Microsoft Azure Fundamentals; Essential knowledge to prepare for the AZ900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam. Section 1
The AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals is the entry-level cloud certification for Microsoft Azure. You should get to know the fundamentals of cloud computing, Azure Core services, and the Azure Portal. In This article, I am going to explain some useful concepts that can help you to prepare for the exam.
The core Azure concepts (part 1) and core Azure services (part 2) are described. Follow the following links to complete the learning path for Azure Fundamentals part 1 and Azure Fundamentals part 2.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/az-900-describe-cloud-concepts/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/az-900-describe-core-azure-services/
The most commonly used services and features in Azure.
- Compute
- Networking
- Storage
- Mobile
- Databases
- Web
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Big data
- AI
- DevOps
Cloud Architecture Terminologies
Availability
Your ability for your service to remain available
Scalability
Increase/decrease your capacity based on the increasing/decreasing demand for traffic, memory, and computing power.
Elasticity
Automatically increase/decrease your capacity based on the current demand of traffic, memory, and computing power.
Disaster Recovery
To recover from a failure and to prevent the loss of data. The solution that recovers from a disaster is known as Disaster Recovery (RD).
The total cost of ownership (TCO)
The image illustrates the Total Cost of Ownership for CAPEX: On-Premise and OPEX: Azure, Cloud Provider
Cloud Services
- IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service — A cloud provider keeps the hardware up to date, but the cloud tenant is responsible for maintaining the operating system and configuring the network.
- PaaS — Platform as a service — the cloud tenant deploys their applications into the managed hosting environment.
- SaaS — Software as a Service — The cloud tenant only provides their data to the application managed by the cloud provider.
Azure Data Storage
- Azure Cosmos DB
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure SQL Managed Instance
- Azure Database for MySQL
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Azure HDInsight
- Azure Databricks
- Azure Data Lake Analytics
The benefits and usage of
- Azure Cosmos DB — A globally distributed, multi-model database service. It supports schema-less data, which lets you build highly responsive. Designed for scale with 99.999% availability. Azure Cosmos DB supports SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables, and Gremlin APIs.
- Azure SQL Database — Can be used to build data-driven applications and websites. You can migrate your data using Azure Database Migration Service with minimal downtime using Microsoft Data Migration Assistance. It supports both relational data and non-relational structures such as JSON and XML.
- Azure Database for MySQL — you can use point-in-time restore to recover a server to an earlier state, as far back as 35 days.
- Azure SQL Managed Instance — When databases use Cyrillic characters for collation. Azure SQL Database only uses the default
SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_ASserver collation.
Azure database documentation
Compute services
Azure compute is an on-demand computing service for running cloud-based applications. It provides computing resources such as multi-core processors, memory, networking, and operating systems. It also provides serverless computing to run apps without requiring infrastructure setup or configuration. The resources are available on-demand and can typically be made available in minutes or even seconds.
Depending on your requirements, each service provides different options. Some of the most outstanding services are:
- Azure Virtual Machines
- Azure Container Instances
- Azure App Service
- Azure Functions (or serverless computing)
Virtual Machine (VM) is a software emulation of physical computers. VMs include memory, storage, a virtual processor, and networking resources. They host an operating system, and you are able to install and run software just such as a physical computer.
Containers are a virtualization environment for running applications. containers do not include an operating system for the app running inside the container. You are able to run multiple instances of a containerized application on a single host machine.
Kubernetes Services Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications. For instance, you might split a website into a container hosting your front end, another hosting your back end, and a third for storage.
Azure App Service is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering. It is possible to quickly build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web, mobile, and API apps running on any platform. There are performance, scalability, security, and compliance requirements while using a fully managed platform to perform infrastructure maintenance. With App Service, the most common app service styles can be hosted such as:
- Web apps
- API apps
- WebJobs
- Mobile apps
Functions are commonly used when you need to perform work in response to an event (mostly via a REST request), timer, or message from another Azure service.
Azure Batch provides large-scale high-performance computing and parallel batch jobs with the ability to scale to tens, hundreds, or thousands of VMs.
Serverless computing includes 3 concepts the abstraction of servers, an event-driven scale, and micro-billing. Azure has two implementations of Serverless Compute
- Azure Functions — which can execute code in almost any programming language.
- Azure Logic App — can execute logic triggered by Azure services without writing any code. You create Logic App workflows using a visual designer on the Azure portal or in Visual Studio. The workflows are persisted as a JSON file.
Azure Storage services
Azure Storage is a service that makes it possible to store files, messages, tables, and other types of information. Clients such as websites, mobile apps, desktop applications, and many other types of custom solutions can read data from and write data to Azure Storage.
The following types of data are supported by Azure Storage
- Structured Data
- Semi-Structured data
- Unstructured data
Azure Blob Storage is Object Serverless Storage. Blob storage can manage very large files and large amounts of unstructured files as well as thousands of simultaneous uploads, massive amounts of video, audio, image data, growing log files, backup, disaster recovery.
Azure Files Storage You can access and manage files that are shared in the cloud. They are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.
Azure Disk Storage Chooses SSD or HDD, encryption by default. It provides disks for virtual machines, applications, and other services.
Azure Blob Access Tiers
• Hot access tier: Optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently (images for your website).
• Cool access tier: Optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days (invoices for your customers).
• Archive access tier: Appropriate for data that is rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days, with flexible latency requirements (for instance, long-term backups).
Azure Networking Services
- Azure Virtual Network provides Azure resources, such as VMs, web apps, and databases, to communicate with each other, with users on the internet, and with your on-premises client computers. An Azure network is a set of resources that links other Azure resources. The following key networking capabilities are provided by Azure virtual networks. The following key networking capabilities are provided by Azure virtual networks.
- Communicate between Azure resources
- Communicate with on-premises resources
- Isolation and segmentation
- Internet communications
- Route network traffic
- Filter network traffic
- Connect virtual networks - Azure VPN Gateway instances are deployed in Azure Virtual Network instances. The following connectivity is enabled. — A site-to-site VPN connection between an Azure Virtual Network and your local network. — A point-to-site connection between individual devices to virtual networks. — A network-to-network connection between virtual networks to other virtual networks.
- Azure Express Route has greater bandwidth and higher levels of security. A connection between your on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a private connection.
