Cloud Fundamentals Flashcards
What is “cloud computing”?
Renting resources like storage space or CPU cycles on another company’s computers
What are the four typical computing services offered by cloud providers?
**Compute power - i.e. Linux servers or web apps
**Storage - such as files and databases
Networking - secure connection user -> provider
Analytics - i.e. visualizing telemetry/performace data
What is the difference between a container and a VM?
Containers do not require an OS and rely on a runtime environment that runs the app and all of its dependencies from within the container. VMs are simply virtual computers.
What is “vertical scaling” in cloud computing?
Vertical scaling (a.k.a. “scaling up”) is the process of adding resources to increase the power of an existing server (add more CPUs, storage, or memory)
What is “horizontal scaling” in cloud computing?
Horizontal scaling (a.k.a. “scaling out”) is the process of adding more servers that function together as a unit (multiple servers processing incoming requests)
What is “fault tolerance”?
When one component fails, a backup component takes its place
What are “Capital expenditures” (a.k.a. CapEx)?
Physical resources that have an upfront cost for a business
What are “Operational expenditures” (a.k.a. OpEx)?
Money spent on services or products as you use them (no upfront cost)
For accounting purposes, what are the costs of all cloud services classified as?
Operational expenditures (OpEx)
What does “agile” refer to in terms of cloud services?
The ability to rapidly scale IT infrastructure to adapt to evolving business needs
What is the difference between “public cloud” and “private cloud”?
Public cloud refers Azure in the online portal using their servers, whereas private cloud is a deployment of Azure used on-premises
What is “hybrid” cloud in cloud computing?
It refers to an approach that uses Azure both locally (on-prem) and through Microsoft’s servers
What are the three major categories of cloud computing?
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Platform as a Service (Paas)
Software as a Service (SaaS)
What is IaaS?
Infrastructure as a Service is a cloud-provisioned service that provides the hardware, virtualization, storage and networking required to run your software
What is PaaS?
Platform as a Service eliminates the need to set up and maintain dependent hardware/software (i.e. OS, web server, system updates) elements required to run a web application (you only provide application and data)
What is SaaS?
Software as a service is software that is centrally hosted and managed for the end customer (i.e. Office 365 or Skype)
What are Azure subscriptions?
Logical containers for Azure resources that separate out resources and data
What are the three tiers of support offered for Azure support plans?
Developer (lower response priority)
Standard (production, mid-level priority)
Professional Direct (highest priority)
What is a “hypervisor”?
A piece of software that manages virtualization of hardware (mimicking different computers)
What is Kubernetes used for in Azure?
It enables management of a cluster of VMs that run containerized services
What tool is used as a console within Azure?
Azure Cloud Shell
What options of consoles do you have for Azure CLI?
Bash or PowerShell
In Azure CLI, what command lists account information?
az account list
In Azure CLI, what command lists resource groups?
az group list
In Azure CLI, what flag and option allow for output to be displayed as a table?
–output table
How would you use Azure CLI to filter down to web sites within a certain Resource Group?
az resource list –resource-group replace-with-group-name –resource-type Microsoft.Web/sites
What are “Availability zones” in Azure?
They are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region that can be used for redundancy
What is a “region pair” in Azure?
An Azure region is always paired with another at least 300 miles away within the same geography (i.e. East US and West US)
What does SLA stand for?
Service-level agreement
What are the three key characteristics of a SLA?
- Performance Targets
- Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees
- Service Credits
What is a “composite SLA value”?
Applications that have multiple components with different uptime rates (i.e. SQL Database with 99.99% and web app with 99.95%) will have a composite value equal to the percentage of both multiplied together (i.e. .9995 * .9999)
How can you improve the composite SLA for a web application using a SQL database?
If the SQL database is unavailable, put the transactions into a queue for processing
How do you calculate the percentage chance of simultaneous failure?
Failure rate A * Failure rate B
i.e. .001 * .0001
Where are scripts/data stored from when using Azure Cloud Shell?
In the Azure Storage Account created when you first access ACS - this persists through different sessions
In Azure, how can you get quick tips on availability, performance, security and costs?
Use the Azure Advisor service from the menu
How do you view all of the Azure resources that are available to create?
Portal Menu > Create a Resource > See all
How do you see all of the Azure “preview” features?
Search “preview” in the Azure Marketplace
What is “Azure compute”?
Computing service for running cloud-based applications that provides resources like mulit-core processors and supercomputers
What are the four common techniques for performing compute in Azure?
1) VMs
2) Containers
3) Azure App Service
4) Serverless Computing
What is serverless computing?
Cloud-hosted execution that runs your code but offers NO control over the underlying infrastructure (simply runs your code and takes care of the processing reqs)
What are update domains in Azure?
They are logical groupings of VMs that can be rebooted at the same time
Hoe do you avoid planned maintenance from causing downtime in your servers in Azure?
Add them to an availability set with redundant VMs
What is a fault domain in Azure?
A representation of the grouping of VMs sharing the same hardware, which causes them to be susceptible to unplanned outages (essentially represents a server rack)
What are virtual machine scale sets?
A group of identical, load-balanced VMs
What is “Azure Batch”?
Large-scale job scheduling and compute management that can scale up to thousands of VMs
What is the “ACI” service?
Azure Container Instances is the fastest, simplest way to run a container in Azure - as a PaaS with no additional configurations/services (elastic scale)
What is “container orchestration” in Azure?
The task of automating, managing and interacting with a large number of containers at once
What is AKS in Azure?
Azure Kubernetes Service is an orchestration service for containers
What is Azure App Service?
A PaaS (only provide your code) solution for hosting web apps that has built-in load balancing, quick scaling, and traffic management
What is “WebJobs” in Azure?
It allows you to run a program/script within Azure App Service based off of a schedule or trigger (often used to run background tasks)
What is “Serverless computing”?
Functions that run based off of triggers and scale easily as needed with no need to manage underlying infrastructure (PaaS)
What is an “Azure Logic App”?
Apps that are designed in a web-based designer that execute logic triggered by Azure services without writing any code
How would you migrate data from an on-prem SQL Server to an Azure SQL Database?
Using the Microsoft Data Migration Assistant in Azure
What is Azure Data Lake used for?
Structured and unstructured data storage
What is “Azure Files”?
Fully managed file shares that use Server Message Block (SMB) for encryption at rest and in transit
What is “Azure Queue storage”?
A service for storing many messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world (typically has sender and receiver components)
What are the three Azure data storage tiers?
1) Hot
2) Cool
3) Archived
What is “N-tier Architecture” in Azure?
It’s an application architecture separated into n number of logical tiers where higher tiers can access services from a lower tier, but the reverse is not true
What is an “Azure region”?
One or more Azure data centers within a specific geographic location (i.e. East US)
In Azure, what is an NSG?
A Network Security Group allows or denies inbound network traffic to your Azure resources
What are the uses for an Azure Load Balancer?
- Incoming internet traffic
- Internal traffic across Azure services
- Port forwarding for specific traffic
- Outbound connectivity for VMs in a Vnet
What is “Azure Application Gateway”?
A load balancer and Web Application Firewall (WAF) for HTTP traffic to web applications
What is a CDN in Azure?
A Content Delivery Network is a distributed network of servers that reliably serves a web application to its consumers (a way to get content to users in their local region to minimize latency)
What is “Azure Traffic Manager”?
A service that uses the DNS server closest to the user to direct user traffic to a globally distributed endpoint
What are the four things that you’re always responsible for in Azure web app deployments?
1) Data
2) Endpoints
3) Accounts
4) Access Management
What is the “Azure Security Center”?
A service that provides security recommendations and resource monitoring
What is a “Service Principal” in Azure?
An identity that is used by a service or application
What are “managed identities” in Azure?
An account within Azure AD that is managed and can be used to authenticate an application or Azure service the same way that any other AD account could
In Azure, how is a Vnet securely connected to on-prem resources?
Typically through a VPN connection
What is “Azure Policy”?
A service used to create, assign, and manage policies to enforce different rules and effects over Azure resources
What are “Azure Management Groups”?
Containers for managing access, policies and compliance across multiple Azure subscriptions
What are “Azure Blueprints”?
A blueprint for the deployment of various resource templates (i.e. role assignments, policy assignments, Azure Resource Manager templates, resource groups)
What is the “Azure Service Trust Center”?
A website resource with details about how Microsoft implements and supports security, privacy, and compliance in their products
What is Azure’s “Compliance Manager”?
A risk assessment dashboard within the Service Trust Portal that allows tracking, assigning and verifying organizational regulatory compliance
What is “Azure Monitor”?
A service for monitoring how applications are performing and identifies issues affecting them and their dependencies
What is “Application Insights” in Azure?
A service that monitors the availability, performance and usage of web applications
What is “Azure Monitor for VMs”?
A service that montiors Azure VMs at scale for performance and health metrics
What is “Autoscale” in Azure Monitor?
A service that ensures you have the appropriate amount of resources running to effectively manage the load on your application
What is the “NetworkWatcherRG” resource group in Azure?
It’s created automatically to enable Network Watcher in Azure VNets
In Azure, what is a “deployment”?
The instantiation of an Azure resource
In Azure, what are “resource locks”?
A setting that can be applied to any resource to block modification or deletion
How should you estimate costs for Azure resources?
Azure Pricing Calculator
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
When VM workloads are predictable and static, how can you save money on the VM cost?
Use the “reserved instance” functionality
What is the difference between Azure CLI and Azure Cloud Shell?
Azure CLI can be run locally with the command prompt or PowerShell, whereas Azure Cloud Shell is run in the Azure portal
