Concepts Flashcards
Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets let you create and manage a group of load balanced VMs. The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule. Scale sets provide the following key benefits:
- Easy to create and manage multiple VMs
- Provides high availability and application resiliency by distributing VMs across availability zones or fault domains
- Allows your application to automatically scale as resource demand changes
- Works at large-scale
Availability Zones
Availability Zones are separated groups of datacenters within a region. Availability zones are close enough to have low-latency connections to other availability zones. They’re connected by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than 2ms. However, availability zones are far enough apart to reduce the likelihood that more than one will be affected by local outages or weather. Availability zones have independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. They’re designed so that if one zone experiences an outage, then regional services, capacity, and high availability are supported by the remaining zones. They help your data stay synchronized and accessible when things go wrong.
Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic (OSI layer 7) load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.
Application Gateway can make routing decisions based on additional attributes of an HTTP request, for example URI path or host headers
Azure load balancer
Azure Load Balancer operates at layer 4 of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. It’s the single point of contact for clients. Load balancer distributes inbound flows that arrive at the load balancer’s front end to backend pool instances. These flows are according to configured load-balancing rules and health probes. The backend pool instances can be Azure Virtual Machines or instances in a Virtual Machine Scale Set.
Azure Monitor Logs
Collects and organizes log and performance data from monitored resources. You can analyze Logs data by using a sophisticated query language Kusto Query Language (KQL) that’s capable of quickly analyzing millions of records
Azure Monitor Metrics
Azure Monitor Metrics is a feature of Azure Monitor that collects numeric data from monitored resources into a time-series database. Metrics are numerical values that are collected at regular intervals and describe some aspect of a system at a particular time.
Note:
Azure Monitor Metrics is one half of the data platform that supports Azure Monitor. The other half is Azure Monitor Logs, which collects and organizes log and performance data. You can analyze that data by using a rich query language.
Azure Sentinel
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform that uses built-in AI to help analyze large volumes of data across an enterprise—fast. Microsoft Sentinel aggregates data from all sources, including users, applications, servers, and devices running on premises or in any cloud, letting you reason over millions of records in a few seconds. It includes built-in connectors for easy onboarding of popular security solutions. Collect data from any source with support for open standard formats like CEF and Syslog.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) that is made up of security measures and practices that are designed to protect cloud-based applications from various cyber threats and vulnerabilities. Defender for Cloud combines the capabilities of:
- A development security operations (DevSecOps) solution that unifies security management at the code level across multicloud and multiple-pipeline environments
- A cloud security posture management (CSPM) solution that surfaces actions that you can take to prevent breaches
- A cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) with specific protections for servers, containers, storage, databases, and other workloads
Azure Data Explorer
Azure Data Explorer is a fast, fully managed data analytics service for real-time and time-series analysis on large volumes of data streams from business activities, human operations, applications, websites, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and other sources.
Ask questions and iteratively explore data on the fly to improve services and products, enhance customer experiences, monitor devices, and boost operations.
Quickly identify patterns, anomalies, and trends in your data. Explore new questions and get answers in minutes. Run as many queries as you need, thanks to the optimized cost structure.
Azure Log Analytics
Used to edit and run log queries against data in the Azure Monitor Logs store.
Availability Sets
Availability sets are logical groupings of VMs that reduce the chance of correlated failures bringing down related VMs at the same time. Availability sets place VMs in different fault domains for better reliability, especially beneficial if a region doesn’t support availability zones. When using availability sets, create two or more VMs within an availability set. Using two or more VMs in an availability set helps highly available applications and meets the 99.95% Azure SLA. There’s no extra cost for using availability sets, you only pay for each VM instance you create.
Azure status
Global view of the health of all Azure services across all Azure regions.
Service health
Personalized view of the health of the Azure services and regions you’re using.
Resource health
provides information about the health of your individual cloud resources such as a specific virtual machine instance
Azure managed disks
Azure managed disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. Managed disks are like a physical disk in an on-premises server but, virtualized. With managed disks, all you have to do is specify the disk size, the disk type, and provision the disk. Once you provision the disk, Azure handles the rest.
The available types of disks are ultra disks, premium solid-state drives (SSD), standard SSDs, and standard hard disk drives (HDD)
Azure DevTest Labs
is a service for easily creating, using, and managing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) virtual machines (VMs) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments in labs. Labs offer preconfigured bases and artifacts for creating VMs, and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates for creating environments like Azure Web Apps or SharePoint farms.
Lab owners can create preconfigured VMs that have tools and software lab users need. Lab users can claim preconfigured VMs, or create and configure their own VMs and environments. Lab policies and other methods track and control lab usage and costs.
Management of the cloud
Management of the cloud speaks to managing your cloud resources. In the cloud, you can:
- Automatically scale resource deployment based on need.
- Deploy resources based on a preconfigured template, removing the need for manual configuration.
- Monitor the health of resources and automatically replace failing resources.
- Receive automatic alerts based on configured metrics, so you’re aware of performance in real time.
Management in the cloud
Management in the cloud speaks to how you’re able to manage your cloud environment and resources. You can manage these:
- Through a web portal.
- Using a command line interface.
- Using APIs.
- Using PowerShell.
Security principal
A security principal is an object that represents a user, group, service principal, or managed identity that is requesting access to Azure resources.
Reliability
Reliability is the ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function
High availability
it’s important the resources are available when needed. High availability focuses on ensuring maximum availability, regardless of disruptions or events that may occur.
Network access control
Network access control is the act of limiting connectivity to and from specific devices or subnets within a virtual network. The goal of network access control is to limit access to your virtual machines and services to approved users and devices. Access controls are based on decisions to allow or deny connections to and from your virtual machine or service.
Azure supports several types of network access control, such as:
- Network layer control
- Route control and forced tunneling
- Virtual network security appliances
Blueprints
Blueprints are a declarative way to orchestrate the deployment of various resource templates and other artifacts such as:
- Role Assignments
- Policy Assignments
- Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates)
- Resource Groups
Compliance Manager
Compliance Manager is a cross-Microsoft Cloud services solution designed to help organizations meet complex compliance obligations, including the EU GDPR, ISO 27001, ISO 27018, NIST 800- 53, NIST 800- 171, and HIPAA[2].
It enables your organization to perform on-going risk assessments for what is identified as Microsoft’s responsibilities by evaluating detailed implementation and test details of our internal controls.
Azure HDInsight
Run popular open-source frameworks—including Apache Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Kafka, and more —using Azure HDInsight, a customizable, enterprise-grade service for open-source analytics. Effortlessly process massive amounts of data and get all the benefits of the broad open-source project ecosystem with the global scale of Azure. Easily migrate your big data workloads and processing to the cloud.
Network security groups
You can use an Azure network security group to filter network traffic between Azure resources in an Azure virtual network. A network security group contains security rules that allow or deny inbound network traffic to, or outbound network traffic from, several types of Azure resources. For each rule, you can specify source and destination, port, and protocol.
Local Network Gateway
The local network gateway is a specific object that represents your on-premises location (the site) for routing purposes. You give the site a name by which Azure can refer to it, then specify the IP address of the on-premises VPN device to which you’ll create a connection.
What is elastic computing or cloud elasticity?
Elastic computing is the ability to quickly expand or decrease computer processing, memory, and storage resources to meet changing demands without worrying about capacity planning and engineering for peak usage. Typically controlled by system monitoring tools, elastic computing matches the amount of resources allocated to the amount of resources actually needed without disrupting operations. With cloud elasticity, a company avoids paying for unused capacity or idle resources and doesn’t have to worry about investing in the purchase or maintenance of additional resources and equipment.
While security and limited control are concerns to take into account when considering elastic cloud computing, it has many benefits. Elastic computing is more efficient than your typical IT infrastructure, is typically automated so it doesn’t have to rely on human administrators around the clock, and offers continuous availability of services by avoiding unnecessary slowdowns or service interruptions.
Site Recovery service
Site Recovery helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages. Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to a secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is running again, you can fail back to it.
What is the concept of paired regions?
Each region in the world has at least one other region in which is shares an extremely high speed connection, and where there is coordinated action by Azure not to do anything that will bring them both down at the same time.
What data format are ARM templates created in?
JSON
If you wanted to get an alert every time a new virtual machine is created, where could you create that?
Azure Monitor
