Introduction
What is Microsoft Azure?
Azure is a continually expanding set of cloud services that help you meet current and future business challenges. Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.
Azure provides artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) services that can naturally communicate with your users through vision, hearing, and speech. It also provides storage solutions that dynamically grow to accommodate massive amounts of data. Azure services enable solutions that aren't feasible without the power of the cloud.
Azure provides artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) services that can naturally communicate with your users through vision, hearing, and speech. It also provides storage solutions that dynamically grow to accommodate massive amounts of data. Azure services enable solutions that aren't feasible without the power of the cloud.
Physical infrastructure
The physical infrastructure for Azure starts with datacenters. Conceptually, the datacenters are the same as large corporate datacenters. They’re facilities with resources arranged in racks, with dedicated power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.
As a global cloud provider, Azure has datacenters around the world. However, these individual datacenters aren’t directly accessible. Datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions or Azure Availability Zones that are designed to help you achieve resiliency and reliability for your business-critical workloads.
The Global infrastructure site gives you a chance to interactively explore the underlying Azure infrastructure.
Regions
A region is a geographical area on the planet that contains 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'll often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed.
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. An availability zone 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.
Azure management infrastructure
The management infrastructure includes Azure resources and resource groups, subscriptions, and accounts. Understanding the hierarchical organization will help you plan your projects and products within Azure.
Resource groups are simply groupings of resources. When you create a resource, you’re required to place it into a resource group. While a resource group can contain many resources, a single resource can only be in one resource group at a time. Some resources may be moved between resource groups, but when you move a resource to a new group, it will no longer be associated with the former group. Additionally, resource groups can't be nested, meaning you can’t put resource group B inside of resource group A.
Resource groups provide a convenient way to group resources together. When you apply an action to a resource group, that action will apply to all the resources within the resource group. If you delete a resource group, all the resources will be deleted. If you grant or deny access to a resource group, you’ve granted or denied access to all the resources within the resource group.
When you’re provisioning resources, it’s good to think about the resource group structure that best suits your needs.
For example, if you’re setting up a temporary dev environment, grouping all the resources together means you can deprovision all of the associated resources at once by deleting the resource group. If you’re provisioning compute resources that will need three different access schemas, it may be best to group resources based on the access schema, and then assign access at the resource group level.
Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
The deployment and management service for Azure.
Features
● Role-based access control (RBAC)
● Tagging for resource organization
● Audit logs for tracking changes
Benefits
● Consistent management layer
● Facilitates automation and orchestration
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