Azure architecture and service guarantees

Question 1

Important note 1

Answer 1

Some services or virtual machine features are only available in certain regions, such as specific virtual machine sizes or storage types. There are also some global Azure services that do not require you to select a particular region, such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager, and Azure DNS.

Question 2

is a discrete market typically containing two or more regions that preserve data residency and compliance boundaries.

Answer 2

Azure geography

Question 3

• Geographies allow customers with specific data residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close.
• Geographies ensure that data residency, sovereignty, compliance, and resiliency requirements are honored within geographical boundaries.
• Geographies are fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure through their connection to dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure.

Answer 3

Azure Geography Benefits

Question 4

refers to the physical or geographic location of an organization’s data or information. It defines the legal or regulatory requirements imposed on data based on the country or region in which it resides and is an important consideration when planning out your application data storage.

Answer 4

Data residency

Question 5

• Americas
• Asia Pacific
• Europe
• Middle East and Africa

Answer 5

Azure Geography Areas

Question 6

Azure services Availability Zones Category: you pin the resource to a specific zone

Answer 6

Zonal services

Question 7

platform replicates automatically across zones (for example, zone-redundant storage, SQL Database)

Answer 7

Zone-redundant services

Question 8

Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away. This approach allows for the replication of resources (such as virtual machine storage) across a geography

Answer 8

Region Pairs

Question 9

SLA Note

Answer 9

Azure does not provide SLAs for most services under the Free or Shared tiers. Also, free products such as Azure Advisor do not typically have an SLA.

Question 10

• Performance Targets
• Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees
• Service credits

Answer 10

Key characteristics of SLAs for Azure products & services

Question 11

An SLA defines performance targets for an Azure product or service. The performance targets that an SLA defines are specific to each Azure product and service. For example, performance targets for some Azure services are expressed as uptime guarantees or connectivity rates.

Answer 11

Performance Targets

Question 12

A typical SLA specifies performance-target commitments that range from 99.9 percent (“three nines”) to 99.999 percent (“five nines”), for each corresponding Azure product or service. These targets can apply to such performance criteria as uptime or response times for services.

Answer 12

Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees

Question 13

customers may have a discount applied to their Azure bill, as compensation for an under-performing Azure product or service.

Answer 13

Service Credits

Question 14

When combining SLAs across different service offerings, the resultant SLA is called a Composite SLA. The resulting composite SLA can provide higher or lower uptime values, depending on your application architecture.

Answer 14

Composite SLA

Question 15

By creating your own SLAs, you can set performance targets to suit your specific Azure application.

Answer 15

APP SLA

Question 16

The goal of an FMA is to identify possible points of failure and to define how the application will respond to those failures.

Answer 16

Failure Mode Analysis