Core Architectural Components of Azure

Question 1

What are the two main groups of architectural components?

Answer 1

Physical infrastructure and management infrastructure

Question 2

What are regions and availability zones?

Answer 2

Regions are geographical areas with one or more availability zones that are near by.

Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within the same Azure region. Each AZ is made up of multiple datacenters with independent power, cooling and networking.

Question 3

How does Azure improve resiliency with respect to AZs?

Answer 3

There has to be 3 separate AZs in a region.

Question 4

How does Azure improve resiliency with respect to AZs?

Answer 4

There has to be 3 separate AZs in a region.

Question 5

What are the three categories/levels of services within availability zones?

Answer 5

Zonal - You pin the resource to a specific location e.g. virtual machines
Zone-redundant - The platform replicates automatically across zones.
Non-regional services: Services that are always available and are resilient to zone-wide and region-wide outages.

Question 6

How does Azure build further resiliency for region-wide outages or big events?

Answer 6

Region pairs - Are duplicates of a region in two separate geographies (300 miles apart) but in the same continent. E.g. East and West America.

Question 7

What is another type of region that is used for instances that need to be separated from main Azure instances for regulatory or compliance reasons?

Answer 7

Sovereign regions.

Question 8

What is Azure management infrastructure?

Answer 8

Incl. resources, resource groups, subscriptions and accounts.

Question 9

What is a resource and a resource group?

Answer 9

A resource is anything you can create, provision or deploy e.g. a VM. Resource groups are groupings of resources. A resource can only be in 1 resource group at anyone time but can move between them. You cannot have resource groups within resource groups.

Question 10

What happens to the resources within a resource group when an action or setting at the Resource Group level is applied?

Answer 10

The setting is applied to current and future resources

Question 11

What Azure feature replicates resources across regions that are at least 300 miles away from each other?

Answer 11

Region pairs