Azure Services and Architecture

119 flashcards by MentisLibrary

The Azure service catalog and how the pieces fit: the resource hierarchy, compute and storage options, networking, identity and governance, databases, messaging and monitoring, with the AWS equivalent named on each card.

Azure resource hierarchy

Management groups contain subscriptions, subscriptions contain resource groups, and resource groups contain resources. Policy and role assignments flow down this tree.

Azure subscription

A billing and access boundary: every resource belongs to exactly one subscription, which is tied to a billing account and has its own quotas and role assignments.

Resource group

A container that holds related resources sharing a lifecycle; you can deploy, update, tag, lock and delete them as a unit.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

The deployment and management layer behind the portal, CLI, PowerShell and SDKs; every request passes through ARM, which authenticates, authorizes and forwards it to the resource provider.

ARM templates and Bicep

ARM templates are JSON files describing resources declaratively; Bicep is a cleaner domain-specific language that compiles to ARM JSON and is the recommended way to write them.

Azure CLI vs Azure PowerShell

Two official command-line tools: the cross-platform az CLI with az <group> <verb> syntax, and the Az PowerShell module with Verb-AzNoun cmdlets; both run in Cloud Shell in the portal.

Azure Policy

A governance service that evaluates resources against rules (policy definitions grouped into initiatives) and can audit, deny, modify or deploy missing configuration at any scope.

Resource locks

CanNotDelete prevents deletion and ReadOnly prevents any change; locks apply at subscription, resource group or resource scope and are inherited downward.

Azure tags

Key-value metadata on resources, resource groups and subscriptions used for cost reporting, automation and ownership.

Azure regions and region pairs

A region is a set of data centers within a latency-defined perimeter; most regions are paired with another in the same geography for platform replication and staggered updates.

Availability Zones vs Availability Sets

Availability Zones are physically separate data centers within a region (at least three where supported); an Availability Set spreads VMs across fault domains (racks) and update domains inside one data center.

Azure Advisor

A free recommendation engine that scans your resources and suggests improvements in reliability, security, performance, cost and operational excellence.

Microsoft Cost Management

Built-in tools to analyze spend, create budgets with alerts, view forecasts and export cost data, scoped to any level of the hierarchy.

Azure Hybrid Benefit

A licensing benefit that lets you apply existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance to Azure VMs and databases, paying only the base compute rate.

Azure reservations and savings plans

Commit to one or three years of VM (or other resource) usage for a large discount; a savings plan commits to an hourly spend across compute services instead of a specific VM size.

Azure Spot Virtual Machines

Unused Azure capacity at a deep discount that Azure can evict with 30 seconds' notice when it needs the capacity or when the price exceeds your maximum.

Service level agreements (SLAs)

Microsoft's contractual uptime commitment per service; the composite SLA of an application is the product of the SLAs of its dependent services.

Azure Virtual Machines

On-demand Windows or Linux servers with a chosen size, image, disks and network interface, managed by you above the hypervisor.

How is an Azure VM size name read?

Family letter(s), number of vCPUs, feature letters, then version: in Standard_D4s_v5, D is general purpose, 4 vCPUs, s supports premium storage, v5 the generation.

Virtual Machine Scale Sets

A group of identical VMs created from one model that scales out and in on metrics or schedules and spreads instances across zones or fault domains.

Managed disks

Azure-managed block storage for VMs: Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk, sized and billed per disk, with snapshots and encryption built in.

Temporary disk on a VM

A local SSD on the host, mounted as D: on Windows or /dev/sdb on Linux, whose contents are lost on deallocation, resize or host failure.

Azure App Service

A managed platform for hosting web apps, REST APIs and mobile backends in .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP or containers, with built-in scaling, TLS, custom domains and deployment slots.

App Service Plan

The compute resources (size, tier, instance count, region, OS) that one or more App Service apps run on; the plan, not the app, is what you scale and pay for.

Deployment slots

Separate live instances of an App Service app (such as staging) with their own hostnames that you can deploy to, warm up and then swap with production, with instant rollback by swapping back.

Azure Batch

A managed job scheduler that provisions pools of VMs, distributes tasks across them and scales the pool, for large-scale parallel and HPC workloads.

Azure Virtual Desktop

A managed desktop and app virtualization service that delivers multi-session Windows desktops from Azure to any device.

Azure Storage account

The top-level namespace for Azure Storage, holding Blob containers, Files shares, Queues and Tables under one globally unique name, with a redundancy option and performance tier.

Blob Storage

Object storage for unstructured data: block blobs (files, uploaded in blocks), append blobs (logs) and page blobs (random access, VHDs), stored in containers.

Blob access tiers

Hot (frequent access), Cool (infrequent, 30-day minimum), Cold (rarely accessed, 90-day minimum) and Archive (offline, 180-day minimum, hours to rehydrate).