What is Cloud Computing?

 Cloud Computing  is the delivery of computing services over the internet (the cloud), enabling for faster innovation, flexibility to the resources, and economies of scale.

The cloud provider is responsible for

Ø  Physical hardware required to execute your work

Ø  Keeping Hardware up to date.

Every business is unique and has different needs. To meet those needs, Cloud providers offer a wide range of services : Compute, Storage, Networking etc.

Benefits of Cloud Computing?

Ø  Cost-effective

Ø  Scalable

Ø  Elastic

Ø  Reliable

Ø  Global

Ø  Secure

Characteristics of Cloud Computing?

Ø  On-Demand Self Service : Consumer can access to computing capabilities such as Server, storage, application as required without any human interaction with Cloud Service Provider.

Ø  Broad Network Access : Cloud capabilities are accessible over web browser through any device (laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet etc.) 

Ø  Resource Pooling : Cloud providers shared the same physical resource with multiple consumers and follow multi tenant model. CSP assigns and reassigns resources as per consumers demand.

Ø  Rapid Elasticity : Cloud is flexible and scalable as per need. Consumer can quickly add or remove computing resources as per their need.

Ø  Measured Service : There is no upfront cost for any resource, so Cloud provider billed the consumer for the resources they consume.

Deployment Models?

There are three different cloud deployment models:

Ø  Public Cloud,

Ø  Private Cloud

Ø  Hybrid Cloud

Cloud deployment model you choose will depend on your budget, security, scalability, and maintenance needs.

Service Models?

There are three major categories:

Ø  Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Ø  Platform as a service (PaaS)

Ø  Software as a service (SaaS)

IaaS / PaaS / SaaS?

Shared Security Model?

Management Responsibilities?

Azure Service Tour?

Compute Services?

Network Services?

Storage Services?

Database Services?

Important Services?

Region Vs Availability Domains

What is a region?

A region is a geographical area on the planet containing 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.

What is an Availability Zone?

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. It 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.

Certification Exam related Important Terms

Serverless Computing in Azure?

Azure has two implementations of Serverless compute:

Ø  Azure Functions, which can execute code in almost any modern language.

Ø  Azure Logic Apps, which are designed in a web-based designer and can execute logic triggered by Azure services without writing any code.

Important Storage Services?

Ø  Azure Blob storage

Azure Blob Storage is unstructured, meaning that there are no restrictions on the kinds of data it can hold. Azure Blob storage lets you stream large video or audio files directly to the user’s browser from anywhere in the world.

Ø  Azure Data Lake Storage

The Data Lake feature allows you to perform analytics on your data usage and prepare reports. Data Lake is a large repository that stores both structured and unstructured data.

Ø  Disk Storage

Disk storage provides disks for virtual machines, applications, and other services to access and use as they need, similar to how they would in on-premises scenarios.

Networking Terms?

Ø  What’s a network security group?

A network security group, or NSG, allows or denies inbound network traffic to your Azure resources

Ø  What is VPN Gateway?

A VPN gateway (or virtual network gateway), enables this scenario. It can provide a secure connection between an Azure Virtual Network and an on-premises location over the internet.

Ø  What is network latency?

Latency refers to the time it takes for data to travel over the network. Latency is typically measured in milliseconds.

Load Balancer Vs Traffic Manager?

Ø  Azure Load Balancer distributes traffic within the same region to make your services more highly available and resilient. Traffic Manager works at the DNS level, and directs the client to a preferred endpoint. This endpoint can be to the region that’s closest to your user.

Ø  Load Balancer and Traffic Manager both help make your services more resilient, but in slightly different ways.

•       When Load Balancer detects an unresponsive VM, it directs traffic to other VMs in the pool. Traffic Manager monitors the health of your endpoints.

•       When Traffic Manager finds an unresponsive endpoint, it directs traffic to the next closest endpoint that is responsive.

Organizing Resources?

Ø  What are resource groups?

Resource groups are a fundamental element of the Azure platform. A resource group is a logical container for resources deployed on Azure.

Ø  What is Resource Lock?

Resource locks are a setting that can be applied to any resource to block modification or deletion.

Delete: It will allow all operations against the resource but block the ability to delete it. 

Read-only: It will only allow read activities to be performed against it, blocking any modification or deletion of the resource.

Resource locks can be applied to subscriptions, resource groups, and to individual resources

Ø  What are tags?

Tags are name/value pairs of text data that you can apply to resources and resource groups, and to individual resources

Factors that affect costs?

Ø  Resource type

Ø  Services

Ø  Location

Ø  Azure billing zones

Free Tools to save Costs?

Ø  What is Azure Advisor?

Azure Advisor is a free service built into Azure that provides recommendations on high availability, security, performance, operational excellence, and cost. Advisor analyzes your deployed services and looks for ways to improve your environment across each of these areas.

Advisor makes cost recommendations in the following areas:

ü  Reduce costs by eliminating unprovisioned Azure ExpressRoute circuits

ü  Buy reserved instances to save money over pay-as-you-go

ü  Right-size or shutdown underutilized virtual machines

Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management is another free, built-in Azure tool that can be used to gain greater insights into where your cloud money is going. You can see historical breakdowns of what services you are spending your money on and how it is tracking against budgets that you have set.

TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator

If you are planning to migrate On-Prem Infrastructure to the cloud, we can use this tool to predict our cost savings.