How Does the Cloud benefit you?
When we envision a world where continuity in different fields is achievable, it is simply powered by the cloud.
Cloud computing allows for data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity to be less expensive and easier. Users can therefore, obtain technology services such as processing power, storage, databases, analytics, etc from a cloud provider, eliminating the need for purchasing, operating and maintaining on-premises physical data centers and servers.
Why use Microsoft Azure?
First off, imagine unlimited innovation and solutions to all your current and future organizational challenges… Azure provides a large variety of cloud services which gives you liberty to create, manage and deploy resources, projects or applications whilst making use of preferred tools.
This platform is trusted, efficient and secure, making it a great choice for procuring cloud services according to your needs.
So, what then are the core Architectural components of Microsoft Azure?
The core architectural components of Azure may be broken down into two main groupings: the physical infrastructure, and the management infrastructure.
Azure Physical Infrastructure:
Azure has datacenters around the world, being a global cloud provider. These are physical facilities with resources arranged in racks, with dedicated power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. Datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions or Azure Availability Zones that are designed to enable the balance of your business-critical workloads through flexibility and dependability.
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. Azure intelligently assigns and controls the resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced.
When you deploy a resource in Azure, you'll often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed.
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. An availability zone is set up to be an isolation boundary. If one zone goes down, the other continues working. Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.
Region Pairs: Most Azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away. This approach allows for the replication of resources across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions because of events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages that affect an entire region. For example, if a region in a pair was affected by a natural disaster, services would automatically fail over to the other region in its region pair.
Sovereign Regions: In addition to regular regions, Azure also has sovereign regions. Sovereign regions are instances of Azure that are isolated from the main instance of Azure. You may need to use a sovereign region for compliance or legal purposes.
Azure Management Infrastructure:
In order to effectively plan projects and products within Azure, we need to understand the hierarchical organization. The management infrastructure includes Azure resources and resource groups, subscriptions, and accounts.
Resource: A resource is the basic building block of Azure. Anything you create, provision, deploy, etc. is a resource. Virtual Machines (VMs), virtual networks, databases, cognitive services, etc. are all considered resources within Azure.
Resource Groups: When you create a resource, you’re required to place it into a resource group. While a resource group can contain many resources, a single resource can only be in one resource group at a time. Some resources may be moved between resource groups, but when you move a resource to a new group, it will no longer be associated with the former group.
Subscriptions: In Azure, subscriptions are a unit of management, billing, and scale. Similar to how resource groups are a way to logically organize resources, subscriptions allow you to logically organize your resource groups and facilitate billing. Using Azure requires an Azure subscription. A subscription provides you with authenticated and authorized access to Azure products and services. It also allows you to provision resources.
Management Groups: Resources are gathered into resource groups, and resource groups are gathered into subscriptions but when dealing with multiple applications, multiple development teams, in multiple geographies, you might need a way to efficiently manage access, policies, and compliance for many subscriptions.
Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. You organize subscriptions into containers called management groups and apply governance conditions to the management groups. All subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group, the same way that resource groups inherit settings from subscriptions and resources inherit from resource groups. Management groups give you enterprise-grade management at a large scale, no matter what type of subscriptions you might have. Management groups can be nested.
