Introduction to Azure fundamentals

Azure is a cloud computing platform with an ever-expanding set of services to help you build solutions to meet
your business goals. Azure services range from simple web services for hosting your business presence in the
cloud to running fully virtualized computers for you to run your custom software solutions. Azure provides a
wealth of cloud-based services like remote storage, database hosting, and centralized account management.
Azure also offers new capabilities like AI and Internet of Things (IoT).
Cloud Computing –
Cloud Computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet, which is otherwise known as the
cloud. These services include servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence.
Cloud computing offers faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet by using a pay-as-you-go pricing
model. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which helps you:
 Lower your operating costs.
 Run your infrastructure more efficiently.
 Scale as your business needs change.
To power your services and deliver innovative and novel user experiences more quickly, the cloud provides on-
demand access to:
 A nearly limitless pool of raw compute, storage, and networking components.
 Speech recognition and other cognitive services that help make your application stand out from the
crowd.
 Analytics services that deliver telemetry data from your software and devices.
Azure Offer –
 Be ready for the future: Continuous innovation from Microsoft supports your development today and
your product visions for tomorrow.
 Build on your terms: You have choices. With a commitment to open source, and support for all
languages and frameworks, you can build how you want and deploy where you want to.
 Operate hybrid seamlessly: On-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge--we'll meet you where you are.
Integrate and manage your environments with tools and services designed for a hybrid cloud solution.
 Trust your cloud: Get security from the ground up, backed by a team of experts, and proactive
compliance trusted by enterprises, governments, and startups.
Azure Portal –
The Azure portal is a web-based, unified console that provides an alternative to command-line tools. With the
Azure portal, you can manage your Azure subscription by using a graphical user interface. You can:
 Build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud deployments.
 Create custom dashboards for an organized view of resources.
 Configure accessibility options for an optimal experience.
The Azure portal is designed for resiliency and continuous availability. It maintains a presence in every Azure
datacenter. This configuration makes the Azure portal resilient to individual datacenter failures and avoids
network slowdowns by being close to users. The Azure portal updates continuously and requires no downtime
for maintenance activities.
Azure Marketplace –
Azure Marketplace helps connect users with Microsoft partners, independent software vendors, and startups
that are offering their solutions and services, which are optimized to run on Azure. Azure Marketplace
customers can find, try, purchase, and provision applications and services from hundreds of leading service
providers. All solutions and services are certified to run on Azure.
The solution catalog spans several industry categories such as open-source container platforms, virtual
machine images, databases, application build and deployment software, developer tools, threat detection,
and blockchain. Using Azure Marketplace, you can provision end-to-end solutions quickly and reliably, hosted
in your own Azure environment.
Azure Services –
 Compute: Compute services are often one of the primary reasons why companies move to the Azure
platform. Azure provides a range of options for hosting applications and services –
 Azure Virtual Machines – Windows or Linux virtual machines (VMs) hosted in Azure.
 Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets – Scaling for Windows or Linux VMs hosted in Azure.
 Azure Kubernetes Service – Cluster management for VMs that run containerized services.
 Azure Service Fabric – Distributed systems platform that runs in Azure or on-premises.
 Azure Batch – Managed service for parallel and high-performance computing applications.
 Azure Container Instances – Containerized apps run on Azure without provisioning servers or
VMs.
 Azure Functions – An event-driven, serverless compute service.
 Networking: Linking compute resources and providing access to applications is the key function of
Azure networking. Networking functionality in Azure includes a range of options to connect the outside
world to services and features in the global Azure datacenters.
 Azure Virtual Network – Connects VMs to incoming virtual private network (VPN) connections.
 Azure Load Balancer – Balances inbound and outbound connections to applications or service
endpoints.
 Azure Application Gateway – Optimizes app server farm delivery while increasing application
security.
 Azure VPN Gateway – Accesses Azure Virtual Networks through high-performance VPN
gateways.
 Azure DNS – Provides ultra-fast DNS responses and ultra-high domain availability.
 Azure Content Delivery Network – Delivers high-bandwidth content to customers globally.
 Azure DDoS Protection – Protects Azure-hosted applications from distributed denial of service
(DDOS) attacks.
 Azure Traffic Manager – Distributes network traffic across Azure regions worldwide.
 Azure ExpressRoute – Connects to Azure over high-bandwidth dedicated secure connections.
 Azure Network Watcher – Monitors and diagnoses network issues by using scenario-based
analysis.
 Azure Firewall – Implements high-security, high-availability firewall with unlimited scalability.
 Azure Virtual WAN – Creates a unified wide area network (WAN) that connects local and
remote sites.
 Storage: Azure provides four main types of storage services.
 Azure Blob storage – Storage service for very large objects, such as video files or bitmaps.
 Azure File storage – File shares that can be accessed and managed like a file server.
 Azure Queue storage – A data store for queuing and reliably delivering messages between
applications.
 Azure Table storage – Table storage is a service that stores non-relational structured data (also
known as structured NoSQL data) in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a schema
less design.
 These services all share several common characteristics:
- Durable and highly available with redundancy and replication.
- Secure through automatic encryption and role-based access control.
- Scalable with virtually unlimited storage.
- Managed, handling maintenance and any critical problems for you.
- Accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.
 Mobile: With Azure, developers can create mobile back-end services for iOS, Android, and Windows
apps quickly and easily. Features that used to take time and increase project risks, such as adding
corporate sign-in and then connecting to on-premises resources such as SAP, Oracle, SQL Server, and
SharePoint, are now simple to include. Other features of this service include:
 Offline data synchronization.
 Connectivity to on-premises data.
 Broadcasting push notifications.
 Autoscaling to match business needs.
 Databases: Azure provides multiple database services to store a wide variety of data types and
volumes. And with global connectivity, this data is available to users instantly.
 Azure Cosmos DB – Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL options.
 Azure SQL Database – Fully managed relational database with auto-scale, integral intelligence,
and robust security.
 Azure Database for MySQL – Fully managed and scalable MySQL relational database with high
availability and security.
 Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Fully managed and scalable PostgreSQL relational database
with high availability and security.
 SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines – Service that hosts enterprise SQL Server apps in the
cloud.
 Azure Synapse Analytics – Fully managed data warehouse with integral security at every level of
scale at no extra cost.
 Azure Database Migration Service – Service that migrates databases to the cloud with no
application code changes.
 Azure Cache for Redis – Fully managed service caches frequently used and static data to reduce
data and application latency.
 Azure Database for MariaDB – Fully managed and scalable MariaDB relational database with
high availability and security.
 Web: Azure includes first-class support to build and host web apps and HTTP-based web services. The
following Azure services are focused on web hosting.
 Azure App Service – Quickly create powerful cloud web-based apps.
 Azure Notification Hubs – Send push notifications to any platform from any back end.
 Azure API Management – Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at
scale.
 Azure Cognitive Search – Deploy this fully managed search as a service.
 Web Apps feature of Azure App Service – Create and deploy mission-critical web apps at scale.
 Azure SignalR Service – Add real-time web functionalities easily.
 IoT: The ability for devices to garner and then relay information for data analysis is referred to as IoT.
Many services can assist and drive end-to-end solutions for IoT on Azure.
 IoT Central – Fully managed global IoT software as a service (SaaS) solution that makes it easy
to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale.
 Azure IoT Hub – Messaging hub that provides secure communications between and monitoring
of millions of IoT devices.
 IoT Edge – Fully managed service that allows data analysis models to be pushed directly onto
IoT devices, which allows them to react quickly to state changes without needing to consult
cloud-based AI models.
 Big Data: Data comes in all formats and sizes. When we talk about big data, we're referring to large
volumes of data. Data from weather systems, communications systems, genomic research, imaging
platforms, and many other scenarios generate hundreds of gigabytes of data. This amount of data
makes it hard to analyze and make decisions. It's often so large that traditional forms of processing and
 analysis are no longer appropriate. Open-source cluster technologies have been developed to deal with
these large data sets. Azure supports a broad range of technologies and services to provide big data
and analytic solutions.
 Azure Synapse Analytics – Run analytics at a massive scale by using a cloud-based enterprise
data warehouse that takes advantage of massively parallel processing to run complex queries
quickly across petabytes of data.
 Azure HDInsight – Process massive amounts of data with managed clusters of Hadoop clusters
in the cloud.
 Azure Databricks – Integrate this collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics service with other
big data services in Azure.
 AI: Machine learning is a data science technique that allows computers to use existing data to forecast
future behaviors, outcomes, and trends. Using machine learning, computers learn without being
explicitly programmed. Forecasts or predictions from machine learning can make apps and devices
smarter.
 Azure Machine Learning Service – Cloud-based environment you can use to develop, train, test,
deploy, manage, and track machine learning models. It can auto-generate a model and auto-
tune it for you. It will let you start training on your local machine, and then scale out to the
cloud.
 Azure ML Studio – Collaborative visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy
machine learning solutions by using prebuilt machine learning algorithms and data-handling
modules.
A closely related set of products are the cognitive services. You can use these prebuilt APIs in your
applications to solve complex problems.
 Vision – Use image-processing algorithms to smartly identify, caption, index, and moderate
your pics & videos.
 Speech – Convert spoken audio into text, use voice for verification, or add speaker recognition
to your app.
 Knowledge mapping – Map complex information and data to solve tasks such as intelligent
recommendations and semantic search.
 Bing Search – Add Bing Search APIs to your apps and harness the ability to comb billions of
webpages, images, videos, and news with a single API call.
 Natural Language processing – Allow your apps to process natural language with prebuilt
scripts, evaluate sentiment, and learn how to recognize what users want.
 DevOps: It brings together people, processes, and technology by automating software delivery to
provide continuous value to your users. With Azure DevOps, you can create build and release pipelines
that provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your applications. You can integrate
repositories and application tests, perform application monitoring, and work with build artifacts. You
can also work with and backlog items for tracking, automate infrastructure deployment, and integrate
a range of third-party tools and services such as Jenkins and Chef. All these functions and many more
are closely integrated with Azure to allow for consistent, repeatable deployments for your applications
to provide streamlined build and release processes.
 Azure DevOps – Use development collaboration tools such as high-performance pipelines, free
private Git repositories, configurable Kanban boards, and extensive automated and cloud-based
load testing. Formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services.
 Azure DevTest Labs – Quickly create on-demand Windows and Linux environments to test or
demo applications directly from deployment pipelines.
What resources do virtual machines use?: The many VMs that use its resources are guest machines, guest
computers, guest operating systems, or simply guests. The hypervisor treats compute resources—like CPU,
memory, and storage—as a pool of resources that can easily be relocated between existing guests or to new
virtual
Azure Fundamental Concepts
Types of Cloud Models –
There are three deployment models for cloud computing: public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. Each
deployment model has different aspects that you should consider as you migrate to the cloud.
 Public cloud: Services are offered over the public internet and available to anyone who wants to
purchase them. Cloud resources, such as servers and storage, are owned and operated by a third-party
cloud service provider and delivered over the internet.
 No capital expenditures to scale up.
 Applications can be quickly provisioned and deprovisioned.
 Organizations pay only for what they use.
 Private cloud: A private cloud consists of computing resources used exclusively by users from one
business or organization. A private cloud can be physically located at your organization's on-site (on-
premises) datacenter, or it can be hosted by a third-party service provider.
 Hardware must be purchased for start-up and maintenance.
 Organizations have complete control over resources and security.
 Organizations are responsible for hardware maintenance and updates.
 Hybrid cloud: A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines a public cloud and a private
cloud by allowing data and applications to be shared between them.
 Provides the most flexibility.
 Organizations determine where to run their applications.
 Organizations control security, compliance, or legal requirements.
Cloud Computing Advantages –
There are several advantages that a cloud environment has over a physical environment –
 High availability: Depending on the service-level agreement (SLA) that you choose, your cloud-based
apps can provide a continuous user experience with no apparent downtime, even when things go
wrong.
 Scalability: Apps in the cloud can scale vertically and horizontally:
 Scale vertically to increase compute capacity by adding RAM or CPUs to a virtual machine.
 Scaling horizontally increases compute capacity by adding instances of resources, such as
adding VMs to the configuration.
 Elasticity: You can configure cloud-based apps to take advantage of autoscaling, so your apps always
have the resources they need.
 Agility: Deploy and configure cloud-based resources quickly as your app requirements change.
 Geo-distribution: You can deploy apps and data to regional datacenters around the globe, thereby
ensuring that your customers always have the best performance in their region.
 Disaster recovery: By taking advantage of cloud-based backup services, data replication, and geo-
distribution, you can deploy your apps with the confidence that comes from knowing that your data is
safe in the event of disaster.
 Reliability = High Availability: Server uptime is really one of the biggest concerns for any data center. If
the system goes down, that could cost the company thousands or even millions of dollars. Many on-
premises systems appear to have virtually 100% uptime since they are “always” up. However, running
24/7 servers for 8-to-5 workloads are simply wasteful, and yet, these systems periodically experience
downtime, upgrade, or maintenance issues. On the contrary, most cloud services within Microsoft
Azure come with a 99.95% SLA guarantee which is much higher than most on-premises data centers
can hope to offer.
 The architect of the cloud is built on the premise that hardware will fail at some point. Cloud providers
like Microsoft or Amazon have automated a number of features that used to cause headache when
hosting on-premises servers:
1. •3 redundant copies of data at all times, with 1 copy in a separate data center in case of
regional disaster like a hurricane or earthquake;
2. •Automatic fail over to backup server to minimize downtime;
3. •Hosting applications on at least 2 server instances to minimize downtime when hardware
failure occurs;

Therefore, unless you want to spend millions of dollars on building and maintaining your own IT
infrastructure, it is highly unlikely that you can compete with the stability and reliability of public cloud
providers.
 Predictability: Cloud computing is typically provided on a monthly pay-as-you-go financing model.
1. the cost of IT operations can now be aligned with the business growth instead of requiring large
capital expenses up front in anticipation of new businesses, customers, or applications.
2. CIOs can now know exactly how much IT operational costs are associated with an addition of one
customer or a unit of service.
3. The cloud allows for “just in time” delivery of needed services with very little advanced notice of
seasonal or temporary spikes in demand.
4. predict trends and challenges before they happen using monitoring tools and predictive analytics
which help your internal IT personnel troubleshoot potential bottlenecks and plan for additional
capacity if need to.
5. proactively resolve issues with real-time data, alerts, and technical support from the cloud
providers.
Capital expenses vs. operating expenses –
There are two different types of expenses that you should consider:
 Capital Expenditure (CapEx) is the up-front spending of money on physical infrastructure, and then
deducting that up-front expense over time. The up-front cost from CapEx has a value that reduces over
time.
 Operational Expenditure (OpEx) is spending money on services or products now and being billed for
them now. You can deduct this expense in the same year you spend it. There is no up-front cost, as you
pay for a service or product as you use it.
Cloud computing is a consumption-based model –
Cloud service providers operate on a consumption-based model, which means that end users only pay for the
resources that they use. Whatever they use is what they pay for. A consumption-based model has many
benefits, including:
 No upfront costs.
 No need to purchase and manage costly infrastructure that users might not use to its fullest.
 The ability to pay for additional resources when they are needed.
 The ability to stop paying for resources that are no longer needed.