Understand core Azure services Flashcards
Describe Regions
A region is a geographical area on the planet containing 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 will often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed.
A region is one or more Azure data centers within a specific geographic location. East US, West US, and North Europe are examples of regions. In this instance, you see that the application is running in the East US region.
Describe Availability Zones
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. It 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.
Describe Resource Group
Resource groups are a fundamental element of the Azure platform. A resource group is a logical container for resources deployed on Azure. These resources are anything you create in an Azure subscription like virtual machines, Application Gateways, and CosmosDB instances. All resources must be in a resource group and a resource can only be a member of a single resource group. Many resources can be moved between resource groups with some services having specific limitations or requirements to move. Resource groups can’t be nested. Before any resource can be provisioned, you need a resource group for it to be placed in.
Describe LB
Azure Load Balancer is a load balancer service that Microsoft provides that helps take care of the maintenance for you. Load Balancer supports inbound and outbound scenarios, provides low latency and high throughput, and scales up to millions of flows for all Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) applications. You can use Load Balancer with incoming internet traffic, internal traffic across Azure services, port forwarding for specific traffic, or outbound connectivity for VMs in your virtual network.
When you manually configure typical load balancer software on a virtual machine, there’s a downside: you now have an additional system that you need to maintain. If your load balancer goes down or needs routine maintenance, you’re back to your original problem.
If instead, however, you use Azure Load Balancer, there’s no infrastructure or software for you to maintain. You define the forwarding rules based on the source IP and port to a set of destination IP/ports.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/intro-to-azure-networking/3-scale-load-balancer
Describe Application Gateway
If all your traffic is HTTP, a potentially better option is to use Azure Application Gateway. Application Gateway is a load balancer designed for web applications. It uses Azure Load Balancer at the transport level (TCP) and applies sophisticated URL-based routing rules to support several advanced scenarios.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/intro-to-azure-networking/3-scale-load-balancer
Describe Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that can efficiently deliver web content to users. It is a way to get content to users in their local region to minimize latency. CDN can be hosted in Azure or any other location. You can cache content at strategically placed physical nodes across the world and provide better performance to end users. Typical usage scenarios include web applications containing multimedia content, a product launch event in a particular region, or any event where you expect a high-bandwidth requirement in a region.
Describe a virtual network
A virtual network is a logically isolated network on Azure. Azure virtual networks will be familiar to you if you’ve set up networks on Hyper-V, VMware, or even on other public clouds. A virtual network allows Azure resources to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. A virtual network is scoped to a single region; however, multiple virtual networks from different regions can be connected together using virtual network peering.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/intro-to-azure-networking/2-deploy-to-azure
Describe Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage is unstructured, meaning that there are no restrictions on the kinds of data it can hold. Blobs are highly scalable and apps work with blobs in much the same way as they would work with files on a disk, such as reading and writing data. Blob Storage can manage thousands of simultaneous uploads, massive amounts of video data, constantly growing log files, and can be reached from anywhere with an internet connection.
Blobs aren’t limited to common file formats. A blob could contain gigabytes of binary data streamed from a scientific instrument, an encrypted message for another application, or data in a custom format for an app you’re developing.
Azure Blob storage lets you stream large video or audio files directly to the user’s browser from anywhere in the world. Blob storage is also used to store data for backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. It has the ability to store up to 8 TB of data for virtual machines. The following illustration shows an example usage of Azure blob storage.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/intro-to-data-in-azure/3-how-azure-storage-meets-your-business-storage-needs
Describe File Storage
Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Azure file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. Applications running in Azure virtual machines or cloud services can mount a file storage share to access file data, just as a desktop application would mount a typical SMB share. Any number of Azure virtual machines or roles can mount and access the file storage share simultaneously. Typical usage scenarios would be to share files anywhere in the world, diagnostic data, or application data sharing.
Describe Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed database service. It supports schema-less data that lets you build highly responsive and Always On applications to support constantly changing data. You can use this feature to store data that is updated and maintained by users around the world. The following illustration shows a sample Azure Cosmos DB database that’s used to store data that’s accessed by people located across the globe.
Describe Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a relational database as a service (DaaS) based on the latest stable version of the Microsoft SQL Server database engine. SQL Database is a high-performance, reliable, fully managed and secure database. You can use it to build data-driven applications and websites in the programming language of your choice without needing to manage infrastructure.
You can migrate your existing SQL Server databases with minimal downtime using the Azure Database Migration Service. The service uses the Microsoft Data Migration Assistant to generate assessment reports that provide recommendations to help guide you through required changes prior to performing a migration. Once you assess and perform any remediation required, you’re ready to begin the migration process. The Azure Database Migration Service performs all of the required steps. You just change the connection string in your apps.
Describe Disk Storage
Disk storage provides disks for virtual machines, applications, and other services to access and use as they need, similar to how they would in on-premises scenarios. Disk storage allows data to be persistently stored and accessed from an attached virtual hard disk. The disks can be managed or unmanaged by Azure, and therefore managed and configured by the user. Typical scenarios for using disk storage are if you want to lift and shift applications that read and write data to persistent disks, or if you are storing data that is not required to be accessed from outside the virtual machine to which the disk is attached.
Disks come in many different sizes and performance levels, from solid-state drives (SSDs) to traditional spinning hard disk drives (HDDs), with varying performance abilities.
When working with VMs, you can use standard SSD and HDD disks for less critical workloads, and premium SSD disks for mission-critical production applications. Azure Disks have consistently delivered enterprise-grade durability, with an industry-leading ZERO% annualized failure rate. The following illustration shows an Azure virtual machine using separate disks to store different data.
Describe Archive Storage
for data that are rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days with flexible latency requirements.
Describe Azure Resource Manager
Azure Resource Manager has a number of features that you can use to organize resources, enforce standards, and protect critical Azure resources from accidental deletion.
REVIEW https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/control-and-organize-with-azure-resource-manager/2-principles-of-resource-groups
