Azure Basic Understanding

Microsoft Azure Tutorial for Beginners

It is important to have a fair knowledge about these terms to start learning Azure.

High Availability system is one that is designed to be available 99.999% of the time, or as close to it as possible. Usually this means configuring a failover system that can handle the same workloads as the primary system.

Scalability handles the changing needs of an application within the confines of the infrastructure via statically adding or removing resources to meet applications demands if needed.

Elasticity is to match the resources allocated with actual amount of resources needed at any given point in time

Agility provide on-demand IT resources rapidly to make available the network infrastructure along with applications which can be used by the organization immediately to gain value.

Fault Tolerant system is extremely like HA but goes one step further by guaranteeing zero downtime.

Disaster Recovery might seem as though you don’t need a disaster recovery infrastructure if your systems are configured with HA or FT. After all, if your servers can survive downtime with 99.999% or better availability. DR is configured with a designated Time to Recovery and Recovery Point, which represent the time it takes to restore essential systems and the point in time before the disaster which is restored

Economies of scale is the ability to do things more efficiently or at a lower cost per unit when operating at a larger scale

Operating expense (OPEX) is an expense required for the day-to-day functioning of a business.

Capital expense (CAPEX) is an expense a business incurs to create a benefit in the future.

Consumption-based billing models are predicated upon a basic concept: pay for what you use.

Infrastructure as A Service (IAAS) is means of delivering computing infrastructure as on-demand services. It is one of three fundamental cloud service model server’s storage network operating system. In the user purchasing server’s software data center space or network equipment and rent those resources as a fully outsourced service can demand model. It allows dynamic scaling and resources are distributed as a service. generally, includes multiple user on a single piece of hardware.

Platform as A Service (PAAS) is a cloud delivery model for application composed of services managed by the third party. It provides elastic scaling of your application in which it allows developers to build application and services over the internet and deployment include public, private and hybrid.

Software As A Service (SAAS) allows user to run existing online application and it is a model software that deployed as a hosting service and accessed over Output Rephrased/Re-written Text the internet or software delivery model during which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and accessed using their client, usually an online browser over the web. SAAS services are used for the development and deployment of modern application.

Private Cloud: the cloud services used by a single organization, which are not exposed to the public. A private cloud resides inside the organization and must be behind a firewall, so only the organization has access to it and can manage it.

Public Cloud: the cloud services are exposed to the public and can be used by anyone. Virtualization is typically used to build the cloud services that are offered to the public. An example of a public cloud is Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Hybrid Cloud: the cloud services can be distributed among public and private clouds, where sensitive applications are kept inside the organization’s network (by using a private cloud), whereas other services can be hosted outside the organization’s network (by using a public cloud). Users can them interchangeably use private as well as public cloud services in everyday operations.

Azure region is a set of data centers that are deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected via an underlying dedicated regional low-latency network. There are currently 42 regions available around the world, with another 12 additional Azure regions planned for the future.

Availability Zones is an Azure offering that is used to protect applications and data centers from data center failures. Each Availability Zone is a unique physical location within an Azure region, and each zone is supported by one or more data centers, equipped with their own independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.

Resource groups are logical containers in Azure. They hold related Azure resources that are part of a larger Azure solution. These resource groups can host all resources that comprise an overall Azure solution, or they can also host just the resources that need to be managed as part of a group. The administrator gets to decide, based on needs, how to allocate resources in resource groups within Azure.

Resource Manager provides a consistent management layer for all Azure resources, security and auditing features, as well as tagging features that you can use to manage your resources once they’ve been deployed into Azure. Using Resource Manager, you can deploy, manage, and monitor all Azure resources for a solution as one group.

Virtual machine is defined as a computer file, typically called an image, which behaves like an actual computer machine.

Azure virtual machine scale sets create and manage a group of load balanced VMs. The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule. Scale sets provide high availability to your applications.

Azure Container Instances (ACI) is a service that enables a developer to deploy containers on the Microsoft Azure public cloud without having to provision or manage any underlying infrastructure.

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for container orchestration. It allows developers and engineers to manage containerized workloads and services through both declarative configuration and automation.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully-managed service that allows you to run Kubernetes in Azure without having to manage your own Kubernetes clusters.

A virtual network is a network where all devices, servers, virtual machines, and data centers that are connected are done so through software and wireless technology.

Network Load Balancer makes routing decisions at the transport layer (TCP/SSL). It can handle millions of requests per second.

A VPN Gateway is a specific type of virtual network gateway that is used to send encrypted traffic between an Azure virtual network and an on-premises location over the public Internet.

Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications

Content Delivery Network (CDN) or content distribution network, is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users.

Azure Blob Storage is an object storage solution for the cloud. Blob Storage allows you to store a massive amount of unstructured data.

Azure Disk Storage Data disks on Ultra Disk Storage hold up to 64 TB per disk.

Azure Archive Storage offers low-cost, durable and highly available secure cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements. Store terabytes of data in the cloud for only a few dollars a month and repurpose your storage infrastructure for other critical business objectives.

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s highly scalable, NoSQL database platform running in Azure. It supports four API models, including Key-Value pair and Documents. Cosmos Database (DB) is a horizontally scalable, globally distributed, fully managed, low latency, multi-model, multi query-API database for managing data at large scale. Cosmos DB is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering from Microsoft Azure and is a cloud-based NoSQL database.

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a managed cloud database provided as part of Microsoft Azure. A cloud database is a database that runs on a cloud computing platform, and access to it is provided as a service

Azure Database for MySQL provides a fully managed database service for app development and deployment with built-in capabilities

Azure Database for PostgreSQL is a relational database service in the Microsoft cloud based on the PostgreSQL Community Edition database engine

Azure Database Migration Service is a fully managed service that enables you to migrate databases or data warehouses from on-premises or other cloud services to Azure.

Microsoft Azure Marketplace is an online store that offers applications and services either built on or designed to integrate with Microsoft's Azure public cloud.

Azure Internet of Things (IoT) is a collection of Microsoft-managed cloud services that connect, monitor, and control billions of IoT assets. In simpler terms, an IoT solution is made up of one or more IoT devices that communicate with one or more back-end services hosted in the cloud

Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW) is a petabyte-scale MPP analytical data warehouse built on the foundation of SQL Server and run as part of the Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Platform.

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics

Azure HDInsight is a cloud distribution of Hadoop components. It is a managed Apache Hadoop cloud service that lets you run Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache Kafka, Apache HBase, and more.

Azure Databricks has a support for Python, Scala, R and SQL and some libraries for deep learning like Tensorflow, Pytorch and Scikit-learn for building big data analytics and AI solutions

Azure Data Lake is a scalable data storage and analytics service. It provides unlimited storage for structured, semi-structured or unstructured data.

Azure Machine Learning studio is a web portal in Azure Machine Learning for low-code and no-code options for model training, deployment, and asset management. The studio integrates with the Azure Machine Learning SDK for a seamless experience

Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers.

Azure Functions is code being triggered by an event

Logic Apps is a workflow triggered by an event

Azure Event Grid is a cloud service that provides Event-Driven Computing.

Azure DevOps, there are existing tasks that allow manipulation of VMs and environments within specific labs.

Azure DevTest Labs provides developers and testers a self-service sandbox environment to quickly create Dev/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs.

Azure Portal is a web-based portal is used for Build, manage and monitor all your apps in Microsoft

Azure command-line interface (Azure CLI) is a set of commands used to create and manage Azure resources. The Azure CLI is available across Azure services and is designed to get you working quickly with Azure, with an emphasis on automation.

Azure Cloud Shell is a browser-based shell experience to manage and develop Azure resources

Azure PowerShell is a set of cmdlets for managing Azure resources directly from the PowerShell command line.

Azure Advisor analyses your configurations and usage telemetry and offers personalized, actionable recommendations to help you optimize your Azure resources for reliability, security, operational excellence, performance and cost

Network Security Group contains security rules that allow or deny inbound network traffic to, or outbound network traffic from, several types of Azure resources. For each rule, you can specify source and destination, port, and protocol. Azure network security group to filter network traffic to and from Azure resources in an Azure virtual network.

Application security groups enable you to configure network security as a natural extension of an application's structure, allowing you to group virtual machines and define network security policies based on those groups

User Defined Routing (UDR) is a significant update to Azure's Virtual Networks as this allows network admins to control the routing tables between subnets within a subnet as well as between VNets thereby allowing for greater control over network traffic flow.

Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It's a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability

DDoS Protection enables you to protect your Azure resources from denial of service (DoS) attacks with always-on monitoring and automatic network attack mitigation

The Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enterprise identity service provides single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to help protect your users from 99.9 percent of cybersecurity attacks

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a process where a user is prompted during a sign-in event for additional forms of identification.it is ramp up business security.

Azure Security Center is a tool for security posture management and threat protection. The service enables continuous assessment of security posture, protects against cyberattacks using

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that provides a secure store for secrets. You can securely store keys, passwords, certificates, and other secrets.

Azure Information Protection (AIP) is a cloud-based solution that enables organizations to discover, classify, and protect documents and emails by applying labels to content.

Azure ATP (Advanced Threat Protection), the cloud-based security service by Microsoft that is used detects and alerts you to suspicious activity in your on-premises Active Directory environment.

Azure Policy helps you manage and prevent IT issues with policy definitions that enforce rules and effects for your resources.

Azure Blueprint is a package for creating specific sets of standards and requirements that govern the implementation of Azure services, security, and design.

Azure Monitor helps you maximize the availability and performance of your applications and services. It delivers a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments

Azure Service Health helps you stay informed and take action, with alerts for outages and a personalized dashboard for service issues.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a physical sciences laboratory and a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce.

Trust Center is where you can find security and privacy settings for Microsoft Office programs.

Compliance Manager is workflow-based risk assessment tool in the Microsoft Service Trust Portal, enables you to track, assign, and verify your organization's regulatory compliance activities related to Microsoft Professional Services and Microsoft cloud services, such as Microsoft Office 365,

Azure Government is the mission-critical cloud, delivering breakthrough innovation to US government customers and their partners. Only US federal, state, local, and tribal governments and their partners have access to this dedicated instance, with operations controlled by screened US citizens.

Azure China cloud services operated by 21Vianet which is a physically separated instance of cloud services located in China.

Azure subscription is a logical container used to provision resources in Azure. It holds the details of all your resources like virtual machines (VMs), databases, and more. When you create an Azure resource like a VM, you identify the subscription it belongs to.

Management groups are containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance across multiple subscriptions.

Azure Cost/ Pricing Calculator is a free cost management tool that can help you estimate your cloud costs for new Azure deployments, or variations of your existing workloads.

Azure Cost Management, available to all Azure customers and partners, is a SaaS solution that empowers organizations to monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud spend in a multi-cloud environment

Service-level agreements (SLAs) is a formal document that provides specific terms that state the level of service that will be provided to a customer. Microsoft's Azure SLA defines three primary characteristics of Azure service, performance targets, uptime, and connectivity guarantees.