Architectural Components of Azure Flashcards
What is the primary characteristic of Azure Regions?
Azure Regions are primarily globally distributed groups of nearby datacenters. With few exceptions, resources created on Azure must be assigned to a physical region.
What is the main purpose of Azure Region Pairs, particularly from an exam perspective?
The main purpose of region pairs is to act as a redundancy or failover location. If one region in the pair becomes unavailable, resources in the paired region can take over.
What is the key difference between sovereign regions and the general Azure public cloud?
Sovereign regions are separate and isolated from the general Azure public cloud. They are designed for government compliance and have specific access requirements.
Within which larger Azure component do Availability Zones exist?
Availability Zones exist within Azure Regions. This is a key distinction for their location.
What is the primary purpose of Availability Zones?
The primary purpose of Availability Zones is to act as a method of fault isolation within a region, providing redundancy and high availability by utilizing multiple independent datacenters.
Explain the difference between “zonal” and “zone-redundant” services when using Availability Zones.
Zonal services require you to choose a specific availability zone for deployment (like Virtual Machines). Zone-redundant services automatically replicate data across zones (like Azure Storage).
What is the function of Resource Groups in Azure’s management infrastructure?
Resource Groups organize Azure resources. They can hold resources with the same access or lifecycle needs, and there are no location restrictions for resources within a group.
Beyond acting as an access control boundary, what additional function do Azure Subscriptions serve compared to Resource Groups?
In addition to being an access control boundary, Subscriptions also act as the billing boundary, where the method of payment for Azure resources is set.
Which component in Azure’s resource organization hierarchy is optional?
Management Groups are the only optional component in the Azure resource organization hierarchy.
How does resource hierarchy impact access and policies in Azure?
Resource hierarchy describes the top-down application of access and policies. Lower-level or child objects automatically inherit applied access and policies from their parent layer.
What are Azure Regions?
Globally distributed groups of datacenters (with some single-datacenter exceptions) where Azure resources are physically located. Resources must generally be assigned to a region.
What are Region Pairs?
A pair of Azure regions located in the same country (with Brazil as an exception) designed to act as a redundancy or failover location for disaster recovery purposes.
What are Sovereign Regions?
Separate and isolated Azure cloud instances designed for specific government compliance requirements. Examples include Azure for US Government and Azure China.
What are Availability Zones?
Multiple independent datacenters located within an Azure Region, providing fault isolation and contributing to high availability and redundancy for applications.
What are Zonal Services?
Azure services that allow or require deployment to a specific Availability Zone within a region (e.g., Virtual Machines).
What are Zone-Redundant Services?
Azure services that offer the option to automatically replicate or copy data across multiple Availability Zones within a region (e.g., Azure Storage).
What are Resources?
Any item created on Azure, such as virtual machines, storage accounts, or databases.
What are Resource Groups?
A logical container that holds related Azure resources, typically those with the same access or lifecycle needs. Resources within a group can be from different regions.
What are Subscriptions?
An Azure management layer that contains Resource Groups. It acts as both an access control boundary and the primary billing boundary for Azure resources.
What are Management Groups?
An optional Azure management layer that sits at the top of the hierarchy, allowing for the central management of multiple subscriptions.
What is the Resource Hierarchy?
The organizational structure of Azure resources, where child objects belong to a parent object. Access and policies applied at higher levels are automatically inherited by lower-level objects.
