the core architectural components of Azure

Question 1

Azure offers limitless innovation. How does Azure offer this?

Answer 1

-Bring ideas to life: Build on a trusted platform to advance your organization with industry-leading AI and cloud services.

-Seamlessly unify: Efficiently manage all your infrastructure, data, analytics, and AI solutions across an integrated platform.

-Innovate on trust: Rely on trusted technology from a partner who’s dedicated to security and responsibility.

Question 2

What are the different things Azure can do?

Answer 2

• running your existing applications on virtual machines to exploring new software paradigms, such as intelligent bots and mixed reality.
• Azure provides AI and ML services that can naturally communicate with your users through vision, hearing, and speech.
• It also provides storage solutions that dynamically grow to accommodate massive amounts of data.

Question 3

The core architectural components of Azure may be broken down into two main groupings:

Answer 3

the physical infrastructure, and the management infrastructure.

Question 4

What is the physical infrastructure

Answer 4

The physical infrastructure for Azure starts with data centres.
Datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions or Azure Availability Zones designed to help you achieve resiliency and reliability for your business-critical workloads.

Question 5

What are Regions?

Answer 5

A region is a geographical area on the planet that contains at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network. Azure intelligently assigns and controls the resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced.

When you deploy a resource in Azure, you’ll often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed.

Question 6

What are availability zones?

Answer 6

Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. An availability zone is set up to be an isolation boundary. If one zone goes down, the other continues working. Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.

Question 7

How do we ensure resiliency with availability zones?

Answer 7

To ensure resiliency, a minimum of three separate availability zones are present in all availability zone-enabled regions. However, not all Azure Regions currently support availability zones.

Question 8

You want to ensure your services and data are redundant so you can protect your information in case of failure. Azure can help make your app highly available through availability zones.

How?

Answer 8

When you host your infrastructure, setting up your own redundancy requires that you create duplicate hardware environments.

You can use availability zones to run mission-critical applications and build high availability into your application architecture by co-locating your compute, storage, networking, and data resources within an availability zone and replicating in other availability zones. Keep in mind that there could be a cost to duplicating your services and transferring data between availability zones.

Question 9

What are Availability zones primarily used for VMs?

Answer 9

Availability zones are primarily for VMs, managed disks, load balancers, and SQL databases.

Question 10

Azure services that support availability zones fall into three categories:

Answer 10

Zonal services
Zone-redundant services
Non-regional services

Question 11

What are zonal services?

Answer 11

Zonal services: You pin the resource to a specific zone (for example, VMs, managed disks, IP addresses).

Question 12

What are zonal-redundant services?

Answer 12

Zone-redundant services: The platform replicates automatically across zones (for example, zone-redundant storage, SQL Database)

Question 13

What are non-regional services?

Answer 13

Non-regional services: Services are always available from Azure geographies and are resilient to zone-wide outages as well as region-wide outages

Question 14

Even with the additional resiliency that availability zones provide, it’s possible that an event could be so large that it impacts multiple availability zones in a single region.

What is the solution to this?

Answer 14

To provide even further resilience, Azure has Region Pairs.

Question 15

What are region pairs?

Answer 15

Most Azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography at least 300 miles away. This approach allows for the replication of resources across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions because of events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages that affect an entire region.

For example, if a region in a pair was affected by a natural disaster, services would automatically failover to the other region in its region pair.

Question 16

examples of region pairs?

Answer 16

Examples of region pairs in Azure are West US paired with East US and South-East Asia paired with East Asia. Because the pair of regions are directly connected and far enough apart to be isolated from regional disasters, you can use them to provide reliable services and data redundancy.

Question 17

Not all Azure services automatically replicate data or automatically fall back from a failed region to cross-replicate to another enabled region.

what must happen in this case?

Answer 17

In these scenarios, recovery and replication must be configured by the customer.

Question 18

What are the advantages of region pairs?

Answer 18

-If an extensive Azure outage occurs, one region out of every pair is prioritized to make sure at least one is restored as quickly as possible for applications hosted in that region pair.

-Planned Azure updates are rolled out to paired regions one region at a time to minimize downtime and risk of application outage.

-Data continues to reside within the same geography as its pair (except for Brazil South) for tax- and law-enforcement jurisdiction purposes.

Question 19

Most regions are paired in two directions, meaning they are the backup for the region that provides a backup for them (West US and East US back each other up). However, some regions, such as West India and Brazil South, are paired in only one direction.

Answer 19

In a one-direction pairing, the Primary region does not provide backup for its secondary region. So, even though West India’s secondary region is South India, South India does not rely on West India. West India’s secondary region is South India, but South India’s secondary region is Central India. Brazil South is unique because it’s paired with a region outside of its geography. Brazil South’s secondary region is South Central US. The secondary region of South Central US isn’t Brazil South.

Question 20

In addition to regular regions, Azure also has sovereign regions.

What are Sovereign regions?

Answer 20

Sovereign regions are instances of Azure that are isolated from the main instance of Azure. You may need to use a sovereign region for compliance or legal purposes.

Question 21

Azure sovereign regions include:

Answer 21

US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, US Gov Iowa and more: These regions are physical and logical network-isolated instances of Azure for U.S. government agencies and partners. These datacenters are operated by screened U.S. personnel and include additional compliance certifications.

China East, China North, and more: These regions are available through a unique partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet, whereby Microsoft doesn’t directly maintain the datacenters.