Core Architectural Components of Azure Flashcards
What are the core Azure architectural components?
- Azure Regions
- Region Pairs
- Sovereign Regions
What is a Region in Azure?
- areas of the world where azure has a set of datacenters (min. 3 in a set)
- not necessarily “countries” but can be
- about 60 world-wide
- a region is usually connected to another to make a “region-pair”
- anyone can use regions
What is a Region-Pair?
- a connection of two regions
- have highest speed connections and special treatment during Azure updates
- during Azure updates they are not going to be both updated at the same time
How is data storage dealt with in regions?
- concept of data residency:
- data stored in regions of a land nevers leaves
- i.e two regions in Canada, data never leaves canada
How is data dealt with when there is no close region-pair?
I.e in the past with Brazil
Only datacenter in South America
One-way pairing with South Central US
-> data leaves Brazil to the US
How available are the 60+ regions for everyone?
- most of them are not available to everyone
- some restrictions apply, i.e in some regions you have to be a resident of
What are Sovereign Regions?
- Usually connected to a country or a government
- not connected to Azure public cloud
- require approval to join / create a subscription
- adhere to different sets of standards
What are Availability Zones?
- effectively (sets of) datacenters that are physically separated within each Azure region
- one or more datacenters are representing each availability zon within a region
- very high-speed connections
- physically seperate and own maintenance and infrastructure
Are Availability Zones available everywhere?
No, not supported in every region.
Also not every service supports Availability Zones
What types of Services exist that support Availability zones?
- Zonal Services
- Zone-redundant services
- Always available Services
What are Zonal Services and what do they enable?
- special type of service that supports AZs
- you can choose a specific Availablity Zone to deploy the service to
- you should then deploy a duplicate service to another zone to achieve resiliency
- i.e. Virtual Machines
What are Zone Redundant Services and what do they do?
- Automatically deployed across zones for you
- you don’t have to configure it
- e.g. Azure SQL Database
What are Always Available Services and what do they enable?
- global services
- Microsoft takes care of ensuring that they are always on
- also called “non-regional” services
- e.g. Azure Portal, Azure Active Directoy, Azure Front Door
What kind of choice do you have additionally about Availability Zone services?
- some services give the choice between zonal services and zone redundant services
What are Azure Resources?
- generic term to represent Azure service that you have access to
- such as a specific Database, VM, Storage account
- you can create a resource in many different ways (Azure Portal, CLI, PowerShell, …)
- has a name created by you
- name has sometimes to be unique, sometimes not
- generally you indicate the region where they are to be created
