Understanding Azure Architecture and Management

Question 1

Describe what the cloud and an azure data center are.

Answer 1

The cloud consists of physical data centers that require cooling and electricity. They house thousands of physical servers and networking equipment.

Question 2

How many azure data centers are there worldwide?

Answer 2

160

Question 3

Describe ITPACS

Answer 3

IT pre assembled components are shipping containers that contain servers with their own electricity, ventilation and cooling. A data center is made up of many ITPACS.

Question 4

How does Microsoft ensure data security in their data centers?

Answer 4

1) They don’t publish the physical address of a data center.
2) Physical security guards and biometric identification
3) Adhere to ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2
4) Third-party audits to ensure that Azure is adhering to the standards
5) Data is stored three times in each data center
6) Azure has teams of security professionals who are dedicated. Odds are that Azure has more resources than any individual organization.

Question 5

Describe how Microsoft addresses energy efficiency in their data centers.

Answer 5

1) Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012.
2) Will have 100% of renewable energy by 2025.
3) Use machine learning to control cooling within a data center
4) Underwater data center to address cooling issues

Question 6

Describe an Azure Region

Answer 6

When you create an azure resource you get to decide the region when you create them; this indicates where the physical data will reside.

Question 7

Why would you choose one Azure region over another?

Answer 7

1) Performance: If your users are in Canada, then you don’t want to host in Asia since there are performance implications with transferring data long distances.
2) Not all azure services are available in all regions (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructureservices/)
3) Not all azure sizes are available in all regions
4) There may be security reasons for having data stored in specific physical data (azure.microsoft.com/en-in/resources/achieving-compliant-data-residency-and-security-with-azure/)

Question 8

Describe Azure Geographies

Answer 8

Contains one or more regions.

Question 9

Describe Availability Zones

Answer 9

1) Unique physical locations within a single region. They are made up of one or more data centers within a region. There will be three separate zones/data centers.
2) You can deploy data or virtual machines across the availability zones/data centers.

Question 10

Describe Region Pairs

Answer 10

1) Data centers that are usually 300 or more miles apart
2) Allows configuration of automatic replication and failover for some azure services
3) Azure will automatically make copies of your data across regions

Question 11

Describe how Microsoft implements high availability in their data centers

Answer 11

1) When updates to a region are required. Azure makes sure that only one region in the pair is updated at one time.
2) If an outage affects multiple regions, one region within each pair will be prioritized for recovery.

Question 12

Describe a resource

Answer 12

Manageable item in Azure. Includes things like virtual machines, databases, storage accounts.

Question 13

Describe a resource group

Answer 13

1) Grouping of many resources
2) Resources share the same lifecycle - Deploy, update and delete a bunch of grouped resources together. If a resource needs to exist in a different deployment cycle then it should be in a different resource group.
3) Resources can only exist in one resource group
4) Resources can communicate across resource groups
5) Apply security controls to a resource group
6) Can exhort infrastructure-as-code using Resource Manager Templates

Question 14

Describe how Azure Resource Manager works

Answer 14

Deployment and management services in Azure. Used for creating, deleting, etc. of resources. It performs authentication through Azure AD and forwards requests to the API for the specific resource.

You can issue commands to ARM using Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI and Azure SDKs.

Question 15

Describe an azure resource manager template.

Answer 15

1) JSON file that can be used to do infrastructure as code. The JSON file displays all of the resources that are part of the deployment.
2) You can download the resource manager template by exporting it within the Portal.

Question 16

Describe the add to library function in the portal

Answer 16

Add to library allows you to save templates for usage at a later time.

Question 17

Describe the deploy function in the portal

Answer 17

Deploy allows you to deploy a resource manager template to another resource group.

Question 18

Describe azure service health

Answer 18

1) Service Issues: Service health shows the health of all services
2) Health advisories: Changes in azure services that require your attention, such as updates that are required or deprecations that affect your services.
3) Planned Maintenance: See if there is planned maintenance on any of your services.
Security Advisories: Security changes that may affect your services.
4) Resource Health: Health by service specific service type. You can see if there is anything you can do to help the health of the service.

Question 19

Describe Azure Monitor

Answer 19

1) Lets you collect and monitor telemetry from your resources. Azure always collects metrics from your azure resources.
2) t is detailed monitoring that applies to a specific resource.
3) You can integrate with Log analytics to push data from azure monitor into logs.

Question 20

Describe Azure mobile app

Answer 20

It lets you monitor your resources and perform actions from a mobile application.

Question 21

Describe azure advisor

Answer 21

Personalized azure consultant on how to optimize your azure resources. Under all services, search advisor. It will look at all the resources you have deployed and the telemetry.