Regions & Availability Zones

Question 1

What is a data center?

Answer 1

Physical facility that hosts servers
Group of networked servers
Own power, cooling, and network infrastructure

Question 2

What are Azure Regions?

Answer 2

Group of data centers that are connected with internet connectivity - low latency network for speed efficiencies (<2 milliseconds).
Can vary in size
Distributed across the globe

Question 3

What defines ‘latency limits’ within regions?

Answer 3

Fiber option connection and how fast the connection is
Latency is the time it takes for data to travel
Means datacenters are not too far from each other

Question 4

How many availability zones in a Region?

Answer 4

3 or mores zones

Question 5

How do you choose a region as a customer?

Answer 5

Location - where are you customers
Features - not all features are available in all regions
Pricing - differs from region to region

Question 6

What are Region Pairs? What are the 3 main functions?

Answer 6

Services only available in certain regions - some services are global - 50+ countries
Region pairs - connected regions in case one region goes does. Can replicate data on multiple regions
Functions - Outage Failure, Planned Updates, Replication to paired region
Regions are paired with exactly one region
Very important to distaste recovery

Question 7

What are Geographies?

Answer 7

Region pairs are within the same geography
Contain two or more regions

Question 8

What are Availability Zones? What does every zone have?

Answer 8

Zone - one or more data centers
Each data center gets a number that represents a grouping of physically separate facility
Helps protect from data center failures - other data centers can pickup the slack
Independent power, cooling, networking

Question 9

What are Zonal Services?

Answer 9

Zonal Services - can deploy VMs to different data centers/availability zones

Question 10

What does it mean to be ‘Zone Redundant’?

Answer 10

Zone redundant - services will work across multiple availability zones

Question 11

What are Resources in Azure?

Answer 11

Resource represents a service you can purchase including all of the configurations that you makes
Ex. SQL
Comes as a JSON file

Question 12

What are Resource Groups in Azure? What are they not?

Answer 12

Grouping of logically related resources - a container for resources
Often grouped by lifecycle (dev versus prod)
By department, location, billing
Not - a resource themselves

Question 13

What are resource group rules?

Answer 13

Each resource can only exist in a single resource group
Add/remove resources at any time
Move resources - can move a resource to another resource group
Multiple regions - resources from multiple regions can be in one resource group

Question 14

How do resource groups work with Access Control?

Answer 14

You can give users access to a resource group and everything inside it

Question 15

Can resources interact with resources in other resource groups?

Answer 15

Yes

Question 16

Where do resource groups store its meta data?

Answer 16

In a location or region

Question 17

What is Azure Resource Manager? How are ARM requests handled?

Answer 17

The underlying management layer for resources - creating, updating, deleting, and controlling access to resources
If you interact with a resource, it goes through ARM
Azure Resource Manager API handles the request
Unified language?

Question 18

What are the benefits of ARM?

Answer 18

Group resource handling - deploy, manage, monitor resources as a group
Consistency - deploy resources in a consistent state
Dependencies - define dependencies between resources
Access Control - easy to assign access to users
Tagging - easy to tag resources
Billing - Use tagging for billing visibility

Question 19

What type of requests does ARM handle?

Answer 19

APIS, SDKs, Azure Tools - Azure Resource Manager will handle

Question 20

Can a resource be in more than one resource group? Can they move groups?

Answer 20

No
Resources can be moved between groups but not nested

Question 21

Can resource groups be in different geographical locations?

Answer 21

Resources in groups can be in different geographical locations