Microsoft Azure Resources
Part two of the Azure Fundamentals series
Check out Part One of the series:
Azure Architectural Resources
Azure cloud is not nebulous. Its data centres are located in multiple geographies. A Geography in Azure refers to the logical boundary of a country. It contains regions that are separated by hundreds of miles.
Regions are locations in which data centres reside, data flows in and out of these data centres over Microsoft’s cables.
All regions have a dedicated power supply and network infrastructure. They are climate controlled and have power generators that ensure the high availability of the hardware.
Microsoft’s Project Natick deployed a data centre 117 deep to the seafloor. To know more about it, read Underwater Data Centres.
Although Regions have all the facilities to help data centres run smoothly, there are factors that cannot be controlled. For example, a natural disaster.
If an earthquake or tornado happened in a region that would cause a great loss to Azure users.
To ensure high availability of resources and business continuity, Azure provides Regional pairs. A regional pair consists of two regions within a geography, If there is a power outage in one region, you can connect and use the duplicate resource in the second region. Azure users can configure BCDR ( business continuity disaster recovery ) documents to replicate resources across regional pairs.
The maintenance of regional pairs is serialized. If multiple regions are affected by a disaster, then one region is prioritized for recovery.
Another problem that can arise is the latency or failure of a component in the data centre. To decrease latency and ensure the availability of resources, businesses can choose Availability zones.
Availability zones are physical locations within a region. Each availability zone has one or more data centres. Zone-redundant services like SQL Database are automatically replicated across availability zones in a region by Azure whereas Zonal services like VMs must be explicitly replicated to Availability zones by the user.
Azure Resources
A resource is any manageable item in Azure. You can store resources in a Resource Group. Resource groups are logical containers used to manage resources. If you wish to delete all your resources, then you can delete the resource group and all resources in it will be automatically deleted.
A Management Group is like a resource group but for subscriptions.
A Subscription is a high-level resource that is created for you based on the plan you choose when creating an Azure account. A Free-trial subscription gives you access to certain resources for free for a limited period of time. A Pay-as-you-go subscription lets you pay as per your usage.
Azure Core Resources
Virtual Machine (VM) is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service, it is a virtual server. You can choose an operating system like Linux or Windows for your VM. Subsequently, you are responsible for installing a browser, a terminal and setting up your tech stack.
Virtual Machines can fail due to hardware issues, to ensure the high availability of your VMs, Availability sets are used. Availability Sets are replicas of your VM present in different server racks.
If a rack is not functioning due to hardware failure, the VMs will still be available in other racks because of Availability sets. These racks are called Fault Domains.
An Update Domain is similar to a fault domain. VMs in different update domains or racks are updated separately.
Azure App Services is a Platform-as-a-service that has pre-configured VMs and networks set up for you. As a user of this service, you have to choose the OS, the tech stack, storage capacity, and authentication features.
Installing OS, applications, and a database, etc in a VM takes a lot of time. This time period can be reduced by compressing the required tech stack into images and using Docker to build the environment from those images. Azure Container Instances (ACI) is a Platform-as-a-service that uses Docker and creates containers.
With ACI you can focus on designing and building your application without thinking about the VM or the infrastructure.
To deploy and manage multiple containerized applications, azure provides the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that offers serverless Kubernetes.
The article is part two of the Azure Fundamentals Series. Stay tuned for more on Virtual networks and Databases!
See also,
- Stories by Shreya Sinha
- Azure Documentation
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