Module 1

Learning objectives
 Describe the basic concepts of cloud computing
 Determine whether Azure is the right solution for your business needs
 Differentiate between the different methods of creating an Azure subscription

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet, which is otherwise
known as the cloud. You can choose what you need to get the job done but you don’t have to
worry about any of the upkeep.

Compute power is how much processing your computer can do.

Storage is the volume of data you can store on your computer.

These are the 2 main things that cloud computing services offer. Both can be increased and
decreased as needed in the cloud so that you only pay for what you need.

Why should I move to the cloud?

Two main trends

1. Teams deliver new features to their users at records speeds
2. Users expect an increasingly rich and immersive experience with their devices and with
software

Because the tech world has changed and progress is expected quickly, clous computing makes
sense since it offers a neary limitless pool of raw compute, storage, and networking
components

It also offers analytics services that deliver telemetry data from your hardware and software

What is Azure?

Azure is a continually expanding set of cloud services that help your organization meet your
current and future business challenges. It supports infrastructure, platform, and software as a
service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). Services include virtual machines running in the cloud, website and
database hosting, virtual intelligence, and machine learning.
Over 100 services

How does Azure work?

Azure uses a tech known as virtualization which separates a computer’s hardware from its
software (operating system). It does this using an abstraction layer using something called a
Hypervisor.

A Hypervisor emulates all the functions of a real computer and its CPU in a virtual machine,
optimizing the capacity of the obstructed hardware. It can run multiple virtual machines at the
same time and any virtual machine can run any compatible OS.

Azure takes this virtualization tech and repeats it in Microsoft’s multiple data centers around
the world. Each data center has many racks filled with servers. Each server includes a
Hypervisor to run multiple virtual machines. A network switch provides connectivity to all
servers. One server in each rack runs a special piece of software called a Fabric Controller. Each
fabric controller is connected to another piece of software known as the Orchestrator. The
Orchestrator is responsible for managing everything that happens in Azure including user
requests. Users make request using the Orchestrator’s Web API. The Web API can be called by
many tools including the GUI (portal.azure.com).

User makes request to create a virtual machine -> orchestrator packages data and picks the
best server rack and sends info to fabric controller -> fabric controller creates virtual machine ->
user can connect to new virtual machine

What is the Azure portal?

 The GUI for Azure

 Better than command line
 Allows customization
 Start and stop services easily
 Monitor health of services
What is the Azure Marketplace?

Place to buy custom solutions and services optimized for Azure and created by third party
vendors.

More than 8000 listings.

Tour of Azure Services

1. Compute
a. Let’s you scale your computing capability on demand and only pay for what you
use
b. Allows scaling
2. Networking
a. Let you connect your cloud and on-prem infrastructure
b. VPNs and Load Balancers are examples
3. Storage
a. Disk, file, blob, or archival storage
b. Allows scaling
4. Mobile
a. Build and deploy cross-platform solutions
b. Allows sending notifications
c. Xamarin
5. Databases
a. Variety of proprietary and open-source engines
b. SQL, CosmosDB, MySQL
6. Web
a. Build, deploy, manage, and scale web applications
7. Internet of Things
a. Connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets
b. Analyze data as it arrives from sensors
8. Big Data
a. Open-source cluster services for large volumes of data
b. Analytics at a massive scale
c. Complex queries
9. Artificial Intelligence
a. Use existing data to forecast future behaviors
b. Use machine learning to build, train, and deploy models to the cloud
10. DevOps
a. Automate software delivery
There is a list of all tools available under each section. Worth a read. Unit 4/8

Azure Accounts

You need one main Azure account. Once you have that you can create multiple subscriptions
with it. All Azure resources need to be assigned a subscription.

Free account includes:

 Free access to popular Azure products for 12 months
 Credit to spend for the first 30 days
 Access to more than 25 products that are always free
They also have student accounts and a learning sandbox.

Module 2
Learning objectives
 Identify the benefits and considerations of using cloud services
 Describe the differences between categories of cloud services
 Describe the differences between types of cloud computing

Different types of cloud modules

1. Public cloud
a. Services offered over the public internet and available to anyone who wants to
purchase them
b. No capital expenditures to scale up
c. Apps can be quickly provisioned and deprovisioned
d. Pay for what you use
2. Private cloud
a. Consists of computing resources used exclusively by users from one business or
organization. This can be physically located at your organization’s on-prem
datacenter, or it can be hosted by a third-party service provider
b. Hardware must be purchased for start-up and maintenance
c. Complete control over resources and security
d. Organizations are responsible for hardware maintenance and updates
3. Hybrid cloud
a. Combines a public cloud and private cloud by allowing data and applications to
be shared between them
b. Most flexibility
 c. Organizations determine where to run their applications
d. Complete control over security, compliance, and legal requirements

Cloud computing advantages - GASHED

 High availability
o Depends on the service level agreement you choose
 Scalability
o Vertically or horizontally, meaning adding RAM or CPUs and increasing compute
capacity by adding VMs for example
 Elasticity
o Apps can auto scale
 Agility
o Deploy quickly
 Geo-distribution
o Deploy stuff to regional datacenters around the globe
o Ensures performance and allows users to meet local data governance laws
 Disaster recovery
o Cloud-based backup services, data replication, geo-distribution all help

Capital expenses vs operating expenses

CapEx – up-front spending of money on physical infrastructure and then deducting that
expense over time

OpEx – spending money on services or products now and being billed for them now; pay as you
go

When thinking about moving to the cloud, there are accounting questions to ask as well, mainly
how the business wants to handle expenses short and long term

Cloud computing is a consumption-based model

Benefits:
 No upfront cost
 No need to purchase and manage costly infrastructure
 Pay for resources when they are needed
 Stop paying for resources when they are no longer needed

Cloud service models

  Infrastructure as a service
o Closest to managing physical servers
o User manages things like the OS and network settings
o Most flexible, complete control
 Platform as a service
o Cloud provider manages the nitty-gritty
o User manages their applications on the server
o Kind of the same as IaaS, but less for the user to manage
o Disadvantages around how an application runs, not as flexible
o Focus on application development
 Software as a service
o Cloud provider manages all aspects of the application environment
o User manages their data
o Less to worry about, pretty much just focus on your product
o Disadvantage is this has the least flexibility, and you don’t have direct control of
features
o Pay as you go pricing model

Serverless computing

 Takes away the need for infrastructure all together

 Highly scalable and event-driven
 Servers are still running the code
 It’s just that all server related work is removed from the user having to do it
 Allows developers to increase focus on business logic
Module 3
Learning objectives
 Azure subscriptions and management groups
 Azure resources, resource groups, and Azure Resource Manager
 Azure regions, region pairs, and availability zones

Organizing structure for resource in Azure – 4 levels

 Management groups
 Subscriptions
 Resource groups
 Resources
  Management groups
o Manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple subscriptions
o All subscriptions automatically inherit conditions
 Subscriptions
o Groups together user accounts and the resources that have been created
o Each subscription has limits/quotas on the amount of resources that you can
create and use
o Easy to manage costs
 Resource groups
o Logical container for resources to be deployed and managed
 Resources
o Instances of services like databases or virtual machines

Azure Regions

 Region – geographical area on the planet that contains at least one but potentially
multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency
network
 Region is a choice user makes when creating resources
 Some features are only available in some regions
 They offer better scalability and redundancy
 Special regions
o US government
 Super high security down to the people physically in charge
o China
 Partnership with 21Vianet which maintains datacenters in China
 Availability zone – physically separated datacenters within an Azure region
o Idea is to have multiple zones with fiber optic connection so they can back each
other up
o Not available in all regions
o Not free
 Region pair – each region is paired with another one in the same geography at least 300
miles away
o Helps in case there is a physical disaster that affects a large area of the earth
 o

Azure Resources

 Resource: A manageable item that's available through Azure. Virtual machines (VMs),
storage accounts, web apps, databases, and virtual networks are examples of resources.
 Resource group: A container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. The
resource group includes resources that you want to manage as a group. You decide
which resources belong in a resource group based on what makes the most sense for
your organization.

Delete resource group to delete many things at once

Use tags to better organize

Allows for use of policies for types of resources

Azure Resource Manager

Deployment and manager service for Azure, helps organize resource groups

Allows you to manage your resources through the GUI or through:

 PowerShell
 Azure CLI
 REST APIs
 Client SDKs

Allows for RBAC (role-based access control)

Azure Subscriptions

 A subscription provides you with authenticated and authorized access to Azure products
and services.
 Can help separate billing, access control, environments, org structures, or subscription
limits like how many of something you can create in one subscription
 Billing can be broken down very specifically, subscriptions can belong to an invoice
section which can belong to a billing profile which can belong to a billing account

Azure Management Groups

Azure management groups are above subscriptions and can help manage them

Management groups give you enterprise-grade management at a large scale no matter what
type of subscriptions you might have. Allows for hierarchy.

 10,000 management groups can be supported in a single directory.

 A management group tree can support up to six levels of depth. This limit doesn't
include the root level or the subscription level.
 Each management group and subscription can support only one parent.
 Each management group can have many children.
 All subscriptions and management groups are within a single hierarchy in each directory.