What is Azure?
Table of Contents
- Microsoft’s Cloud Platform
- It facilitates with all the tools to develop and deploy the applications along with data management irrespective of the regions.
- Virtualisation Technology is used to provide cloud services.
Describe Regions?
A region is a geographic area located anywhere in the world which has at least one data centre but several data-centres at times.
The allocation of services offered in Azure depends on the region selection.
The more number of regions provide great availability along with scalability for the users.
Describe Availability Zones?
Availability Zones are –>Separate Physical Data-centres located with in a region.
Describe Resource Groups?
Azure resources that are deployed will have a logical container and these containers are known as Azure Resource Groups.
How to Create a Resource Group:-
Step 1:-
Step 2:-
Describe Azure Resource Manager
Azure Resource Manager is a management tool which has a functionality to allow organise resource and deploy applications.
Describe some of the core products available in Azure:-
Describe products available for Compute such as Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, App Services, Azure Container Instances (ACI) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Virtual Machines:-
- As the name implies, these are the machines created virtually through a software emulator.
- These virtual machines operated on a remote connection software(ex:-RDP & SSH)
- Azure offers these virtual machines and hosts them on its platform.
Virtual Machine Scale Sets:-
The Virtual Machine Scale sets are used to scale the VM’s and manage the load between other VM’s. These come in use depending on the amount of workload. (workload +–>VM’s+)
App Services:-
- Theses services are offered as platform as a service(PaaS) in the Microsoft Azure.
- This platform facilitates to develop & host the enterprise grade web and mobile applications with top notch scalability.
Azure Container Instances(ACI):-
ACI->Service to run a container without the need for virtual machinery and docker engine Management.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):-
Service available on Microsoft Azure for docker containers to scale thousands of nodes to aid management and deployment of clusters.
Describe products available for Networking such as Virtual Network, Load Balancer, VPN Gateway, Application Gateway and Content Delivery Network
Virtual Network:-
| Virtual Network | This is a private network created in the Azure Cloud between different virtual machines to establish a secure communications. |
Load Balancer:-
| Load Balancer | The is a device that switches the traffic between the devices located in the same cluster. This devices balances the traffic through distribution. |
VPN Gateway:-
| VPN Gateway | These are gateways created to securely access the internal networks within the Azure and communicate with the cloud. |
Application Gateway:-
| Application Gateway | This gateway is used to manage traffic from web. This provides extra security features such as firewall to stop web attacks. |
Content Delivery Network:-
| Content Delivery Network | This the server network that cache the content to improve the user experience while using Azure Applications. Operates around the entire world within the content delivery network. |
Describe products available for Storage such as Blob Storage, Disk Storage, File Storage, and Archive Storage
Blob Storage:-
| Blob Storage | The large amount of data can be stored with this service with high scalability. EX:= Videos, audio files Offered in different tiers |
| Disk Storage | Provides the disk storage facility for virtual machines, other devices etc. |
| File Storage | The management of file sharing is done server message protocol(SMB) in the cloud. |
| Archive storage | This for the data that is stored for minimum 180 days and is very rarely accessed. |
Describe products available for Databases such as Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database Migration service
| Cosmos DB | This is a schema-less data-base service which is distributed globally. |
| Azure SQL Database | This is relational data-base offered as services and works on variety of modern applications. |
| Azure Database for MySql | Relational database service offered in Microsoft cloud. It is based on MySql community edition |
| Azure Database for PostgreSQL | Database service built for developers in Microsoft cloud. Operates on Postgresql database engine |
| Azure Database Migration service | This is the service developed to facilitate migrations to Azure platforms from multiple database sources with less downtime. |
Describe the Azure Marketplace and its usage scenarios:-
Describe some of the solutions available on Azure:-
Describe Internet of Things (IoT) and products that are available for IoT on Azure such as IoT Hub and IoT Central:-
IOT MarketPlace:-
| IoT Hub | This is a service hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud This acts a message hub and provides secure communications between the cloud and its managed devices(vice versa).  |
| IoT Central | This an application service offered by Azure to the users as a simplified solution to all IoT needs. The interface offered facilitates users to create, connect, manage and monitor their IoT applications .  |
Describe Big Data and Analytics and products that are available for Big Data and Analytics such as HDInsight, and Azure Databricks:-
| HDInsight | 1.This analytics service quickly process the huge amounts of data cost-effectively. 2.The cloud is distributed with various Hadoop components. 3.The clusters can be formed and use them with variety of frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark etc.  |
| Azure Databricks | 1.This analytics platform is based on Apache-Spark 2.This service provides a collaborative platform for various engineers and analyts that work with data. 3.This services creates a pipeline for data where the data can be ingested, stored, trained and finally modelled to use for business intelligence and other areas.  |
Describe Artificial Intelligence (AI) and products that are available for AI such as Azure Machine Learning Service and Studio:-
| Azure Machine Learning Service | 1.This service lets user to use the Azure cloud environment to create, train, check, deploy, manage and monitor models of Machine Learning. 2.This allow to develop and train the model locaaly and then shift to cloud environment. 3. This also provides ML designer & Automated ML to develop models without code. |
| Azure Machine Learning Studio | 1.This studio can be used to develop predictive analysis models without coding. 2.Provides a drag and drop workspace to use Pre-built analysis models on datasets. |
Describe Serverless computing and Azure products that are available for serverless computing such as Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Grid:-
| Azure Functions | Provides Event Triggered server-less computing for applications. |
| Logic Apps | This service allows the users to build workflows and manage their deployments using predefined schema. |
| Event Grid | This service allows the users to build applications easily with event-based architectures. The event grid acts as a routing device where the subscribed resources is sent to the event handlers group. |
Describe DevOps solutions available on Azure such as Azure DevOps and Azure DevTest Labs
| Azure DevOps | This service is developed for developers and work collaboratively to design, develop, test and deploy the applications. |
| Azure DevTest Labs | This service provides environment to test the applications. Developers can deploy the applications in the virtual machines with pre-loaded resources to test their applications. |
Describe Azure management tools:-
Describe Azure tools such as Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI and Cloud Shell:-
Azure Potral:-
The Azure portal is a management tool that can be accessed via web and the web interface is loaded with Azure services and tools.
Azure Powershell:-
This the module that can be installed in various operating systems such as Windows, MacOS etc.
This module lets the user to control and manage the Azure resources by connecting the module to the Azure cloud.
Azure CLI:-
Cross-Platform(Different OS) command line interface tool that allows users to create and use resources through administrative commands.
Azure Cloud Shell:-
This the browser based CLI tool and runs within the Azure.
Describe Azure Advisor:-
The advisor gives recommendations based on the sunscriptions model.
It provides recommendations in:-
- Cost
- Security
- Reliability
- Operational Excellence
- Performance
Click Here to move on to the next section