Azure Basic

This is my first blog of the Azure series which can help the audience interested in know azure, want to work, or enhance knowledge as an azure admin, developer and consultant, or architect. It can also help you to consume as mini bites if you are preparing for Azure fundamental, developer, admin certification.

What is Azure?

Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications.

Where to access Azure?

Azure portal is a way to access and start with Microsoft Azure.

What is mean by Services on Azure?

Azure provides a logical grouping of different tools, framework, applications called as service or cluster e.g. -

• Compute - to create a virtual machine - windows, Linux, or third party.
• Storage Service - to store data, files, blob, etc.

While creating the Azure services, what all factors you need to consider?

1. Closest to user

Before creating any resource to be deployed on azure make
sure that you choose the azure region near to your user base.
Azure region reference.

2. Cost & Pricing

Think about pricing of azure services, it varies based on
region, volume and other factors. use Azure pricing calculator
to determine the price before creating services at Azure Azure
Pricing

3. Service Availability

Service availability may differs based on region, it may be available in one region but not available in other. There are 3 different status of Azure services :
Internal - Service is available for internal Microsoft
users.
Preview - Service available in public beta and users can avail these services by using an Azure Subscription.
General Availability (GA) - Means service in production and anyone can now use it.

4. Compliance

Microsoft Azure provides you the flexibility to choose data centers that are compliant as per industry, region, and other factors like let's say for example you have a client from the healthcare industry from the US then you can choose HIPAA compliant Data Center or if the client from Europe can choose GDPR complaint Datacenters.

What are the various ways to Access Azure?

You can access azure :

• Azure Portal
• Azure CLI
• PowerShell
• SDK
• Restful APi

Azure Portal, Azure CLI, Powershell is used for Accessing, Provisioning and managing the Azure resources.

SDK and Restful Api are used for consuming azure resources.

Restful Apis are endpoint, by using it you can avail the certain Azure services. Let's say you have a storage service created on your Azure subscription and in order to consume this, you can use the storage service endpoint provided by azure while creating it.

Azure provides a browser-based command-line interface called CloudShell, by using this you can also provision, access, and manage the azure resource.

Azure CLI and Powershell can be installed locally and these tools are platform agnostic.

Azure CLI

Install the Azure CLI for Windows or Mac.

Once you installed the Azure CLI az --version command to confirm the version of CLI.

The easiest way to start with the Azure CLI is browser-based CLI Azure Cloud Shell.

To Learn details about Azure CLI refer to the Link.

To check the Azure CLI installed locally type az.

Azure PowerShell

Power shell is a powerful feature for automation, written in .NET standard.

Azure Powershell works on PowerShell 5.1 on windows and 6.X and higher on all platforms.

If you are running windows 10 version 1607 or higher, you already have PowerShell 5.1 installed.

Run the Windows Powershell and install Azure Module

install-module -name az

Enter Yes for Nuget provider.

What is Azure Resource Manager?

Azure Resource manager is the orchestration layer for Azure, ARM is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources.

Azure tools like azure portal, CLI, PowerShell, restful Api, SDK send the requests to the Azure resource manager and it authenticates/authorizes and then sends these requests to Azure services like compute, storage, etc..

Terminology

Resource - A manageable item that is available through azure e.g. - virtual machines, storage accounts, web apps.

Resource Group - Resource group is container that holds related resources for an azure solution. a resource belongs to which resource group depends on organization strategy or based on what makes more sense like you can create resource group for dev, test, and prod or you can create resource group for different projects.

Resource Provider - Resource provider is a service that provides azure resources like Microsoft. Compute is a service that provides Virtual Machine.

Resource Manager Template - RM template is a JSON file, it is a declarative syntax and helps you to create and deploy azure resources to the Resource group, subscription, Management group, or tenant consistently and repeatedly.

References:
docs.microsoft.com
A Cloud Expert By Dabeer Sheikh