Describe The Core Architectural Components of Azure Flashcards
1
Q
How do Azure subscriptions work?
A
- Create azure account
- add subscriptions
- might have one account for company and then different subscriptions for dev, marketing and sales departments
- subscriptions can be assigned resource groups which contain resources
- account -> subscriptions -> resource groups -> resources
2
Q
what is the free account?
A
includes;
- free access to popular azure products for 12 months
- a credit to use for first 30 days ($200)
- access to more than 25 always free products
- need phone number, credit card and a Microsoft or github account
3
Q
What is free student account?
A
Same as a normal free account but you always get free access to certain software developer tools and $100 credit
4
Q
What is a region?
A
- Geographical area on the planet that contains at least one datacenter, but probably more, that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network
- azure assigns and controls the resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced
5
Q
What are availability zones?
A
- physically separate datacenters within a region
- made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking
- isolation boundary, if one goes down the others continue working
- connected through private fiber-optic networks
- not all regions support them but those that do require a minimum of three zones per region
6
Q
What are availability zones best used for?
A
- good for mission-critical applications that are highly available as you can replicate your services in multiple zones
- used for VMs, managed disks, load balancers and SQL databases
7
Q
What are region pairs?
A
- Most azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography ( US, Europe, Asia etc) at least 300 miles away
- allows for replication of resources that helps reduces likelihood of interruptions due to national disasters, civil unrest, power outages or physical network outages
examples are West US and East Us and Sotuh-East Asia and East Asia
8
Q
Pros of region pairs
A
+ if an outage occurs, one region out of every pair is prioritised to make sure at least one is restored ASAP
+ planned updates are rolled out one region at a time to minimize downtime
+ data continues to reside within geo as its pair for tax and law purposes
9
Q
What are sovereign regions?
A
- instances of azure that are isolated from the main azure instance
- used for compliance or legal purposes
- Us DoD central, Us Gov Virginia, Us Gov Iowa are operated by U.S gov
- Chinea East and China North are maintained through a unique partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet
10
Q
What is a resource?
A
- anything you create, provision or deploy is a resource (such as VMs, DBs and networks)
11
Q
What is a resource group?
A
- a grouping of resources
- when creating a resource it must be placed within a group
- resource groups contain many resources but resources can only be in one group
- cant be nested
- resources can move groups
- when you apply an action to a group it will apply to all resources in it
- no hard rules about how they are used so its up to user to decide what suits them best
12
Q
What is a subscription?
A
- unit of management, billing and scale
- allow you organise your resource groups and facilitate billing
- links to azure account which is an identity in AD or in a directory that AD trusts
- account can have multiple subscriptions but it only needs one
13
Q
What are the two types of subscription boundaries?
A
- Billing boundary determines how an account is billed for using Azure. Multiple subscriptions can be created for different types of billing requirements. Generates separate billing reports for each sub so you can organise costs
- Access control boundary applies access-management policies at subscription level and separate subs can be made to reflect org structure
14
Q
Why might we choose to create separate subscriptions?
A
- Environments; different subs for dev and testing or for compliance reasons
- Org structure; limit one team to lower-cost resources while allowing IT department to have full-range
Billing; manage and track costs based on sub needs
15
Q
What is a management group?
A
- provide a level of scope above subscriptions
- useful if you need a way to manage access, policies and compliance for multiple subs
- subs are organized into groups and you can then apply conditions to the group
- give you enterprise-grade management at a large scale
- can be nested with 6 levels of depth excluding root and sub level
- each group and sub can only have one parent
