Azure Services and Concepts Flashcards
What is an Azure Region
The location of a physical Microsoft datacenter
Which region to choose?
Consider:
distance to users
if the required Azure services are available at particular region
if amount of storage, compute for your requirements are available
data regulatory compliance
Azure geography
A grouping of one or more azure regions.
e.g.,
Azure Geography - Canada
Contains Azure Regions - Canada Central and Canada East
Why use Azure geographies?
Microsoft may copy data between regions in a given geo for data redundancy or other operational purposes.
This is important for data regulatory compliance!!
Region Pairs
Regions within a geo.
Data centers usually 300+ miles apart
Automatic replication and failover for some services
High Availability
Availability Zones
Are unique physical data centers within a single region with independent power, cooling and networking.
Not all regions have availability zones.
Azure Resources
A resource is a manageable item in Azure.
i.e., virtual machines, storage accounts, web apps, databases, VNETs, etc.
Resource Group
Container that contains resources that share the same lifecycle
Resources can be in different regions.
Resources can only exist in one resource group
Resources can communicate across resource groups
Container for security boundaries.
Resource manager templates. (IaC)
Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
The deployment and management service for Azure.
Central to all creation, deletion and modification of resources in Azure.
REST endpoint for Azure Portal, Azure CLI, Azure Power Shell, Azure SDKs.
Azure Resource Manager Templates
JSON
Defines infrastructure and configuration for Azure resources
Declarative Syntax
Deployment of resources using: Azure pipelines GitHub PowerShell Azure CLI Resource Manager REST API Azure Portal
Azure Service Health
Global view of the health of Azure across all regions!
Comes from Azure Status but filtered only for services you use
Available in the portal
Azure Monitor
Collecting and analyzing telemetry for your azure resources.
Detailed monitoring for single resources.
Metrics differ per resource.
Can set up Alerts.
Azure Advisor
A dashboard of automated recommendations on your current resources broken up into 5 sections.
Cost - alerts when underutilizing resources, resizing resources, etc.
Security - alerts when MFA should be setup, HTTPS, etc. etc.
Reliability - alerts relating to replication, backups settings, etc.
Operational Excellence -
Performance -
Can also create alerts that trigger an action.
Azure Subscriptions
a logical unit of Azure services that are linked to an Azure account.
In order to take advantage of Azure’s cloud-based services, you must have a subscription as it serves as a single billing unit for Azure resources used in that account.
