Core Azure Architectural Components Flashcards
Explain the concept of regions
Microsoft broken up the world in 60+ regions.
When you want to deploy a virtual machine you have to choose a regions where the servers exist.
Not every regions are available to everyone because some have certain restrictions. Ex: The Chinese version of Azure is run by a Chinese company so it isn’t available for the general public. The Government regions only give access to the government members and the government members can only use the government specific ones.
What are region pairs
Regions have pairs. Almost always in the same geography because of storage laws.
The data connection between regions is the highest speed available.
The most logical place to put your backups would be in the paired region because is highest speed, lowest latency, prioritization in terms of bringing them back online.
If multiple regions go down, one region of each pair is treated as a priority.
What are Availability Zones
Within the regions sometimes you have the availability to deploy to individual availability zones.
Ex: Canada has 3 availability zones. You can pick the individual availability zones to deploy your resources to.
An availability zone because when you use them you are increasing the availability of your application. Each availability zone is separated from each other, running on its own power, heating, cooling and running on its own network. Typically availability zones are buildings on the same property, perhaps, but physically separated and running on their own individual.
What is a resource group
Folder structure or an organizational structure for resources.
Examples of resources you can create in an Azure account: virtual machines, storage accounts, databases, …
We can put these resource in resource groups, and logical group related things, like by project, by people, basically to organize the resources.
Above resource groups we have the concept of subscription and above that, management groups. So subscriptions group resource groups and management groups group subscriptions.
What is a subscription
It’s a billing unit / the level of billing. When we sign up for azure we have to give them the information of the credit card and that creates a subscription.
All the resources created under that subscription get charged to that credit card. So every resource must be associated with a subscription.
You can create multiple subscriptions and have access to more than one subscription with different roles.
The same company can create different subscription for different departments, like human resources, marketing, … And at the top of those subscription we have an account, which can be a user and they have access to all subscriptions and may be the global administrator.
What are management groups
You can apply different rules to different group level instead of having to go into each individual subscription and reapply the rule.
They can force policies that are forced on all of other management groups and subscriptions beneath it.
What is Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
To interact with azure we can use the portal, we can do some type of command line which will affect resources, you can use Virtual Studio, API commands.
The Azure Resource Manager API can handle all resources in Azure, and then the resources themselves are the databases the VM, the app services and tables, …
Resources – Instance of some Azure services that you create that are yours to use. My VM is my instance of an Azure service.
Azure Resource Manager API controls your groups of resources.
What are the Core resources available in Azure
- Compute services (ways how azure can execute programs, applications, …)
- Networking services (ways that applications can communicate with each other and the security around that)
- Storage services (files and data stored within a storage account format)
- Database services (like an organized storage account with tables, columns, collections, …)
- Azure Marketplace (find a lot of services including some not created by Microsoft)
Compute services
Virtual Machines (VM), App services (Web apps), Azure Container Instances (ACI), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Windows Virtual Desktop.
Compute – “executing code” in the cloud
Virtual Machines explanation
IaaS; looks and acts like a real server but is one server divided in a lot a slices and you are using one or more of those slices and the other clients the rest; supports both Linux and Windows operating systems; you have full control over ir as if it was your machine; behaves like a physical machine.
Over 200 VM to choose from, based on the number of CPU cores, speed, RAM size, temporary disk size, IOPS (Input Output Operations per seconds) – lots of combinations of this cases to choose from.
App services explanation
PaaS (taking your code, packaging it up, giving it to Azure and Azure runs it); ability to choose plan types and level but not the hardware capacities; promise of performance but no access to hardware.
Containers explanation
Another paradigm to run code in the cloud; they contain everything an app needs to run in a “container image”; fast and easy to deploy; you can chose from very different options, two of them are the Azure Container Instance (ACI – single instance, quickest way to deploy a container) and Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS – runs on a cluster of servers, enterprise-grade).
Windows Virtual Desktop explanation
Desktop version of Windows that runs in the cloud; your software installed, your files available from anywhere; can even see your desktop on iOS and Android or any web browser; runs on azure
Networking Services Covered
- Virtual Networks (it’s the most basic level of network; emulating a physical network that you might have on your environment; is basically some settings and a database; you can configurate who can communicate with who)
- VPN Gateway (used to connect to networks together securely, its encrypted and can’t be spied upon and you can get access to the resources of that remote network)
- VNet Peering
- ExpressRoute (high-speed private connection to Azure; doesn’t run on the private internet)
Types of networking services:
- Connectivity services (how application connect and communicate)
- Protection services (assure that only authorized people have the ability to communicate to your server, protecting attacks and denial of services, …)
- Delivery services (help deliver the resources to the end user without another server)
- Monitoring services
