What is it? Set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.
Remember:
- A region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.
- Geography is an area of the world containing at least one Azure region
- A regional service is an Azure service that is deployed regionally and enables the customer to specify the region into which the service will be deployed.
- A non regional service is an Azure service for which there is no dependency on a specific Azure region. Non-regional services are deployed to two or more regions and if there is a regional failure, the instance of the service in another region continues servicing customers.
- Azure services and capacity can vary by region, so it's important to understand if targeted regions offer required capabilities.
Azure Availabiliy Zones
What is it? High-availability offering that protects your applications and data from datacenter failures
Remember:
- Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region.
- Availabiliy Zones are Unique physical locations within a region and protect your applications and data from datacenter failures
- Each zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.
- An Availability Zone in an Azure region is a combination of a fault domain and an update domain.
- Azure services that support Availability Zones fall into two categories:
Resource Groups
What is it? Container in which the metadata for a logical group of resources is stored.
Remember:
- Resource Manager provides management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure account.
- RG can include all the resources for the solution, or only those resources that you want to manage as a group
- RG stores metadata about the resources.
- Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) is the way that you manage access to resources in Azure.
Virtual Machines
What is it? Image service instances that provide on-demand and scalable computing resources with usage-based pricing.
Remember:
- Each virtual machine provides its own virtual hardware including CPUs, memory, hard drives, network interfaces and other devices.
- a virtual machine behaves like a server: it is a computer within a computer that provides the user with the same experience they would have on the host operating system itself.
- In addition to various Windows Server versions, Azure supports all of the major Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE and Ubuntu.
- Most Azure VMs come with temporary non-persistent local storage. Additionally, Azure offers HDD and SSD-based disk storage for data.
| Category | Azure VM | Azure App Service |
| Description | Infrastructure as a service. Full control over your computing environment. | Platform as a service. Allows you to integrate the app without managing underlying infrastructure. |
| Deploy | OS Imgae | Runtime stack. |
| State Management | Stateful or stateless | Stateless |
| Auto Scaling | Use VM Scale sets | Built-in service |
| Scale Limit | 1000 nodes per scale set for platform image. 600 Nodes per scale set for custom image | 20 instances and 100 with App Service Env | Traffic Distribution | Use Azure Load Balancer to distribute incoming traffic | Load balancing is integrated | Architecture | N-tier and web-Queue-worker | N-tier and big compute (HPC) |
Azure App Services
What is it? HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends.
Remember:
- Multiple languages and frameworks - ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Python.
- Run PowerShell and other scripts or executables as background services.
- Managed production environment
- Containerization and Docker
- DevOps optimization
- Global scale with high availability
- Connections to SaaS platforms and on-premises data
- Security and compliance
- Application templates
- Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code integration
- API and mobile features
- Serverless code
- With App Service, you pay for the Azure compute resources you use
| Category | Azure VM | Azure App Service |
| Description | Infrastructure as a service. Full control over your computing environment. | Platform as a service. Allows you to integrate the app without managing underlying infrastructure. |
| Deploy | OS Imgae | Runtime stack. |
| State Management | Stateful or stateless | Stateless |
| Auto Scaling | Use VM Scale sets | Built-in service |
| Scale Limit | 1000 nodes per scale set for platform image. 600 Nodes per scale set for custom image | 20 instances and 100 with App Service Env | Traffic Distribution | Use Azure Load Balancer to distribute incoming traffic | Load balancing is integrated | Architecture | N-tier and web-Queue-worker | N-tier and big compute (HPC) |