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Azure Fundamentals

This captures my notes from the Azure Fundamentals learning content found at learn.microsoft.com.

Cloud Concepts​

Scaling​

Scaling up (vertical scaling) is increasing the size of the VM / resources

Scaling out (horizontal scaling) is increasing the number of VMs / resources

Azure architecture and services​

Core Architectural Components​

Azure is made up of data centers, regions, and availability zones. Learn more about the global Azure infrastructure here.

Region - a geographical area on the planet containing at least one (useually more) data centers that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network.

Availability Zone - a unique physical location within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more data centers 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.

AZs re primarily for VMs, managed disks, load balancers, and SQL databases.

Azure services that support availability zones fall into three categories:

  • Zonal services: You pin the resource to a specific zone
  • Zone-redundant services: The platform replicates automatically across zones
  • Non-regional services: Services are always available from Azure geographies and are resilient to zone-wide outages as well as region-wide outages.

Region Pairs - Most Azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) 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 fail over to the other region in its region pair.

Azure Management Infrastructure​

  • Resources
  • Resource Groups
  • Subscriptions
  • Management Groups

Important facts about management groups:

  • 10,000 management groups can be supported in a single directory.
  • A management group tree can support up to six levels of depth. This limit doesn't include the root level or the subscription level.
  • Each management group and subscription can support only one parent.

Compute and Networking​

  • VM Scale Sets
  • VM Availability Sets