Module 4 Flashcards

1
Q

Azure spans the globe with more than how many facilities

A

100

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2
Q

What is a Region in Azure and what does it contain.

A
  • A region is a geographical area containing one or more data centers that are nearby and networked via low latency network.
  • Azure assigns and controls the resources within a region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced.
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3
Q

True or False, Everything Azure offers is available in every region

A

False, some things are only available in certain regions (i.e. VM Size or Storage Types)

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4
Q

What types of things do not require a region

A
  • Some Things are global services that do not require region selection (i.e. Azure Ad, Traffic Manager and Azure DNS).
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5
Q

-Azure has more global regions than anyone else, giving the flexibility to get your App closer to your user wherever they are, as well as also providing what…

A

Better scalability, redundancy and better preserves data residency

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6
Q

Azure has some special regions, what are these and why do they exist

A
US DOD Central
US Govt Virginia
US Govt IOWA and More
China East
China North and More

These exist for compliance and legal reasons

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7
Q

How are the US Govt regions separated and how are they operated

A
  • Physically and logically separated for US govt agencies and operated by screened US personnel
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8
Q

How are the China Regions managed

A

Managed via Partnership with 21vianet, MS does not directly manage these.

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9
Q

What are regions used to identify

A

Regions are used to identify the location of your resources

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10
Q

Azure divides the world into geographies, how are these defined

A
  • Azure divides the world into geographies, defined by country borders or geopolitical boundaries
  • Azure Geography is a discrete market containing 2 or more regions preserving data residency boundaries.
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11
Q

What do Geographies allow customers to achieve

A
  • Geographies allow customers wit specific data residency and compliance needs to keep apps and data close
  • Ensure data residency sovereignty, compliance and resiliency requirements are honoured within boundaries
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12
Q

What level of fault tolerance are built into geographies and how is this achieved

A

Fault Tolerant to withstand complete region failure through a connection to a dedicated high capacity network infrastructure.

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13
Q

What areas are geographies broken down into

A
  • Americas
  • Europe
  • Aspac
  • Middle East and Africa
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14
Q

In what way do regions belong to geographies and what is applied

A

Each region belongs to a single geography and has specific service availability, compliance and data residency applied.

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15
Q

You want to make your data and services redundant to protect in case of failure, when using On-Prem this requires hosting duplicate H/W environments.

How does Azure help with this

A
  • Azure can help through availability zones
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16
Q

What are Availability Zones made up of

A

Availability Zones are physically separate DCs within an Azure region

  • Each Availability zone is made up of one of more DCs with independent power/cooling/networking
  • If one zone goes down the other continues working.
  • Availability Zones are connected via High Speed fibre networks
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17
Q

Does every region support Availability zones

A

No, not every region support availability zones

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18
Q

How do Availability zones allow running of mission critical apps

A
  • Availability Zones allow running of mission critical apps building High availability bu co-locating compute, storage, data resources within a zone and reduplicating it in other zones
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19
Q

What cost implications can be involved with using Availability zones?

A
  • There could be a cost to duplicating services and transferring data between zones
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20
Q

What types of resource are availability zones typically used for

A
  • Availability Zones are primarily for VMs, managed disks, load balancing and SQL DBs
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21
Q

What categories of services that fall into availability zones are there

A

Zonal Services

Zone Redundant Services

22
Q

What is meant by a Zonal Service within Availability Zones

A
  • Zonal Services - Pin resource to specific zone (i.e. VMs, managed disks, IPs)
23
Q

What is meant by Zone Redundant Services within Availability Zones

A
  • Zone Redundant Services - Platform replicates automatically across zones (i.e. zone redundant storage and SQL dbs)
24
Q

Availability zones are created using one or more data centers, there are a minimum of 3 zones in a region. However a large enough disaster could cause an outage to effect even two data centers. What Azure solution could be used to mitigate this risk

A

Region Pairs

25
Q

What is a region pair?

A
  • Each Azure region is paired with another within the same geography (US, Europe, Asia etc)
26
Q

What is the minimum distance that a region pair must be from the other

A

At least 300 miles

27
Q

Region Pairs in Azure allows replication of resources (Such as VM Storage) across a geography, this is to minimize interruptions that may occur due to what…

A
  • Allowing replication of resources (such as VM storage) across a geography minimizes interruptions that may occur due to natural disasters, civil unrest, power or network outage affecting both regions at once.
28
Q

If one region pair was affected by a natural disaster, what would happen

A

If a region pair was affected by a natural disaster, services would failover automatically to the other region pair

29
Q

What are some of the additional advantages of region pairs

A
  • In extensive Azure outage - 1x region of every region pair is prioritized for restore
  • Planned Azure updates are rolled out to paired regions one at a time to minimize downtime and risk.
  • Data resides in same geography as pair (except Brazil South) for tax and law enforcement jurisdiction purposes
  • A broad set of distributed DC’s allows Azure to provide a high guarantee of availability.
30
Q

What do SLAs capture

A

SLAs capture terms that define standards that apply to azure.

31
Q

There are SLAs to for specific Azure products and services.

SLAs describe MS commitment to providing Azure customers with what

A

Specific performance standards

32
Q
  • SLAs specify what happens if product or service fails to perform to the SLAs specification. However what sort of SLAs are provided for most Free/Shared Tiers
A

None

33
Q

What 3 Characteristics are there for SLAs for Azure Products and Services

A

Performance Targets

Uptime and Connectivity Gurantees

Service Credits

34
Q

What is meant by SLA Performance Targets

A
  • SLA defines performance targets for product or service these are specific to each azure product of services (e.g. uptime guarantees of connectivity rates)
35
Q

What is meant by SLA Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees

A
  • typical SLA commits to between 99.9% or 99.999% (i.e. 3 OR 5 nines)
  • Example - Cosmos DB has SLA of 99.999% uptime with low latency commitments of 10 Miliseconds on DB Reads and Writes
36
Q

What is meant by Service credits

A

SLAs also describe the response if an Azure Product or Service fails to perform to specification. Customer may have a discount applied to there bill as compensation.

37
Q

Define a composite SLA and what it can result in

A

Combining SLAs across different service offerings results in a composite SLA.

This can result in a higher or lower uptime value depending on your application architecture

38
Q

How can you improve a composite SLA

A

You can improve composite SLA by creating independent failback paths

39
Q

You can create your own SLAs to meet your own performance targets to suit you specific Azure application. What is this known as

A

Application SLA

40
Q

What do you need to know to build and efficient, reliable solution

A
  • Building an efficient, reliable solution requires knowing your workload requirements and selecting/provisioning azure products/services according to those requirements.
41
Q

What existing data in Azure will help create an achievable Application SLA

A
  • Azure SLAs define performance targets for Azure products/services within your solution. This will help create achievable application SLAs
42
Q

What is meant by the term resiliency

A

Resiliency - ability to recover from failure and continue to function

  • Not avoiding failures but responding to them in a away that avoids downtime or data loss.
43
Q

What is the goal of resiliency

A

The goal of resiliency is to return to a fully functioning state following a failure

44
Q

What are two key components of resiliency

A

HA (High availability) and DR (Disaster Recovery) are 2 key components of resiliencey.

45
Q

When designing architecture and designing for resiliency what should you perform, and what is it’s goal

A
  • When designing architecture - design for resiliency, your should perform a FMA (Failure Mode Analysis) which goal is to identify possible points of failure and define how to respond to such failures.
46
Q

What does availability refer to (try not to use the word available)

A
  • Availability refers to time system is functional and working, maximizing availability requires implementing measures to prevent possible service failures.
47
Q

Increasing availability is expensive and increases what…

A

Complexity

48
Q

As complexity grows with higher availability solutions more services depend on each other this makes it easy to overlook….

A
  • As complexity grows more services depend on each other, making it easier to overlook possible failure points
49
Q

An SLA of 99.999% allows for approx how much down time a year

A
  • SLA of 99.999% allows for approx 5mins of downtime a year.
50
Q

For 99.99% targets (4-nines) manually recovering from failures may not be enough, what might you need to investigate instead

A

Investigate Self diganosing and Self healing solutions

51
Q

Why should you consider the time window against which your SLA targets are measured

A

Consider time window against which SLA targets are measured, a smaller window will mean tighter tolerances, hourly or daily uptime measurements might not allow for achievable targets.