Azure Summarised Training and Certification Notes
This article is based on the list from the Microsoft website which is quite accurate to the exam. Get the Azure Exam Prep Book for full details. For each part, I am giving summarised information here to speed up your learning or you can also use them as revision study material. There are 4 main parts.
- Cloud Concepts
- Core Azure Services
- Security, Privacy, Compliance, and Trust in Azure
- Azure Pricing and Support
Cloud Concept
This part contains general knowledge about cloud computing e.g. what are the benefits of the cloud, the different types of cloud service offering, and the differences in cloud deployment models.
Technological benefits of the cloud:
High Availability — The major cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GCP) have multiple data centers spread around throughout the world. Data and code stored in the cloud are copied to more than one data center. If anything happens to one data center, the data can be recovered from another data center.
Fault Tolerance — In case there is any fault in the application or infrastructure, the service can continue to work by moving the work to other healthy servers.
Disaster Discover — The data in the cloud can also get copied to other regions e.g. copy data from West US to East US. If there is a natural disaster that happened in West US and every data center goes down, the data center in East US will still have a copy of the data.
Scalability — The application running in the cloud can expand its size when there are more users in the system.
Elasticity — The application running in the cloud can shrink its size when there are fewer users in the system. The users can also set automatic shutdown during non-business hours to save money.
Business benefits of cloud
Agility — Cloud allows the business to deliver IT systems to customers faster. The machines in the cloud are ready for cloud users to spin up when they need and shut down when they are not required.
Economies of scale — Cloud is a shared pool of machines and services. As the number of customers grows, cloud providers can lower the cost or increase the quality of the services.
Capital Expenditure (CapEx) vs Operational Expenditure (OpEx) — Building a data center requires large capital investment for hardware as well as the facility. A data center will also require ongoing electricity and staffs costs for operation. By using the cloud, the capital expenditure for building a data center is not required.
Consumption-based model (pay-as-you-go) — The cloud users only pay for what they need, by the duration they need.
Types of cloud service offering
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) — In this offering, the cloud providers offer barebone hardware in the managed data centers such as a virtual machine or file storage. The cloud providers will take care of the physical infrastructure e.g. data center security or hardware repair, while the cloud users need to take care of server maintenance. For example, Azure VM allows users to spin up new virtual machines of any size.
PaaS (Platform as a Service) — The cloud providers will take care of the servers. The cloud users only need to bring in application code or data. For example, Azure SQL Database is a fully managed service by Azure that the users do not need to / cannot access anything beyond their data.
SaaS (Software as a Service) — The cloud providers will take care of both servers and code. Cloud users only need to configure the software to suit their needs. For example, Office 365 allows users to use the Microsoft Office software suite.
Differences in cloud deployment model
Public Cloud — When the companies decided to use all their servers from the cloud providers’ data center.
Private Cloud — When the companies decided to use all their servers on their own data center to replicate the cloud services e.g. offering self-service components.
Hybrid Cloud — When the companies decided to use some of the servers in their own data center, and some of the servers in the public cloud.
Core Azure Services
This part contains the introduction to different services offering in Azure for each service category:
Compute — Azure Virtual Machine, Container, Kubernetes Service
Network — Azure Virtual Network, Load Balancer, VPN Gateway, Application Gateway, and Content Delivery Network
Internet of Things (IoT) — Azure IoT Hub, IoT Central
Big Data & Analytics — Azure HDInsight, Data Lake Analytics, Databricks
Artificial Intelligence — Azure ML, ML Studio
Serverless Computing — Azure Function, Logic Apps
Storage — Azure Blob Storage, Disk Storage, File Storage, Data Lake Storage
Database — Azure SQL DB, SQL DW, Cosmos DB
Management tools — Azure CLI, PowerShell, Portal, Advisor
Azure Marketplace — Azure service for deploying ready-to-use services by Azure or the 3rd party. Such as a package to install and set up R Studio.
Security, Privacy, Compliance, and Trust in Azure
This part contains the security Azure provided for their services as well as Azure’s commitment to privacy and regulatory compliance.
Azure services for security in different areas:
Network Security — Azure Firewall, DDoS Protection, and Network Security Group
Authentication and Authorization — Azure Activity Directory (AD)
Application Security — Azure Key Vault, Information Protection, Advanced Threat Protection
Resource Governance — Azure Policies & Initiatives, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Locks, Management Groups, Advisor
Monitoring & Reporting — Azure Monitor, Service Health
Privacy & Regulatory Compliance — Azure Government (for US governments), Germany (for EU’s GDPR regulation), Trust Center.
Azure Pricing and Support
This part contains information about different types of Azure subscriptions, cost factors of Azure services, tools for cost calculation, and the support plans in Azure.
Azure subscription types:
Free — New users will receive $200 credits to spend on any Azure products in the first 30 days. We will also receive free access to popular Azure products for the first 12 months, and free access to free products forever. This type of subscript requires credit card details, but nothing will be charged until we decide to upgrade to a pay-as-you-go subscription.
Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) — Charge monthly for the services used in the last billing period. This type is used by individuals and businesses.
Enterprise Agreement — Enterprises can make an agreement with Azure which would allow discounted prices for software licenses and Azure services.
Student — Students will receive $100 credit to spend in the first 12 months. No credit card is required for this subscription type, but student email verification is required.
Cost Factors of Azure services
Resource Types — Different Azure products will have different pricing e.g. Azure VM cost will be based on the virtual machine size, operating system, usage hours, and storage size. The users can turn off virtual machines temporarily to save usage hours cost, but the storage cost will always incur.
Subscription Types — Most users will pay the standard price, while the enterprise customers may have discounted or stable costs.
Locations — For some resource types, the cost will vary based on the server locations. For example, Azure VM in Japan data center might cost more than in US data center.
Inbound and Outbound traffic — Movement of data between different data centers (availability zones) or regions might incur a cost.
Tools for cost calculation for Azure
TCO Calculator — The service to compare the cloud cost with the Total Cost of Ownership e.g. how much you need to spend if you are to build the same infrastructure in your own data center.
Pricing Calculator — The website where the potential customers can plan their cost before moving to Azure cloud
Azure Cost Management — Azure free service which shows how much have we spent in this billing period, and also provide the best practices to optimize the cost
Azure Advisor — Azure free service which provides the recommendations in high availability, security, performance, and cost based on Azure products we are using.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- SLA is the minimum time that Azure commits the service will be available to use. If the service is offline for a longer time than SLA, Azure will provide credits for the customers.
- Azure offers 99.9% SLA on most Azure products
- There are some cases that the SLA that can be increased. For example, Azure guarantees 99.99% SLA for virtual machines that have more than one instance across more than one region.
Public Preview vs Private Preview features
- Most new features in Azure will be launched as a private preview for limited users, then a public preview for all the users.
- After the feature has been thoroughly tested, it will be out of preview and become a generally available feature (GA).
- Azure provides Preview Portal for the users to test out new features for the Azure portal. For other features that are not related to the portal, the users can access them from the standard Azure portal.
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