Describe Azure architecture and services.

What is Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a continually expanding set of cloud services that assists businesses in meeting both current and future challenges. It offers the flexibility to build, manage, and deploy applications across a vast global network using preferred tools and frameworks.

Key Offerings of Azure

• Limitless Innovation: Azure empowers users to build intelligent applications and solutions utilizing advanced technologies, tools, and services, facilitating the progression of businesses.

• Unified Technology Management: It allows for efficient management of infrastructure, data, analytics, and artificial intelligence solutions across an integrated platform.

• Innovative Trust: Azure emphasizes security and responsibility, being committed to using trusted technologies.

Azure Services Use Cases

Azure provides over 100 services catering to diverse needs such as:

• Running existing applications on virtual machines (VMs).

• Exploring advanced software paradigms like intelligent bots and mixed reality.

• Applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) for user communication through vision, hearing, and speech.

• Utilizing dynamic storage solutions for large data sets.

Getting Started with Azure Accounts

• An Azure subscription is necessary to create and use services. When completing Learn modules, temporary subscriptions are created for hands-on practice in a controlled environment called the Learn sandbox.

• For personalized applications and business needs, users must create an Azure account which generates a subscription. Multiple subscriptions can be created under a single account to manage resources for different departments (development, marketing, sales).

Azure Free Account

New users can sign up for a free account on the Azure website. This account typically provides:

• Free access to popular Azure products for 12 months.

• A $200 credit for the first 30 days.

• Continuous free access to more than 25 products.

Requirements for Sign Up

To create a free Azure account, users will need a phone number, a credit card (for verification purposes only), and a Microsoft or GitHub account.

Azure Free Student Account

This offer provides:

• Free access to select Azure services for 12 months.

• A $100 credit for initial use.

• No credit card is required for sign-up.

Microsoft Learn Sandbox

During Learn exercises, a technology termed the sandbox creates a temporary subscription added to the Azure account. Resources are then automatically cleared after completing the module. The sandbox is a cost-effective method for testing and creating Azure resources.

Azure Physical Infrastructure

Understanding Azure's core architectural components is crucial. These can be categorized into two main groups: physical and management infrastructure.

Physical Infrastructure

• Azure's physical infrastructure comprises datacenters worldwide that are similar to large corporate facilities, hosting resources organized in racks equipped with power, cooling, and network connections.

• These datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions and Availability Zones to enhance resiliency and reliability for critical workloads.

Regions

Regions represent geographical areas containing multiple, low-latency networked datacenters. When deploying resources in Azure, users must select an appropriate region based on regional service availability.

Availability Zones

These are distinct datacenters within a region designed as isolation boundaries to ensure continuity of service—if one zone goes down, others remain operational. A minimum of three availability zones are mandatory in all enabled regions to provide resiliency.

Using Azure Availability Zones

Availability zones are particularly useful for:

• Ensuring redundancy and high availability of services and data.

• Protecting applications from failures by running critical components across zones, leveraging features like virtual machine scale sets and availability sets.

Cost Considerations

While adding redundancy incurs additional costs, Azure availability zones help streamline operational efficiency without manual duplication of services.

Azure Region Pairs

Azure regions are often paired with another regional site to further enhance resilience. This pairing allows for automatic failover in case of regional outages, ensuring continuous service.

Importance of Region Pairs

• They facilitate planned Azure updates by ensuring one region is always available while the other is updating, thereby minimizing downtime and risks of application outages.

• Data remains within geographical boundaries for compliance purposes.

One-Directional Pairings

Some regions may only have one-directional backup capabilities, where the primary region does not serve as a backup for its secondary region.

Sovereign Regions

Azure also supports sovereign regions, isolated instances of Azure for compliance or legal obligations, such as those for U.S. government or specific territorial regulations in China.

Azure Management Infrastructure

The management infrastructure encompasses:

• Resources and Resource Groups: Resources are foundational to Azure, while resource groups provide logical organization.

• Subscriptions: Subscriptions serve as units of management and billing, allowing authenticated access to Azure services.

Organizing Resources

Resource groups allow for the logical segregation of resources, with actions applied to all included resources—deleting a group removes all contained resources. A thoughtful structure enhances resource management and cost efficiency.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions enable logical organization and billing management of resources, where multiple subscriptions can cater to varied departmental needs within an organization.

Azure Management Groups

Management groups provide an additional hierarchical layer for managing multiple subscriptions, allowing centralized governance and compliance enforcement.

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)

Azure enables users to create and utilize VMs for various purposes, offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) without the need for managing physical hardware.

Use Cases for VMs

1. Total Control: VMs allow customized operating systems, enabling specialized hosting environments.

2. Development and Testing: Quick provisioning of diverse configurations simplifies development workflows.

3. Cloud Application Hosting: Cost-effective operation of apps in the cloud due to fluctuating demands.

4. Disaster Recovery: VMs can replace or support on-premises resources when outages occur.

5. Lift and Shift: Physical servers can be converted to cloud environments with minimal changes.

Scaling and Availability

Azure offers tools like Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Availability Sets to improve redundancy, scalability, and availability of applications by managing multiple VMs optimally without overhead.

Best Practices for VM Management

• Use Availability Sets: Grouping VMs ensures staggered updates and resilience against power/network failures.

• Monitor and Adjust: Utilize Azure's automatic scaling features based on usage demand to optimize performance and costs.