Azure Fundamentals

This contains notes taken based on the skills definition for the azure fundamentals exam. Although not thoroughly comprehensive it’s intended to define/state some concepts that may not be clearly defined. This is only intended for study purposes:

Describe Cloud Concepts

Identify the benefits and considerations of using cloud services

• Identify the benefits of cloud computing, such as High Availability, Scalability, Elasticity, Agility, and Disaster Recovery.

  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:

  • Vertically: Computing capacity can be increased by adding RAM or CPUs to a virtual machine.
  • Horizontally: Computing capacity can be increased by adding instances of a resource, such as adding more virtual machines to your 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.

• Difference between Capital Expenditure(CapEx) and Operation Expenditure(OpEx).

  CapEx is the upfront money spent on infrastructural development while OpEx is money spent on resources used now and being billed immediately.

  CapEx requires ongoing and support expenditures while OpEx is only responsible for computing resources it uses.

• Describe consumption based model.

  End users only pay for resources they use. No upfront cost is required and users also have the ability to add more computing resources as they go along.

Describe the differences between categories of cloud services

• Describe the shared responsibility model.

  A shared responsibility model is a cloud security framework that dictates the security and availability obligations of a cloud computing provider and its users to ensure accountability.

• Examples of cloud service models.

  Virtual Machine’s —> IaaS, Azure App Services —> PaaS, Office 365 –> SaaS

Describe Core Azure Services

Regions: A region is a 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 pairs: Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away. This helps for replication and failover.

Availability Zones: Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Resource groups: These are logical containers in Azure that house various related resources.

Resources: A single unit of a manageable item found in unit, e.g VM’s, virtual networks, webApps etc.

Subscriptions: A subscription provides you with authenticated and authorized access to Azure products and services. It also allows you to provision resources. An Azure subscription is a logical unit of Azure services that links to an Azure account, which is an identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or in a directory that Azure AD trusts.

Management Groups: This a scope level above subscriptions they help in managing policies, compliance etc across various subscriptions. They can support up to 6 level of depth.

Azure Resource Manager: Azure Resource Manager is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure account.

Tenant: A tenant represents an organization in Azure Active Directory. It’s a dedicated Azure AD service instance that an organization receives and owns when it signs up for a Microsoft cloud service such as Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft 365. Each Azure AD tenant is distinct and separate from other Azure AD tenants.