Core Services Flashcards
What are the core services of Azure ?
- Virtual Machines (Compute)
- Networking
- Storage
- Databases and Analytics
- App Service and Serverless Compute
What are the advantages of VMs over physical computers/servers ?
- Fault Tolerance: It is possible to activate the VM replication (copy) to another availability zone, increasing the fault tolerance.
In azure, this feature is called an availability set.
- Scalability/Elasticity through Scale sets: Multiple copies of VMs. It is often paired with Load Balancers.
It helps scaling up and down copies of application.
What is the advantage of IAAS over PAAS and SAAS ?
Flexibility: if it runs on a server, you can do it on a VM.
It is a trade-off between flexibility and less management (managed)
What is a VNET (Virtual Network)
It is one of the fundamental building blocks for all Azure communications in that it is used for both private and public network communications for communicating within Azure and also with the outside world.
It allows managing subnets, firewalls, routes, etc.
True or False
A VNET can cover multiple regions
False
How is called the virtual format of network components (subnets, firewalls, routes), etc. ?
SDN - Software Defined Network
True or False
VNET resources can use both internal (private) and external (public) IP addresses
True
What are the familiar networking tools to manage access
- Subnets
- Peering / VPN / Express Route
- Network Security Groups / Firewalls
What is a storage account ?
It in an Azure’s all-purpose storage solution for multiple data storage scenarios.
It is massively scalable - petabytes and up
It is a Managed infrastructure - just store your stuff and go
You have flexible access options (files shares, disks, etc.)
What are the 5 types of subservices of storage accounts
- Blob (object)
- Files
- Disks
- Queues
- Tables
What is a blob ?
Binary Large Object
Object Storage
Unstructured Data
All file types (images, videos, scripts, etc.)
What is the storage type Files ?
It is a storage type that is a network file share in the cloud.
What is the storage type Disks ?
Virtual Hard Drives for VMs
What is the storage type Queues ?
Asynchronous messaging between apps and services
Queues is a method of delivering asynchronous or non realtime messages from one service over to another service or to even accept messages coming in from the outside world.
What is the storage type Tables ?
Tables provides NoSQL database storage inside of a service account.
Gradually transitionning to CosmosDB
What are the specificities of the core services: Databases and applications ?
They are core services of azure AND they are managed services (No/Less infrastructure provisioning, OS updates handled, Dynamically scales)
How are databases organized in Azure
There are multiple managed database services (PaaS)
Multiple options with different use cases/level of management: SQL/NoSQL, Fully Managed, Provisionned Infrastructure, Single Regions vs Multiple Regions, Open Source vs Proprietary
What is Analytics
Analytics referts to analysing data (in databases) or trying to get some sort of information,or business intelligence from that data for various types of insights.
What are the challenges of hosting applications on VMs
Full flexibility but with increased responsability.
You manage: Os updates/patching, Compute (CPU/RAM) and storage management, Scaling via VM scale sets
Result: higher management overhead
What is the solution to the challenges of hosting applications on VMs ?
App Services.
You focus on the code. And Azure handles the resources needed.
What are some Managed Services of Azure
- Container/Kubernetes Manager: Azure handles the container management infrastructure, you focus on your containers
- Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning: Pre-Trained modesl - Just bring your data. Custom modesl - You bring the model and Azure provides the scaling training infrastructure
- Big Data Solutions: HDInsights (Hadoop/Spark fully managed), Azure Synapse (Query massive amount of data in fully Serverless), PowerBI (Saas, dashboards for vizualization)
- Internet of Things solutions: Solutions for entire data collection process (Ingestion, Storage, Analysis). Integrates with Big Data solutions.
What is a container
Self-contained, portable, software packaging mechanism
Not dependent on an underlying OS
What is kubernetes
Popular container orchestration service
What is Big Data
Analyze massive amounts of data for business results (Terabytes, Petabytes, and more)
