How to Azure — Azure Services-4

Welcome back! In this article we will look at the main types of services offered by Azure.

Just a quick discussion on what one could call the building blocks of Azure — resources and resource groups.

• Resources: Any entity that you create in Azure.
  - different types of resources are Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Web Apps etc.
• Resource Groups: Logical grouping of these resources.
  - a resource can only be part of one resource group.
  - a resource can be deployed in a region different than the region of the resource group itself.
  - you can move a resource from one resource group to another.
  - a resource can connect to resources in another resource group.
  - resource groups cannot be nested.
  - if you delete the RG, then the resources within the resource group are also deleted.
  - there are different principles of organizing the resources.
  1. all the VNets can be put in one RG, all the VMs can be put in another RG and all the application gateway instances can be put in another RG.
  2. all the production resources are in one RG, all the test resources are in another RG and so on.
  3. all the resources can be organized by department like management, finance, etc.
  - tagging can be done to better organize the resources within the RG. (we will see what is tagging and how it is useful).
  - Role based access control can be applied on the RGs (more on this later).

You may be wondering, "Why does a resource group need a location? And, if the resources can have different locations than the resource group, why does the resource group location matter at all?"
The resource group stores metadata about the resources. When you specify a location for the resource group, you're specifying where that metadata is stored. For compliance reasons, you may need to ensure that your data is stored in a particular region.
If a resource group's region is temporarily unavailable, you can't update resources in the resource group because the metadata is unavailable. The resources in other regions will still function as expected, but you can't update them. This condition doesn't apply to global resources like Azure Content Delivery Network, Azure DNS, Azure Traffic Manager, and Azure Front Door.

This is taken from this MS document.

• Azure Resource Manager:
  - You can create resources and use the azure services using various means like Azure Powershell, Azure CLI, Azure Portal and Rest Clients.
  - However, these all are redirecting the request to what is the Resource Manager.
  - We have the concept of Azure Resource Manager Template — which is a JSON file that can be used to deploy the resources. It uses declarative syntax.

Azure Services

Azure services (courtesy of the author)

Azure Compute Services:

• Azure Virtual Machines:
  - IaaS offering.
  - software emulation of physical computers.
  - allows to host an OS (as you are asked the OS during the creation).
  - one can RDP into the VM.
  - can control the VM like a physical computer.
• Azure App Services:
  - PaaS offering.
  - for web, mobile, API apps — can build, deploy and scale these apps.
  - all the elements of the app to be deployed run on VMs that are provisioned by the app service plan.
• Azure Container Instances:
  - PaaS offering.
  - run on top of an OS.
  - allows to deploy the software and it related dependencies without having to worry about the underlying infra.
  - can run multiple instances of the application on a single host machine.
• Azure Kubernetes Service:
  - provides an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience.
  - allows to deploy and manage containerized applications.
• Azure function:
  - PaaS serverless offering.
  - abstracts the underlying hosting environment.
  - mainly used in response to events like timer trigger or blob trigger.
  - code-first development.
  - Triggers define how a function is invoked. Bindings provide a declarative way to connect to services from within the code.
  - charged for the CPU time for which the function runs.
• Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Storage Services

A storage account is required for the same which can be created from the portal which is accessible over HTTP, HTTPS.
Requires to have a unique name for the storage account all over the world.

Create a storage account on the portal (screenshot taken by author)

There are different types of redundancy in the storage account (not all are supported in all regions).

• Azure Blob Storage:
  - unstructured data like images, audio, videos.
  - can be used for backup and restore.
  - the data is stored in containers — which is like a folder holding all the blobs.
  - can have unlimited number of containers per storage account, can have unlimited blobs in each container.
• Azure Files Storage:
  - fully managed shares which can be mounted on on-premises systems or on cloud services which is accessible via SMB protocol.
  - one can access the data from the URL for the files using Shared Access Signatures (more on this later).
• Azure Disk Storage:
  - provides disks for Virtual Machines.
  - different types of disk like SSD, HDD and Premium SSD Disks.
• Azure Blob Access Tiers:
  - there are three main tiers — hot, cool and archive (more on this later).

Azure Database and Analytics Service

• Azure Cosmos DB:
  - Scalable and globally distributed.
  - Highly responsive and high availability (‘Always On’).
  - stores data in the form of document (json files).
  - data is abstracted and projected as an API. Choices include SQL, Cassandra, Gremlin, MongoDB, Tables.
• Azure SQL Database
  - PaaS Offering.
  - SQL Database is a high-performance, reliable, fully managed, and secure database.
  - handles most of the functions including upgrading, patching, backups and monitoring.
  - allows for scaling rapidly with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale.
  - Azure SQL Database Serverless provides compute resources that automatically scale.
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
  - PaaS offering similar to Azure SQL Database.
  - to see the differences do follow the link.
• Azure Database for MySQL
  - relational database based on the MySQL community database engine.
  - High availability, fault tolerance, built-in security.
  - point in time to restore up to 35 days.
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL
  - relational database service based on the community version of the open-source PostgreSQL database engine.
  - two deployment options available — single server and hyperscale.
• Azure Synapse Analytics
  - brings together big data analytics, data integration and enterprise data warehousing into one service.
  - earlier called Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
• Azure HDInsight
  - allows to deal with big data in a fast and cost effective manner.
  - analytics service that allows you to run Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache Kafka, Apache HBase and more in the cloud.
• Azure Databricks
  - brings together various data sources like Azure Data Factory, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Cosmos DB etc. and the analytics services like Power BI, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Synapse Analytics.
• Azure Data Lake Analytics
  - analytics services that allows to handle big data.
  - run on demand
  - can handle jobs of any scale.
  - dynamically scales by providing resources for larger volume of data.
  - you only pay for the processing power used.

Azure Networking Services

• Azure Virtual Networks
  - Allows azure resources like VM, web apps to communicate with each other, with users on the internet and with on premises resources.
  - It provides features like:
  1. Isolation and segmentation
  2. Route, filter network traffic
  3. Communicate with Azure or on premises resources.
  4. Connect Virtual Networks
• Azure VPN Gateway
  - A VPN gateway is like a tunnel connecting two endpoints over an untrusted network like internet, sending encrypted data.
  - Azure VPN gateway — deployed in subnet in the virtual network.
  - One VPN gateway in each virtual network.
  - Site-to-Site — connect on premises network to virtual network.
  - Point-to-Site — connect individual network to virtual network.
  - Network-to-Network — connect virtual network to other virtual networks.
  - There are two types of VPNs — route based, and policy based (main difference in how the traffic is encrypted).
• Azure ExpressRoute
  - private connection between on premises network and Microsoft cloud.
  - allows to connect to several Microsoft services like Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365 etc.
  - ExpressRoute connections do not go over the internet.
  - Faster, more reliable, secure.
  - Layer 3 connectivity (network layer).
  - These connections can be from a point-to-point or any-to-any network. They can also be virtual cross-connections through an exchange.

Azure Marketplace (gif by author)

Thanks for reading!

This is a very basic article on the services provided so that the readers know what these services do. In depth reading is required to know about each of these services. There are many other services as well that have not been highlighted.

Also, as always any feedback is welcome. Please feel free to comment on anything that can be added or changed.

Next, we will look at some other services like CLI and PowerShell provided in Azure.