Azure services

Azure concepts

• Geography

• Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa

• Zones

• Zone 1: US, EU, Canada, UK, France

• Zone 2: Asia Pacific, Japan, Australia, India, Korea
• Zone 3: Brazil South

• Zone 4: Germany Central, Germany Northeast

• Regions

• Area of the planet that contains at least one datacenter

• Each regions belongs to a only one geography
• Brings the app cloud of the user (low latency)
• Data compliance
• Not all regions are available to everyone (E.g., government regions)
• Currently 60+ regions

• Regions Pairs

• Regions pairs are almost always in the same geography

• Data connection between region pairs is the highest available
• Software rollout to one pair and the other is left untouched (in case of failure)
• For multiple deployments makes sense to deploy one to each pair

• Example pairs: Canada Central - Canada East, North Europe - West Europe East US - West US, Brazil South - South Central US

• Availability Zones

• A availability zone is a datacenter in a region. A region contain one or multiple availability zones

• It's a datacenter equipped with independent energy, cooling, networking, etc

• A certain availability zone cant be picked

• Resource groups

• A way of organizing groups

• Group resource in a folder structure

• Resources

• A resource is a instance of a service that is yours to use

• Subscription

• Subscription is a billing unit

• Users have access to one or more subscriptions
• Organize resources into distinct accounts

• Management group

• A way to organize the subscriptions

• Resource manager (ARM)

• A common API to interact with the Azure services

• No matter what way to interact with azure you are using (sdk, cli, portal), it will be "converted" to ARM
• ARM templates

Core Azure Products

Compute

• Virtual machines: IaaS. Optionally Multiple VMs running behind a load balancer (scale set)
• App services: PaaS. Give your code and configuration and Azure will run it
• Serverless: Azure functions or Logic Apps. Small bits of code that run natively in the cloud. Insert the code in the portal editor
• Containers: Azure Container Instance (ACI). Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Windows Virtual Desktop: Version of windows that runs in the cloud

Networking

• Connectivity
• Virtual Network: emulate a physical network
• Virtual Private Network (VPN): connect two networks as if they were on the same network
• ExpressRoute: high-speed private connection to Azure
• Protection
• DDoS Protection: Distributed Denial of Service
• Azure Firewall
• Network Security Groups (NSG): Access control list (ACL). Static rules
• Private Link
• Delivery`
• Load Balacer: Distribute traffic evenly between multiple backend servers
• Application Gateway: higher-level load balancer with firewall options
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): stores common static files on the edge
• Azure Front Door Service: LB, CDN and Firewall all-in-one
• Monitoring`
• Network watcher: track traffic and see where it's stuck
• ExpressRoute Monitor
• Azure Monitor

Storage

• Unmanaged storage

• General purpose v2 (gpv2): blobs, tables, queues, files

• Azure data lake storage gen2: cheapest type of storage. Pay per GB (1.8 cent per GB)

• Options: Access tiers, performance tiers, location, redundancy/replication, failover options

• Managed storage

• Virtual Machine Disks

• Backup, replication and recovery storage

• Recovery Services Vault

• Azure Site Recovery

Database

• Document Oriented DBs

• CosmosDB

• Relational DBs

• AzureSQL

• Azure MySQL
• Azure PostgreSQL

• SQL Managed Instance: Fully managed by Azure

• Database Migration Service

• Tools and services for your migration of data to the cloud

• Synapse Analytics (SQL DW)

• Big data

• Does pre-processing on the data to make queries faster
• Analytical database, not transactional