Cloud Concepts & Core Components

Question 1

What is Cloud Computing?

Answer 1

The delivery of computing services, like servers, storage, databases, networking, and such - over the internet.

Question 2

In ‘On Premises’ models, your organization needs to manage everything, including; Applications, Data, Runtime, Middleware, OS, Virtualization, Servers, Storage, and Networking.

In Infrastructure as a Service, what is managed by the Cloud Provider?

Answer 2

Networking, Storage, Servers, and Virtualization

Question 3

In ‘On Premises’ models, your organization needs to manage everything, including; Applications, Data, Runtime, Middleware, OS, Virtualization, Servers, Storage, and Networking.

In Platform as a Service, what is managed by the Cloud Provider?

Answer 3

Networking, Storage, Servers, Virtualization, OS, Middleware, and Runtime.

Question 4

In ‘On Premises’ models, your organization needs to manage everything, including; Applications, Data, Runtime, Middleware, OS, Virtualization, Servers, Storage, and Networking.

In Software as a Service, what is managed by the Cloud Provider?

Answer 4

Networking, Storage, Servers, Virtualization, OS, Middleware, Runtime, Data, and Applications

Question 5

What is a Public Cloud Model?

Answer 5

Services are offered over the public internet and available to anyone who wants them.

Question 6

What is a Private Cloud Model?

Answer 6

Services are only available to users of one business or organization, and all hardware and software for it is owned by the user’s company or organization.

Question 7

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Answer 7

High Availability,
Scalability,
Elasticity,
Agility,
Geo Distribution,
Disaster Recovery

Question 8

What is Scalability?

Answer 8

• Vertical Scalability by adding or removing Ram or CPUs
• Horizontal Scalability by adding instances of software like VMs

Question 9

What is Elasticity?

Answer 9

Elasticity allows web apps to grow and shrink their resources according to the demand, usually dictated by the number of users.

Question 10

What is Agility?

Answer 10

Agility means fast deployment, configuration, and reconfiguration as
application requirements change.

Question 11

What is Disaster Recovery?

Answer 11

Includes Backup Services, Data Replication Options, and Geo-Distribution.

Question 12

What is CapEx?

Answer 12

Capital Expenditure is the up-front spending of money on physical infrastructure (assets).

CapEx can be deducted over time (as the hardware depreciates).

Question 13

What is OpEx?

Answer 13

Operational Expenditure is spending money on services or products on a monthly or quarterly basis (pay as you go).

OpEx can be deducted in the same year as the same bill you payed.

Question 14

What are Azure Regions?

Answer 14

Groups of Microsoft data centers grouped together by geographic location to which Azure Services can be deployed.

Some Azure Services are not available in all Azure Regions, while others are so global that any subscription to them is independent of Regions.

Question 15

What are some of the Azure Services don’t require you to select a specific region when you’re deploying them?

Answer 15

Azure Active Directory,
Azure Traffic Manager,
Azure DNS.

Question 16

What is data residency?

Answer 16

Data Residency is data’s geographic location.

Question 17

What are Special Azure Regions?

Answer 17

Regions used for compliance or legal purposes, like:
US DoD Central,
US Gov Virginia,
US Gov Iowa,
China East,
China North

Special Azure Regions are often separate logical networks to the main Azure network, and often operated by screened personnel with additional compliance certifications.

Question 18

What are Availability Zones?

Answer 18

Availability Zones are a sub-division of an Azure Region. Created by using one or data centers, there are a minimum of 3 Availability Zones per Azure Region.

Services on one datacenter in an Availability Zone can fail over onto another in the case of a power outage or similar. Datacenters inside of an Availability Zone are connected to each other by high speed, private, fiber optic networks.

Not every region supports Availability Zones.

Question 19

What is a Region Pair?

Answer 19

Each Azure Region is paired with another that is in the same geography and is a minimum of 300 miles away. This is a redundancy that allows service failover onto the paired region’s datacenters, and allows for Azure updates to be rolled out without interruption of service

Question 20

What are Availability Zones primarily used for?

Answer 20

VMs,
managed disks,
load balancers,
and SQL databases,

Question 21

What is a Resource?

Answer 21

Any manageable item available through Azure.
VMs,
Storage Accounts,
Web Apps,
Databases,
Virtual Networks

Question 22

What is a Resource Group?

Answer 22

A container for all Resources related to an Azure App or Service. All Resources must belong to one group and cannot belong to more than one. Under special circumstances, a Resource can be moved to another group.

Resource Groups cannot be nested.

Question 23

Best way to organize a Resource Group?

Answer 23

Often by lifecycle, so that when a project is done, the group can be deleted, subsequently deleting all member Resources, rather than having to find each Resource individually.

Question 24

Free Azure Apps

Answer 24

Virtual Network
Private IP Address
Azure Migrate
Inbound Internet Traffic
5gb of Outbound Internet Traffic
Azure Policy
Azure AD
1 million executions of Azure Functions
Azure App Service

Question 25

Pay by Time Apps

Answer 25

Virtual Machines
App Services
Databases
Load Balancers
Managed Storage
Public IP Address

Question 26

Pay Per Gig

Answer 26

Database Storage
Backups
Unmanaged Disks
Network Traffic (between regions)
Network Traffic (more than 5gb/month)

Question 27

Pay per Operation (Usually per 1,000 or 10,000 requests)

Answer 27

Unmanaged Storage (reads, writes)
Databases (queries)
Messaging

Question 28

Pay per Execution

Answer 28

(Pay each time a program runs)

Azure Functions (consumption model)
Serverless Databases
Messaging Services
Logic Apps (consumption model)

Question 29

What is four 9s?

Answer 29

high availability
- 4 minutes down per month
- an hour per year