Azure Terminology Flashcards
High Availability
The ability of an application to continue running in a healthy state, without significant downtime. By “healthy state,” we mean the application is responsive, and users can connect to the application and interact with it.
Scalability
Ability of a system to handle growth of users or work. NOTE: This is NOT automatically done. Increase or decrease the resources and services used based on the demand or workload at any given time. Vertical Scaling (aka “scaling up”) - add more resources to existing servers. Horizontal Scaling (aka “scaling out”) - add more servers.
Vertical Scaling (aka “scaling up”)
The process of adding more resources to increase the power of an existing server (a.g. adding a faster CU, additional CPUs, more memory)
Horizontal Scaling (aka “scaling out”)
The process of adding more servers that function together as one unit (e.g. adding more servers)
Elasticity
Ability of a system to <i>automatically</i> grow and shrink based on application demand.
Agility
Ability to rapidly change an IT infrastructure in order to adapt to the evolving needs of the business (e.g. if your service peaks one month, you can scale to demand and pay a larger bill for the month. If the following month the demand drops, you can reduce the used resources and be charged less).
Fault Tolerance
Ability of a system to handle faults like power, networking, or hardware failures. This is accomplished by building redundancy into the system.
Disaster Recovery
The ability to recover from rare but major incidents: non-transient, wide-scale failures, such as service disruption that affects an entire region. Disaster recovery includes data backup and archiving, and may include manual intervention, such as restoring a database from backup.
Economics of Scale
Economics of scale is the ability to do things more efficiently or at a lower-cost per unit when operating at a larger scale (e.g. the ability to acquire hardware at a lower cost than if a single user or smaller business were purchasing it, cloud providers can also make deals with local governments and utilities to get tax savings, lower pricing on power, cooling, and high-speed network connectivity between sites.) An example of this is Costco or Sam’s Club. They buy in bulk, and you as a customer benefit by purchasing a unit at a small rate than you could acquire on your own.
Capital Expenditure (CapEx)
CapEx is the spending of money on physical infrastructure up front, and then deducting that expense from your tax bill over time. CapEx is an upfront cost, which has a value that reduces over time.
Operational Expenditure (OpEx)
OpEx is spending money on services or products now and being billing for them now. You can deduct this expense from your tax bill in the same year. There is no upfront cost; you pay for a service or product as you use it. This is like the “pay-as-you-go” phone.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas)
IaaS is the most flexible category of cloud computing. It aims to give you complete control over the hardware that runs your application (IT infrastructure servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, and operating system). Instead of buying hardware, with IaaS, you rent it. It’s an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
PaaS provides an environment for building, testing, and deploying software applications. The goal of PaaS is to help you create an application quickly without managing the underlying infrastructure. For example, when deploying a web application using PaaS, you don’t have to install an operating system, web server, or even system updates. PaaS is a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud.
Software-as-a-Service (Saas)
SaaS is software that is centrally hosted and managed for the end customer. It is usually based on an architecture where one version of the application is used for all customers, and licenses through a monthly or annual subscription. Office 365, Skype, and Dynamics CRM Online are perfect examples of SaaS.
Public Cloud
In this model, you have no hardware to manage or keep up-to-date - everything runs on your cloud provider’s hardware.
Private Cloud
Model where a company creates their own data center and provides access to compute resources to users in your organization.
Hybrid Cloud
This is known as “cloud bursting” or segmenting your organizations work as you move to the cloud. In this model, you combine both the public cloud and your private cloud to compose your IT portfolio. Additionally, some companies may decide that some of their applications are better in their private cloud, and vice-versa with the public cloud.
Azure Geography
A discrete market typically containing two or more regions that preserve data residency and compliance boundaries. Examples are: America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.
Region
A geographical area on the planet containing at least one, but potentially multiple data centers that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network.
Availability Zone
Physically separate data centers within an Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling and networking.
Availability Sets
A logical grouping capability for isolating VM resources from each other when they’re deployed.
Comprise of update and fault domains.
Update Domain: When a maintenance event occurs, the update is sequenced through update domains.
Fault Domains: Fault domains provide for the physical separation of a workload across different hardware in the datacenter.
Hierarchy of Azure Entities?
Geography -> Region -> Availability Zone -> Availability Set -> Fault Domain/Update Domain
Region Pair
The concept of pairing one region with another within the same geography (e.g. US, Europe, Asia, etc.) at least 300 miles away. This approach allows for the replication of resources (such as virtual machine storage) across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions due to events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, physical network outages, or patches and updates.
Resource Group
A logical container for resources deployed on Azure.
Azure Resource Manager
An interface for managing and organizing cloud resources. This is a way to deploy cloud resources.
Virtual Machines (VMs)
Windows or Linux flavor, this allows one to have a virtualized set of hardware hosted in Azure.
Virtual Machine Scale Set
Offers a built-in load-balancer. This solution allows you to automatically increase/decrease the number of VMs one has running, create rules for what’s acceptable performance (or create a schedule) before spinning up another VM, and creates redundancy in the system.
App Service
PaaS solution to build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web, mobile, and API apps.
Azure Functions
An event-driver, server,less compute service.
Virtual Network
A logical isolation from other networks that allows the provision of VPNs and SubNets to maintain separation from other network traffic.
Load Balancer
Balances inbound and outbound connections to applications or service endpoints.
VPN Gateway
A specific type of virtual network gateway that is used to send encrypted traffic between an Azure Virtual Network and an on-premise location over the public internet.
Application Gateway
Web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web application. The type of routing this uses is known as application layer (OSI layer 7) load balancing. This can do URL-based routing and more.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Designed to send audio, video, apps, photos, and other files to your customers faster and more reliably, using the servers closest to the user.
Blob Storage
Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud. This is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such a text or binary data. This type of storage is ideal for: serving images or documents directory to a browser, storing files for distributed access, streaming video and audio, storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving, storing data for analysis by an on-premise or Azure-hosted service.
Disk Storage
A virtualized hard disk (VHD) designed to imitate the behavior and user-experience of a physical disk. Azure offers several different flavors of this - namely, Ultra disk, Premium solid state drive (SSD), Standard SSD< and Standard hard disk drive (HDD).
File Storage
Provides fully-managed file storage utilizing encryption at rest and in-transit using SMB and HTTPS.
Archive Storage
Designed to provide low-cost means of storing data for items that have flexibly latency requirements. This is the lowest priced storage offering.
CosmosDB
A globally distributed multi-model solution that guarantees single-digit latency and supports API endpoint data access.
Azure SQL Database
The PaaS solution for utilizing the traditional relational SQL Server. This supports mostly everything that having SQL server on a VM provides, with some exceptions (like xp_CommandShell).
Azure Database Migration Service
The recommended migration service (as opposed to DMA & SSMA) that migrates on-premise SQL Service databases to PaaS Azure Database offerings. Currently, migrating SQL Server 2005 to 2017 is supported.
Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Azure’s cloud-based data warehouse solution that imports data into it’s system utilizing PolyBase T-SQL queries together with the power of Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) to provide a high-performing data warehouse solution. The data is imported into relational tables with columnar storage that can then be queried with T-SQL.
Azure Marketplace
An online store that offers products and services specific to the Azure environment.
IoT Central
A IoT SaaS solution for straightforward problems that don’t require a lot of customization, this provides you the ability to connect, monitor, and manage your IoT devices.
IoT Hub
The “communication hub” for IoT devices, this service allows you control communication to and from your device. This is the “underneath the hood” service that is utilized in IoT central.
IoT Edge
Allows computing to take place on your device rather than in the cloud, preserving precious power by limiting the broadband necessary to communicate between the cloud and the device. This is built on top of IoT hub.
HDInsight
A PaaS solution designed to support open source frameworks for enterprise-grade data analytics. Open source solutions that are supported include Apache Hadoop, Spark and Kafka.
Data Lake Analytics
Microsoft’s PaaS solution that is very similar in nature to HDInsights, providing a compute engine for big data. Use cases include - but are not limited to - prepping large amounts of data for insertion into a Data Warehouse and replacing long-running monthly batch processing with shorter running distributed processes.
Azure Machine Learning service
A cloud service that allows you to prep data, train, test, deploy, manage and track machine learning models. This service is an open-source solution that allows you to fully integrate your own computer resources with Azure’s Machine Learning service. Both an SDK and a low-code experience are available with this solution.
Azure Databricks
Once the data is at rest, this solution reads from multiple sources to analyze and assess the data. This solution is the result of a unique collaborative effort between Microsoft and Apache. This allows you to create clusters and unify your data without centralization.
Azure Machine Learning Studio
A drag-and-drop tool to build, test, and deploy predictive analytic services that can consumed as a web service. The various predictive data models you can develop with this tool are called “experiments.” Once you define your data-sets and your modules on an interactive canvas, you can then form them together into an experiment.
Azure Functions
An event-driven server-less compute platform designed to perform short-lived scheduled or triggered operations.
Azure Logic Apps
A server-less solution designed to string together preexisting resources into workflows. This is a drag-and-drop user experience with no code.
Azure Event Grid
An event-driven app that eliminates polling, and instead uses a pub/sub model to allow user to build a server-less solution. One case case for this is to notify the AIS team when a VM larger than a certain size is created.
Azure Advisor
A SaaS solution that pulls in recommendations from Azure Security Center, Azure Cost Management, Azure SQL DB Advisor, Azure App Service and others to provide a single source to go to with various recommendations to follow best-practices, reduce cost, and enhance security.
Azure Firewall
A SaaS network security solution to protect your Azure Virtual Network resources.
Azure DDoS Protection
Covers all resources on a virtual network. Always-on feature provides real-time protection and information to prevent any resource from being overloaded by invalid requests.
Network Security Group (NSG)
A network filter to restrict both inbound and outbound traffic to and from a specific resource. For each rules that you set up, you must specify a source, destination, port and protocol.
Azure Active Directory
Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service, which gives you the ability to do things like SSO, group management, and more in one centralized location.
Azure Security Center
An automatic security management system
Key Vault
A storehouse for keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services. This is way to protection data in the cloud. This vault is validated by HSMs that ensure FIPs 140-2 Level 2 compliance is followed.
Azure Information Protection
A cloud-based solution that classifies different documents, and optionally protects those documents and emails based on their labels.
Azure Advanced Threat Protection
A cloud-based solution that protects your resources and network against various threats that are common to entities on the internet.
Azure Policy Service
A way to enforce various rules across your enterprise to ensure various resources that are being created and managed by a variety of individuals all conform to the various rules you have set out. For example, you could create a policy that ensures that a VM is created below a certain SKU size.
Azure Initiative Definitions
A group of Azure policies that ensure all resources created in your environment are compliant and meet standards. An example is creating a naming initiative with various naming convention policies that are all grouped together under the naming initiative group.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Built on the Azure Resource Manager, this provides a way to manage who has access to various Azure resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to.
Azure locks
Allows an administrator to lock a subscription, resource group, or resource to prevent users from accidentally deleting or modifying a critical resource. You can set the lock level to either CanNotDelete or ReadOnly .
Azure Advisor
A virtual, personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your azure deployments, analyze resource configuration and usage telemetry, and recommend solutions to help you improve the cost effectiveness, performance, high availability, and security of your Azure resources.
