Core Azure Services Flashcards
What is the Azure Architecture made up of?
Regions
Availability zones
What is a region
Set of data centers deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network
- Each region has more that one data center (physical location)
- Latency is the time it takes data to travel, so the centers are not too far away
-Low latency network: fiber connection
In simple terms: set of data centers close together. They are not a geographic distinction necessarily, but more a loos definition to do with hardware to enable high availability
How do you choose which region to host your resource in?
1) Location of users to minimize latency
2) Features (not all available in all regions)
3) Price differs region to region
What is a paired region
Each region is paired with another region within same geographic area (except Brazil South, paired with South Central US)
If primary region has an outage, you can failover to secondary region (outage failover)
Only one region is ever updated at one time
What are availability zones
Unique physical locations within a region. Each zone has its own power, cooling and networking. Each region that supports AZs has minimum of 3 zones to protect against data center failure
Requires your service to be in all AZs
Part of the high availability approach of Azure
What is zone redundant storage
Automatically replicate across zones
What are Resource Groups?
Everythin in Azure is in a resource group (which is a container, not a resource), allowing you to manage them all as a group.
What are the features of Resource Groups?
1) Each resource can only exist in a single resource group
2) You can add or remove resources to any resource group at any time
3) You can move resources from one group to another
4) Resources from multiple regions can be in one resource group
5) Can be used to manage access control
6) Can interact with resources in other groups
7) A resource group is no a resource itself, but has a location/region as it stores meta data about the resources in it
What is Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Deployment and Management service. Underpins everything to do with creating, updating or deleting resources
If you interact with any resources,this goes through ARM (whether you access via portal, PowerShell, API or SDK), meaning any change will be available across all tools
What is the benefits of ARM
1) Group Resource handling: You can deploy, manage and monitor resources as a group
2) Consistency: deploying resources from various tools will always result in the same consistent state
3) Dependencies: define dependencies between resources to make sure they don’t impact one another
4) Access control: built in features in the ARM make it easy to assign access rights to users
5) Tagging: for easy identification for future scenarios
What is a benefit of resource groups?
Can clean up easily by deleting a whole resource group rather than deleting individually (when you provision a resource, other resources are provisioned alongside it to enable it to run)
What is significant about Resource Groups?
They aren’t resources, but all resources must be in one. Resource groups cannot be moved between regions
What is the purpose of Resource Manager in Azure?
Any creation, update or deletion of resources is done by ARM. It is the common architectural layer which all commands go through to interact with a resource. It manages all resources on azure, and is the only tool to create resources.
When can you remove a resource group?
At any time
What is compute
Service that allows any computation in the cloud
Compute: What is a Virtual Machine
Computer you ave access to exclusively, but doesn’t have exclusive hardware (Multiple VMs can run on same hardware)
Compute: What are the features of VMs
1) Part of IAAS offering, so you manage everything except hardware
2) Tools: Use portal to manage large number of VMs (even in hybrid cloud)
3) Compliance: Use Azure blueprints to make your VMs comply with guidelines
4) Recommendations: Azure will recommend improvement to ensure better security, higher availability and greater performance
Compute: How are VMs prices
Calculated hourly
The more CPU/RAM you use the more you pay per hour
Compute: What are the pros and cons of VMs
Pros
1) Control: Use VMs when you need to control all aspects on env/machine
2) When you want to install specific app on your Windows/Linux machines
3) You can move existing resources and VMs to Azure from on-prem/other cloud provides
4) No maintenance of hardware
5) Only pay for what youu use
Cons
1) Not for everything. If there is an option to use an Azure service, its often worth it
2) Lot of maintenance
Compute: What are Scale Sets?
A pool of identical VMs that can be activated or de-activated as needed
Lets you create and manage a group of identical, load-balanced VMs. A baseline VM for the scale set ensures application stability, and this is what you copy to make up the scale set.
Compute: What are the benefits of using scale sets?
1) Multiple VMs: simple to manage multiple identical VMs using load balancer
2) High availability: if one VM fails or stops, the others will keep working
3) Autoscaling: automatically match demand
4) Large scale: can run up to 1000 VMs
5) No extra cost for using scale sets, only pay for additional resources
Compute: What is a use case for Scale Sets?
Online store runs on a VM. Traffic increases in the evening. Scale set would monitor your usage, and ensure you have enough resources and VMs when you need, and remove them when traffic reduces to save you money
Compute: What is App Services
Part of the PaaS offering, Azure App Service is a fully managed web hosting service for building web apps, mobile back ends and RESTful API without managing infrastructure. Offers scaling and high availability. Is a fully managed platform, so servers, network and storage is managed by Azure, you just worry about business value and logic
Compute: What are the three categories of app services
1) Web apps: websites and online apps hosted on Azures managed platform. Runs on windows or linux, supports lots of languages and uses Azure integraton for easier deployment. Support autoscaling and load balancing
2) Web apps for containers: deploy and run containerized apps in Azure. A container is a completely self-contained unit of software, so al dependencies (codes, units etc) are shipped within the container. You can deploy anywhere with consistence experience
3) API apps: Expose and connect your data backend. It is a software application with no graphical component/UI/front end. Connects other applications programmatically. Use a range of programming languages
Compute: What are Azure Container Instances
It is a PaaS offering that allows you to upload your containers and execute them directly with automatic elastic scale.
Helps to mitigate dependency madness when you want to run software on different environments, as a container provides all the necessary dependencies (framework, OS etc) allowing it to run on any machine. As they are relatively small, you can have several containers on the same machine, with each container being a single, self contained application
Compute: What are the features of Azure Container Instances
1) Manage application dependencies: all the dependencies for an application are included in the container image. You can manage the application and its dependencies with confidence
2) Less overhead: VMs require a lot more maintenance and updates. Containers don’t have any components relating to the OS that require maintenance
2) Increase portability: applications running in containers can be deployed easily to multiple differ OS and hardware platforms
3) Efficiency: Development, deployment and maintenance are all more efficient when using containers. Scaling and patching is much simpler
4) Consistency: the operations team can rely on containers being the same every time, no matter which target they are being deployed to
Compute: Explain the workflow for Containers on Azure
1) Create a software application via SDC
2) Wrap it in a container image
3) Deploy/publish to Azure Container Instance
Compute: What is Azure Kubernetes Service?
Open source, container orchestration system for automatic application deployment, scaling and management
Allows you to manage lots of containers simultaneously
Compute: Why choose Kubernetes
1) Replicate container architecture: reuse your container architecture by managing it in kubernetes. This makes you setup quicker and confidence in the system increase
2) Scaling
3) Stagger container updates or roll back
4) Standard Azure services included: You don’t have to worry about infra and hardware. Get identity and access management, elastic provisioning and much more
5) Global reach: use kubernetes with supported azure regions and on-premise installations using Azure stack
Compute: What is Azure Container Registry (ACR)
Keeps track of current valid container images. Manages files and artifacts for containers. When you create a new container, this comes from ACR. Feeds container images to ACI and AKS (Azure kubernetes services). Uses Azure identity and security features
Compute: How does ACR (Azure Container Registry) and AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services) interact?
1) Say you have an application that processes orders
2) The application runs in a container, created from an image from ACR
3) AKS manages the containers and the cluster, which is a set of computers (called nodes)
4) When orders increase, AKS provisions another container to take the load, which is done in a pod
Compute: What are Azure Functions
Serverless. Smallest compute service on Azure. It is a single function of compute. Called, or invokes, via a standard web address (URL) which triggers the function, which runs once and stops. Can work with other functions or something else
Compute: How does the architecture of Azure functions work?
Still use a VM to run on, but you don’t worry about maintenance, processes or anything VM related, you just worry about functionality
Compute: What are the benefits of Azure functions?
1) Only runs when needed: so if there is no traffic, there is no resource usage
2) Saves money: no resources = no cost
3) Resilience: if your function fails, it doesn’t affect other function instances
Compute: What is important to remember about web app instances?
Need to be unique as will get its own unique internet address
Compute: What is an app service plan
An app service (website) is always within an app service plan. An App Service plan defines a set of compute resources for a web app to run. One or more apps can be configured to run on the same computing resources (or in the same App Service plan). There are a variety to select based on throughput, with varying prices
Compute: what is the key difference and similarities between containers and VMs
Containers have less overheads than VMs and can be deployed consistently
Just like virtual machines, containers run on top of a host operating system. But unlike VMs, containers don’t include an operating system for the apps running inside the container. Instead, containers bundle the libraries and components needed to run the application and use the existing host OS running the container.
Compute: What is a fully managed platform on Azure?
Every part of your Azure service is looked after by MS, meaning you only have to worry about application development
Compute: What cloud service model do VMs belong to?
IAAS
Networking: What is a Virtual Network (VNet)
Allows many types of azure resources to communicate with each other, the internet and on-prem resource. Is virtual, so you have access to it but not the physical hardware
Networking: What is an IP address
Each piece of internet traffic has an IP address to ensure traffic gets to the right server
Networking: What are the 4 main concepts of VNet?
1) Address Space: range of IP addresses available. Each resource attached the the VNet will get its own IP within the VNet
2) Subnets: Enable you to segment the VNet into 1 or more subnetwork and allocate a portion of the address space to the subnet, for security or logical division of resources e.g. resource grouping
3) Subnet regions and subscriptions: A VNet belongs to a single region and every resource must be within the same region, but VNets from different regions can talk to one another. A VNet must belong to one subscription, but a subscription can have multiple VNets
4) Cloud advantages: Scaling (add more VNets or address spaces), high availability (peering, using load balance or VPN gateway) and isolate (manage and organise resources and subnets and NSGs)
Networking: How do you ensure subnets are secure
Use Network security groups to secure individual subnets
Networking: What are load balancers?
Distributes new inbound flows that arrive on the Load Balancer front end to back end pool instances (VMs), according to rules and health probes. Uses IP address and port number to determine the receiving VM in the backend pool
Networking: What are some scenarios for Load Balancers?
1) Internet traffic coming into app
2) Internal networks between internal apps
3) Port forwarding: forward to a specific machine in the backend
4) Outbound traffic: allow outbound connectivity for backend pool VMs
Networking: What is a Virtual Network Gateway?
Composed of 2 or more VMs deployed to the gateway subnet
Networking: What is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway?
Type of virtual network gateway used to send encrypted traffic from Azure network to on premise network over public internet
Networking: What is a scenario for using a VPN gateway?
Have on-prem infra, but want to move parts to the cloud to take advantage of the benefits, so you will have a hybrid solution. To communicate securely between the two, you create a VPN Gateway
Networking: What are the 3 components of a VPN gateway?
1) Azure Gateway subnet: an Azure VNet with a VPN gateway attached
2) Secure connection called a tunnel, with an encryption mechanism
3) On premise network with complimentary gateway to accept encrypted data
Networking: What is site-to-site connection and multi-site connection
Site to site is one VNet to your on-prem
Multi-site is where you connect to more than one on-prem location
Networking: What is an application gateway
Type of load balancer, but instead of routing it based on IP address and port, it works on a higher level at the HTTP request (including host headers or URI path) of the traffic. Enables traffic from a specific web address to go to a specific machine e.g. one to deal with images better
Networking: What is a HTTP request
Data format that is received from internet traffic
Networking: What is a URI path
Web address for request
Networking: What is a host header
Piece of info set with request
Networking: What are the benefits of an application gateway?
1) Works will with other Azure services
2) Scales up or down based on traffic, so you don’t need to manage resources required
3) Encryption: comply with all security policies to comply with any traffic you may receive. Disable or enable traffic encryption at the backend
4) Zone redundancy: Span multiple availability zones and improve fault resiliency
5) Multi-site hosting: use same app gateway for up to 100 websites to save cost and complexity
Networking: What is Content Delivery Network
ontent Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that can deliver web content close to users. Store cached content at edge locations to reduce latency. Each piece of data cached in the edge location has an expiry date, this will be requested from the master data centre, meaning you can update your data
Networking: What are the benefits of CDN
1) Better performance: improve the user experience and the performance of your app
2) Scaling: Scale to suit spikes in traffic, and also protect your main backend server instance from high loads
3) Distribution: Edge servers will serve requests closest to the user. Less traffic is then sent t the server hosting your app
Networking: What does caching and origin server mean?
1) Caching: Collection of temp copies of original files stored at an edge location. The primary purpose is to optimize speed for an application. When a copy expires, a new copy is needed
2) Origin server: Original location of the files, such as the web app. It is the master copy
Networking: What problems does adding a load balancer solve
1) When there is too much data for a single VM to hand
2) To ensure only healthy servers process requests (health probes)
Networking: When would you use an Application Gateway?
1) For incoming traffic to make routing decision based on additional attributes of HTTP request, such as URI or host headers
2) Traffic with specific properties that needs to be process by a particular VM
Networking: Why would you use CDN?
1) To better handle high loads, such as at a product launch
2) To provide better performance and improved user experience
Networking: How do resources on Azure use a virtual network?
Resources that need to communicate with other azure resources or resources on the internet do so via a VNet
Networking: What is an address space on a VNet
Range of IP addresses that can be assigned to services attached to the VNet
Networking: What is the purpose of a VPN Gateway
To send encrypted traffic between an VNet and on-prem location over the public internet
Storage: What are the 4 types of storage
Blob
Disk
File
Archive
Storage: What is a storage account?
Unique Azure Namespace. Every object in azure storage has its own web address, so the name you give to the account becomes the main web address e.g. NAME.storagetype.core.windows.net
Storage: What is blob storage
Binary Large object (anything made up of bits and bytes)
Stores text or binary files up to 4.7TB with a unique address to be retrieved easily. Stores in containers within the storage account, so there are 3 layers. Containers can host unlimited amounts of blobs, and storage accounts can have multiple containers
Storage: In what scenarios would you use blob storage?
Images: store various size and formats as a single image storage
All types: store any kinds of files and have distributed access
Streaming: stream audio and video directly from your blob storage
Log files: Write to log files regardless of size and frequency
Data store: Store any kind of data at scale, such as for archiving, backup, restore and disaster recovery
Storage: What are the 3 blob types?
1) Block: store text and binary data up to 4.7TB. Made up of individually managed blocks of data each of which is identified by a block ID.
2) Append: Block blobs optimised for append operations (works well for logging where data is constantly appended). When you modify an append blob, blocks are added to the end of the blob only, via the Append Block operation. Updating or deleting of existing blocks is not supported
3) Page: stores files up to 8TB. Any part of the file can be accessed at any time, like a virtual hard drive
Storage: What is important about selecting the blob type when choosing storage?
Once the blob has been created, its type cannot be changed, and it can be updated only by using operations appropriate for that blob type, i.e., writing a block or list of blocks to a block blob, appending blocks to a append blob, and writing pages to a page blob.
Storage: What are the pricing tiers for blob storage?
Hot: frequently accessed. Low access times and higher access costs
Cool: Lower storage costs and higher access times. Data remains here for at least 30 days
Archive: lowest cost and highest access time
Storage: What is disk storage
Also referred to as managed disk, it attached to your VM
1) Azure managed: azure looks after the physical disk and guarantees backups and uptime
2) Size and performance: MS and Azure guarantee size and performance as per your agreement
3) Easy upgrade
Storage: What are the disk types in increasing price order
1) HDD: Old school spinning hard drive. Low cost for IA data, such as backups
2) Standard SSD: standard for prod. Higher reliability, scalability and lower latency over HDD
3) Premium SSD: Super fast and high performance. Very low latency. Use for critical workloads
4) Ultra disk: for the most demanding, data intensive workloads with sub-ms latency. Disks up to 64TB. Recommended for gaming, complex analytics etc
Storage: What is File storage?
Normally, companies have file shares used to store and share company assets, but this has issues including:
1) Constrained on storage limit
2) Time and resources to maintain backups
3) Hard to keep data secure
4) Difficult to share across teams and orgs
This can be resolved using file storage
1) Sharing: share access to azure file storage across machines and provide access to your on-premise infra
2) Managed: you don’t have to worry about hardware or OS
3) Resilient: network and power outages wont affect storage like it does on-prem due to redundancies
Storage: In what scenarios would you use file storage?
1) Hybrid: supplement or replace your existing on prem file storage solution
2) Lift and shift: move your existing file storages and related services to azure. As you can take your existing infra and move it service by service, its called lift and shift
Storage: What is Archive storage
Storing large amounts of data is often required, due to policies, legislation and recovery.
Lowest price: the archive tier is the lowest price for storage on Azure. A few dollars a month can get you terabytes of space, allowing you to free up premium storage and repurpose this
Storage: What are the features of Archive storage?
1) Durable
2) Encrypted
3) Stable
4) Suited for IA data
5) Not fast
6) Blob storage
Storage: How do you name a storage account
All lower case, no special characters
Storage: What are some properties and services within a storage account
Containers
File Shares
Tables
Queues
Storage: What type of storage is archive storage?
Blob
Storage: What is the primary use for disk storage?
To attach to a VM to act as a virtual hard drive
Storage: What are the 4 types of managed disk storage
Standard HDD
Standard SSD
Premium SSD
Ultra Disk
Databases: What is Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s proprietary globally-distributed, multi-model database service “for managing data at planet-scale”. Super fast and easy to manage, infinite scalability but costly. Supports schema-less data and supports always changing data
Databases: What features does Cosmos DB have OOB
1) Synchronization across regions, easily add regions and have data sync
2) Latency: Promises single digit latency (0-9ms)
3) Scalability: Automated to meet resource demand, infinite and lowest price (you only pay for what you use)
4) Connectivity: Can choose to work with it via SDK and APIs, many languages and integrate with SQL, MongoDB and Cassandra platforms
Databases: What is a warning for CosmosDB
Costs can run up quickly
Databases: What is Azure SQL
Managed PAAS service. SQL sits on top of the managed hardware/IaaS and provides you with the business logic and functions you need. Think of it as a fully fledged DB system where all you have to worry about is managing the data in the DB. Can integrate with on-prem SQL servers
Databases: What are some features of Azure SQL
1) Fully managed
2) Migration: migrate your on prem SWL server to Azure SQL frictionlessly, creating cost saving and reducing TCO
3) Built in machine learning for optimization (to improve performance) and warnings (degrading instances and obscure events)
4) Cloud benefits: Scalability, high availability, space (up to 100TB), security
Databases: What is Azure Database for MySQL
Whereas Azure SQL is a MS product, MySQL is an opensource project where any member of the community can contribute. It is a mature and stable service as millions of websites use it.
Azure Database for MySQL is easy to set up, manage and scale. It automates the management and maintenance of your infrastructure and database server, including routine updates, backups and security.
Databases: What are the advantages of Azure database for MySQL
1) PaaS: service infra is managed by MS
2) Development focus: focus on developing business strengths instead of managing servers and networks
3) Choice of language: Use the language and framework of your choice, such as PHP and wordpress
4) High availbility and scalable, meaning MySQL can handle increasing numbers of users
5) Azure security features: you get all the high standard azure security features included
6) Cloud Capabilities: all PAAS features such as DB patching, automatic backups and monitoring at no extra cost
Databases: What are some use cases of Azure Database for MySQL
1) Web app
2) E-commerce
3) MObile apps to scale to millions
4) Digital marketing with large spikes in traffic
5) Finance management storing highly sensitive data
6) Gaming dealing with large traffic spikes requiring low latency
Databases: What is Azure database for PostgreSQL
Azure Database for PostgreSQL is a relational database service based on the open-source Postgres database engine. It’s a fully managed database-as-a-service offering that can handle mission-critical workloads with predictable performance, security, high availability, and dynamic scalability. Provides enterprise feature slike horizontal scaling. Free and stable with a huge number of people using it
Databases: What are the feature of Azure database for PostgreSQL
1) Extensions: use a large number of extensions such as JSONB, geospatial functions, indexing integration with tools and much more. Also use programming language of choice
2) Horizontal scaling: use very high performance access to distributed data sets. In other words, use data faster across hundreds of servers
3) Performance recommendations based on usage on how to make your DB perform better. Get notification of disruptive events
4) Fully managed: Azure gives you automatic DB patching, automatic backups and built-in monitoring, all included
Databases: What are some use cases of Azure Database for PostgreSQL
1) Financial applications: ideal for online transactions and integrates with mathematical software
2) Government: use postgres for geometric (GIS) data e.g. PostGIS
3) Manufacturing: downtime is disastrous, and postgreSQL provides automated failover and full redundancy and 0-downtime upgrades
Databases: What is Database migration services
Azure has dedicated tool to migrate on-prem to the cloud
1) Single tool: one step migration for Microsoft SQL and Azure SQL
2) Documentation: comprehensive step-by-step guides and documentation for helping you migrate
3) Guides for non-MS: very detailed guides for migrating from non-MS DBs
Databases: What are databases used for
Catalogs optimized and streamlined data for you to use in your business. Good for storing and retrieving data in exactly the format you want it
Databases: What are the valid destination services for Azure DB migration Service?
Cosmos DB
Azure SQL Server
Azure SQL
Databases: What is the recommended use case for Azure SQL?
Migrate your on-prem SQL server instances directly to Azure and get all the benefits of managed instances
Databases: What are the advantages of using a database for storing data?
The data is sorted for you when its inserted
Its a very powerful way of getting data out in exactly the format you want
Databases: What are the advantages of cosmos DB
1) Large range of tools to work with cosmosDB including SDKs, APIs and more
2) Infinite scaling to handle any demand
3) Very low latency
4) Synchronization
Databases: What is the difference between Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL
Azure SQL is a managed service, meaning Azure takes care of all the infra maintenance
Authentication: What are the 2 authentication and authorization services
2) Azure Active Directory
3) MFA
Authentication: What is authentication?
Confirming user is who they say they are/ their identity, commonly using username and password, or through facial recognition.
Authentication: What is Authorization
Comes after authentication, and takes your identity and checks whether you are allowed access. Granular part of identity services
Determination of access to a system based on authentication
Authentication: What does Identity services cover
Authentication and authorization. Access Management is critical to ensure only the right people and processes have access
Authentication: What is Azure Active Directory
Main tool to manage users and permissions. It is mandatory (you cannot have an Azure account without an AAD service)
Every Azure account needs a first user and this user is in the initial AAD instance
Allows for single sign on, application management and authentication
Authentication: How does Active Directory and Azure Active Directory differ
AD was designed for traditional office use for computers and printers, not for web services
Authentication: What is an AAD Tenant?
A tenant is a representation of an organization. It’s a dedicated instance of Azure AD that an organization or app developer receives when the organization or app developer creates a relationship with Microsoft– like signing up for Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft 365.
Each tenant is distinct and completely separate from other AAD tenants
Authentication: How do users within tenants work
Each user in azure can only belong to a single tenant. Users can be guests of other tenants though
Authentication: How do subscriptions work within AAD
A subscription is a billing entity. All resources within a subscription are billed together, but you can separate costs by having multiple subscriptions within a tenant. If a subscription isnt paid, all resources and services associated with the subscription stop
Authentication: How can AAD be used for hybrid cloud
Some services are on prem and some are in azure. When you want to set up a hybrid infra AAD allows you to manage users on prem and in azure
Authentication: What is Multi-factor authentication
Need at least 2 ways to identify yourself to log in. Layered approach to authentication, so if one is compromised by attackers they still can’t access. Normally consists of 2 or more of the following:
1) Something you know (Username and password)
2) Something you have (Phone, key fob, app)
3) Something you are (Biometrics)
This can be enabled through AAD and is a 1st class citizen from the start
Authentication: What can you do within AAD with new users
Assign roles, or assign access to parts of your Azure account (storage, cosmosDB etc)
Authentication: What is the first service on any Azure account?
AAD
Authentication: How many tenants can a single user belong to in Azure AD?
One, but can be guests to other tenants
Authentication: What are factors used to verify a user with MFA?
Something you know
Something you have
Something you are
Solutions: What are some Azure Solutions?
IOT Big Data AI Serverless DevOps
Solutions: What is IOT
A system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction
Solutions: What are Azure IOT Services?
1) IOT Hub
2) IOT Central
Solutions: What is IOT Hub?
Paas solution that provides more control over the IOT data collection and process. It collects data from all your things, and as it is a backend service it manages all the data. Allows for scaling and authentication, and ease of deployment for new things
Is a managed and secure service
Solutions: What is IOT Central?
Saas solution providing pre-made IOT connections and dashboards to get set up quickly and speed up the implementation of your IOT solution. No coding is needed to deploy the IOT project meaning you can focus on metrics and business value
Solutions: What is Big Data?
It is data from billions of devices, but want to get value from it to provide better service, performance and more profits
Solutions: What are Azure’s Big Data services?
1) Data lake analytics
2) HD Insight
3) Databricks
4) Azure Synapse Analytics
Solutions: What is Data Lake analytics
Stores very large amounts of data. Has parallel processing, so two or more computers process he same data at the same time. The service is ready to go, with servers, processes and any other services ready to go from the start. With no infrastructure to manage, you can process data on demand, scale instantly and only pay per job.
Can run massively parallel data transformation and processing programs across petabytes of data
Solutions: What is HDInsights
Similar to Azure data laka analytics, Run open-source big data frameworks with your Azure free account. Easily run Apache Hadoop, Spark, Kafka and other popular open-source frameworks at global scale.
A managed, full-spectrum, open-source analytics service that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process massive amounts of data across various scenarios such as ETL
It is an open-source framework for the distributed processing and analysis of big datasets in clusters.
Solutions: What is Databricks
Based on Apache Spark, Databricks is an open source distributed cluster-computing framework. Allows you to run and process a dataset on many computers simultaneously without the need to buy them. Integrates with Azure storage services to access large amounts of data
Solutions: What is Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure’s data warehouse offering (previously Azure SQL data warehouse). Used for reporting and data analysis, with limitless storage and analysis capabilities (except by price and size of datacentres). Uses SQL language to manipulate the data.
Is the cloud-based service that leverages massively parallel processing (MPP) to quickly run complex queries across petabytes of data in a relational database
Solutions: What is the outcome of big data services
1) Increase seed and efficiency of data processing
2) Cost reduction on storage and processing
3) Better decision making through immediate processing
4) New products and services: understand what customers want
Solutions: What is AI
Capability of machines to imitate intelligent human behaviour. Through AI, machines can analyse images, comprehend speech, interact in natural ways and make predictions using data
Also called Machine Learning on Azure (it is a subsection of AI)
Solutions: What are 3 main parts of Machine Learning on Azure platform?
1) Models: definition of what you ML app is learning, a set of rules for how to use the data
2) Knowledge mining: use Azure search to find existing insights into your data e.g. geographic connections
3) Build-in apps: Azure has a number of built in apps to use straight away (bot and cognitive services)
Solutions: What are 3 Azure AI services?
1) Azure cognitive services
2) Azure Machine Learning Studio
3) Azure Machine Learning Service
Solutions: What is Azure cognitive services?
Collection of tools to use within your apps. Includes
1) Vision service: to recognize, identify and caption images and videos
2) Decisions: make decisions based on content, e.g. detect offensive languages or IOT anomalies)
3) Speech service: automatic speech to text transcription and speaker identification/verification
Brings AI within reach of every developer – without requiring machine-learning expertise. All it takes is an API call to embed the ability to see, hear, speak, search, understand and accelerate decision-making into your apps.
Solutions: What is Azure Machine Learning Studio
Azure Machine Learning Studio lets you manage your models, projects and other data for your machine learning applications. It is a one-stop shop for working with ML on Azure.
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio (classic) is a collaborative, drag-and-drop tool you can use to build, test, and deploy predictive analytics solutions on your It publishes models as web services that can easily be consumed by custom apps or BI tools such as Excel
Solutions: What is Azure Machine Learning Service
It is a collection of tools/ resources to run your actual ML implementation. Help build your AI apps, with built in automation to recognize trends in apps and create models for you
Solutions: What is Serverless
Extreme version of Paas. Servers are abstracted away and managed elsewhere
Solutions: What are the 3 serverless Azure services?
1) Azure functions
2) Azure Logic apps
3) Azure Event grid
Solutions: What is Azure function
First serverless service
A single task is performed each time, and runs only one for each invocation. It consists of a basic compute unit which can be run millions of times per second if needed
Solutions: What is logic app?
Integrates apps, data and services both inside and outside of Azure.
1) Automation: lots of ways to automate and orchestrate tasks
2) Quick start: no coding required to get started, just need access to your apps for interation
Solutions: What is a use case for logic apps
Every time a new order is made in the system, you can create a logic app to create a record for how long this took. This integrates into a DB and integrates with mail service to send an email to the CEO. Can have a conditional path, so if the order is over £100 send a thank you email. Connect many apps manually or using templates, no code needed, no servers so you can set up quickly!
Solutions: What is Event grid
Routing service: for sending and receiving events between apps that need to know about the event
Serverless: don’t manage infra, just sign up to use the service and start connected services
Ease of use: makes complex cloud architecture simpler
Solutions: what is an event
When an app/process wants another app/process to know something has happened
Solutions: What is DevOps
Work between development and production
At its core is about people: how developers, engineers and system admins organise themselves and work as team to deliver better products faster
Solutions: What are Azures 2 DevOps Services
1) Azure DevOps
2) Azure DevTest Labs
Solutions: What is Azure DevOps
Platform consisting of 5 tools to create more robust software, faster:
1) Azure board: keep track of work tasks, timelines, issues, planning and more
2) Azure pipelines: produce and test your software, automatically and continuously
3) Azure repos: store source code for your apps securely in a managed way.
4) Azure test plans: design tests of apps to implement automatically
5) Azure artifacts: share apps and code libraries with other teams inside and out of your organisation
Solutions: What is Azure DevTest Labs
Environment management: allow developers and engineers to create environments for test and dev
Cost Management: you wont incur unexpected costs and will even minimize waste of resources on your account
Templates: tailor your development and test environments and reuse them with templated deployments
Solutions: When would you use Azure Logic Apps to solve a problem?
If you have to integrate very different systems inside and outside of Azure
Imagine that you work on a photo-sharing application that runs on millions of mobile devices. Demand is unpredictable because you see a spike in usage whenever a locally or nationally significant event occurs. Which Azure compute resource is the best match for this workload?
Serverless
Containers
VMs
Serverless. The app is event driven and needs to handle unpredictable demand. Severless computing can scale instantly and is cost effective. Containers and VMs take seconds-minutes to scale respectively, which may be too slow
Why store data in the cloud?
1) Automated back up
2) replication across the globe
3) Support data analytics
4) Encrypted
5) Multiple data types (video, text, RDS, NoSQL)
6) Storage tiers
What are the encryption for storage services
Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) for data at rest helps you secure your data to meet the organization’s security and regulatory compliance. It encrypts the data before storing it and decrypts the data before returning it. The encryption and decryption are transparent to the user.
Client-side encryption is where the data is already encrypted by the client libraries. Azure stores the data in the encrypted state at rest, which is then decrypted during retrieval.
What is N-tier architecture to build loosely coupled systems?
An N-tier architecture divides an application into two or more logical tiers. Architecturally, a higher tier can access services from a lower tier, but a lower tier should never access a higher tier.
How do you configure a virtual network?
Through software
What is traffic manager?
Traffic Manager works at the DNS level, and directs the client to a preferred endpoint when you are globally distributed. This endpoint/ DNS server can be to the region that’s closest to your user.
How are Load Balancers and Traffic Managers similar and different
Load Balancer and Traffic Manager both help make your services more resilient, but in slightly different ways. When Load Balancer detects an unresponsive VM, it directs traffic to other VMs in the pool. Traffic Manager monitors the health of your endpoints. When Traffic Manager finds an unresponsive endpoint, it directs traffic to the next closest endpoint that is responsive.
What happens when Virtual Machines are deleted
When a virtual machine is deleted, its managed disk remains in the Azure portal and can be used to create a new virtual machine. Until this disk is manually removed, you will incur charges for the disk whether it is in use or not
Can a VM be auto-resized
Virtual machine scale sets can be auto-scaled to combat system performance. If a virtual machine needs to be resized, it must be done manually.
Where do you you view updates, roadmaps and announcements
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/ is where you’ll learn about important Azure product updates, roadmaps, and announcements.
How do you view previews for the portal?
https://preview.portal.azure.com/ is the URL to the Azure Preview Portal, which shows new functionality and features of the Azure Portal.
By searching for the word Preview in the Azure Portal https://portal.azure.com/, you can find information on products that are in public preview, but it is not the best place to obtain this information.
Which services do you pay for out of: Static IP Virtual Machine (stopped, dealloacted) Load Balancer with 5 rules VNet Network Interface
The pricing for a Standard Load Balancer is based on the number of rules configured (load balancer rules and NAT rules) and data processed. However, there is no hourly charge for the Standard Load Balancer itself when no rules are configured.
There is a charge for static public IP addresses irrespective of the associated resource (unless it is part of the first five static ones in the region)
VNets are free, but you pay for data transfer in/out
VMs will incur charges if they are stopped (disk space) but dealloacted and they no longer incur chargers
Network interfaces are free
What is the difference between an availability zone and an availability set
An Availability zone consists of two or more virtual machines in different physical locations within an Azure region. This configuration offers 99.99% SLA.
An Availability set consists of two or more virtual machines in the same physical location within an Azure region. This configuration offers 99.95% SLA
Which of the following are Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) database offerings on Azure?
SQL Server in Azure VM
Cosmos DB
Azure MySQL Database Platform
SQL Server Private Cloud
Azure SQL Database
Cosmos DB
Azure SQL DB
Which of the following are available in the Azure Marketplace?
Virtual machine images
Solution templates
Sample application code
SaaS applications
Virtual machine images are available in the Azure Marketplace. Images are available for Windows and Linux.
SaaS applications make up the majority of the Azure Marketplace.
Solution templates allow you to deploy entire IaaS solutions with a simple click
Sample application code is typically not available in the Azure Marketplace. These code snippets are currently found at the Azure Code Samples site or in a GitHub repository
Which tools can be used on a workstation running on Linux
Powershell (Windows, Mac, Linux)
CLI (Windows, Mac, Linux)
CloudShell (Linux=bash, windows=powershell)
