Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals AZ 90
Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals AZ 90
Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals AZ 90
1
Topics for exam
• 1. Cloud concepts
Cloud agility is the ability to rapidly change an IT infrastructure in order to adapt to the evolving needs of the business (e.g. if
your service peaks one month, you can scale to demand and pay a larger bill for the month. If the following month the demand
drops, you can reduce the used resources and be charged less).
The ability of the application to continue running in a healthy state, without significant downtime. By "healthy state," we mean
the application is responsive, and users can connect to the application and interact with it.
Elasticity
• High Availability
• Basically this defines how much your application is available for its end users. Customers or users will always expect zero downtime
of the application. High availability means your application can withstand below common types of downtime scenarios –
• -Hardware failures
• -Application updates
• -Configuration changes
• -OS update restarts
• -Heavy load restarts
• What is the best practice for achieving the High availability of applications running on Azure VM having web tier and DB
tier?
• For achieving high availability in case of Azure IaaS VMs – Availability sets should be used along with at least 2 instances of VMs
and implement this redundancy at every web tier and DB tier.
• It can be termed as an ability of the application to handle growing amount of work without degrading the
performance. Basically system can grow without limits based on demand.
• Scalability is of 2 types
• 1.Vertical or Scale Up
• In this type of scaling configuration we increase the capacity of the existing hardware or machine. For example, if
you are having a desktop of 4GB RAM and tomorrow you increase the RAM of your machine to 16GB then this is
nothing but the vertical scaling.
• 2.Horizontal or Scale Out
• – In this type of scaling configuration we increase the count of machines without increasing the capacity. For
example, if you have a server of 8GB RAM and tomorrow you put another server of same RAM and so on. When you
do horizontal scaling essentially you increase the computing power in parallel, so you get better performance. This is
horizontal scaling.
Fault Tolerance
Redundancy is often built into cloud services architecture so if one component fails, a backup component takes its place. This
is referred to as fault tolerance and it ensures that your customers aren't impacted when an unexpected accident occurs.
• Disaster Recovery
The ability to recover from rare but major incidents: non-transient, wide-scale failures, such as service disruption that affects
an entire region. Disaster recovery includes data backup and archiving, and may include manual intervention, such as restoring
a database from backup.
• Fault Tolerance
• It is the ability of the system to continue operating in full capacity and fully functional in the event of failure of some of its components. This simply
means, if I have a web application and interacting with database then if the database is not accessible/down still my web application will be available
for users. This means your application is fault tolerant. Microsoft Azure applies various replication and redundancy strategies to make azure hosted
services and applications as fault tolerant.
• How to achieve zero downtime in cloud service deployments during upgrades and all hardware failures?
• Run at least 2 instances of each role within a cloud service. When we have 2 or more instances running for a role in cloud service then automatically
the deployment gets distributed across different fault and upgrade domains and achieves almost or near to zero downtime.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
PaaS provides an environment for building, testing, and deploying software applications. The goal of PaaS is to help you
create an application quickly without managing the underlying infrastructure. For example, when deploying a web application
using PaaS, you don't have to install an operating system, web server, or even system updates. PaaS is a complete development
and deployment environment in the cloud.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
SaaS is software that is centrally hosted and managed for the end customer. It is usually based on an architecture where one
version of the application is used for all customers, and licensed through a monthly or annual subscription. Office 365, Skype,
and Dynamics CRM Online are perfect examples of SaaS software.
• 1.Cloud services
• 1.Servers hardware with server OS for various environments like Dev, QA, UAT, Production, Failover
• 7.Developer workstations with client OS like Windows 7/8/8.1/10 and their licenses
• Cost Effective: Pay-as-you-go, consumption-based pricing model. Rather than paying for hardware up-front, you
rent hardware and pay for the resources that you use.
• Scalable: Increase or decrease the resources and services used based on the demand or workload at any given time.
• Elastic: Automatically add or remove resources based on demand.
• Current: Computer hardware and software is automatically maintained by the cloud provider.
• Reliable: Cloud providers offer data backup, disaster recovery, and data replication services. Redundancy is often
built into cloud services architecture so if one component fails, a backup component takes its place.
• Global: Cloud providers have fully-redundant datacenters located in various regions all over the globe (performance,
redundancy, compliance).
• Secure: Cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, controls, and expert technical skills that can
provide better security than most organizations can otherwise achieve.
• Azure cloud service is an offering from Azure and specifically designed for hosting web applications, background
processing applications [similar to traditional windows service applications] and Azure IaaS workloads means Virtual
Machines. Cloud Service in Azure is a container under which applications run. The web application in cloud
service is termed as “Web Role” whereas background processing applications are termed as “Worker Role”.
• Every cloud service created from Azure provides you a DNS name such as
“YourCloudServiceName.cloudapp.net”. This DNS name is used for accessing web applications over internet.
• An Azure subscription can contain any number cloud services and one cloud service can contain any number of
roles. Each role can run any number of “Instances (virtual machines)” on which actual application executes. To
develop an application cloud service, roles aware we need Azure SDK. Using Azure SDK one can create cloud
service type of project from tools such as Visual Studio (for .net) or Eclipse/IntelliJ Idea (for java).
• The main advantage of cloud services is the ability to support more complex multi-tier architectures
• Application Insights
• Azure Portal
• Azure Resource manager
• Log Analytics
• What are the three main components of the Windows Azure platform?
• Compute
• Storage
• AppFabric
Region (e.g. North Europe, West Europe, Germany North, Germany West Central)
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.
Update Domain: When a maintenance event occurs, the update is sequenced through update domains.
Fault Domain: Fault domains provide for the physical separation of a workload across different hardware in the datacenter.
Hierarchy: Geography > Region > Availability Zone > Availability Set > Fault Domain/Update Domain
Resource Group
Resource groups are a fundamental element of the Azure platform. A resource group is a logical container for
resources deployed on Azure.
• Log Analytics (OMS) (formerly known by “Operational Insights”) in Azure cater all requirements in one single service and takes care of Log
Analytics, Automation, Availability and Security at one single place. It provides single dashboard which gives all details of Logs, IIS Logs, Storage
and other Infrastructure Log and Capacity planning details.
• Exceptions
• AJAX calls from web pages - rates, response times, and failure rates.
• Performance counters from Windows or Linux server machines, such as CPU, memory, and network usage.
• Diagnostic trace logs from your app - so that you can correlate trace events with requests.
• Custom events and metrics that you write yourself in the client or server code, to track business events such as items sold or games won.
Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based, network security service that protects your Azure Virtual
Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted
cloud scalability.
Azure Firewall provides inbound protection for non-HTTP/S protocols. Examples of non-HTTP/S protocols
include: Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Secure Shell (SSH), and File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
It also.provides outbound, network-level protection for all ports and protocols, and application-level
protection for outbound HTTP/S.
Authentication is the process of establishing the identity of a person or service looking to access a resource. It
involves the act of challenging a party for legitimate credentials and provides the basis for creating a security principal
for identity and access control use. It establishes if they are who they say they are.
Authorization is the process of establishing what level of access an authenticated person or service has. It specifies
what data they're allowed to access and what they can do with it.
•Azure AD is a cloud-based identity service. It has built in support for synchronizing with your existing on-premises Active
Directory or can be used stand-alone.
•This means that all your applications, whether on-premises, in the cloud (including Office 365), or even mobile can share
the same credentials. Administrators and developers can control access to internal and external data and applications using
centralized rules and policies configured in Azure AD.
Authentication
•Single Sign-On (SSO)
•Application Management
•Business to Business (B2B) Identity Services
•Device Management
• Microsoft offers Azure active directory, a fully managed multi-tenant service that implements identity and access
capabilities for applications running in Azure as well as applications operating in the on-premises environment. It is
used for providing single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to help users from protecting attacks.
• We have access 2 types of Azure resources:
• External resources, such as Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications.
• Internal resources, such as apps on your corporate network and intranet, along with any cloud apps developed by your
own organization. We must create a new tenant for your organization in your Azure Active Directory.
• More details
• For more information about creating a tenant for your organization, see
Create a new tenant in Azure Active Directory.
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-whatis
Security Center is a monitoring service that provides threat protection across all of your services both in Azure, and
on-premises.
Available in two tiers,
Free (limited to assessments and recommendations only);
Standard (full suite of security-related services including continuous monitoring, threat detection and just-in-time
access control)
Initiatives
Initiatives work alongside policies in Azure Policy. An initiative definition is a set or group of policy definitions to
help track your compliance state for a larger goal.
Oksana Dudnik | November 2020 | LifeGuide 44
Role-Based Access Control
RBAC provides fine-grained access management for Azure resources, enabling you to grant users the specific rights they need to
perform their jobs. RBAC is considered a core service and is included with all subscription levels at no cost.
Resource Locks
Resource locks are a setting that can be applied to any resource to block modification or deletion. Resource locks can set to
either Delete or Read-only. Delete will allow all operations against the resource but block the ability to delete it. Read-only 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, and are inherited when applied at higher levels.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor maximizes the availability and performance of your applications by delivering a comprehensive solution for
collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. It helps you understand how your
applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources they depend on.
ISO/IEC 27018
Microsoft is the first cloud provider to have adopted the ISO/IEC 27018 code of practice, covering the processing of
personal information by cloud service providers.
Trust Center
Trust Center is a website resource containing information and details about how Microsoft implements and supports
security, privacy, compliance, and transparency in all Microsoft cloud products and services. The Trust Center is an
important part of the Microsoft Trusted Cloud Initiative, and provides support and resources for the legal and
compliance community.
• Free Software Trial: It is a full-featured version which is promotionally free for a limited period of time. However, for excessive use, you need to pay
fees.
• Usage-based: This is a widely used model of Microsoft Azure. Here, user are changed for only that service which is used by them.
• Monthly fee: Here, you need to pay a fixed monthly payment for a subscription .
Microsoft offers multiple ways by which one can buy Azure subscriptions. On a high level there are three
channels
• Enterprise agreement – For medium to large enterprises looking at making a pre-commit on the amount of Azure resource consumption. This is
typically a Pre-Paid annual payment.
• Open License Program – For small and medium organizations who would choose to use a Pay-As-You-Go model. Credits can be added through
activation of open license key bought from Microsoft resellers. Also available through web direct options, purchased through Microsoft websites.
• Microsoft Partners – For small and medium organizations who would choose to use a post-paid Pay-As-You-Go model. This is available through
Cloud Solutions Providers – CSP Partners.
• Multiple subscriptions can exist within the same customer tenant. Each subscription can independently fuel different
set of resources within the same customer tenant. Subscriptions can come from different purchase channels and can
co-exist independent of each other.
Best Practices for Minimizing Azure Costs Spending Limits: Spending limit in Azure exists to prevent spending over your
credit amount. All new customers who sign up for the trial or offers that includes credits over multiple months have the spending
limit turned on by default. The spending limit is $0. It can’t be changed. The spending limit isn’t available for subscription types
such as Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions and commitment plans.
•Quotas: Microsoft Azure Limits
•Tags: You can use tags to group your billing data. For example, if you're running multiple VMs for different organizations, use
the tags to group usage by cost center. You can also use tags to categorize costs by runtime environment, such as the billing usage
for VMs running in the production environment. When exporting billing data or accessing it through billing APIs, tags are
included in that data and can be used to further slice your data from a cost perspective.
•Reserved Instances
: Reserved instances are purchased in one-year or three-year terms, with payment required for the full term up front. After it's
purchased, Microsoft matches up the reservation to running instances and decrements the hours from your reservation.
Reservations can be purchased through the Azure portal. And because reserved instances are a compute discount, they are
available for both Windows and Linux VMs.
Public Preview
This means that an Azure feature is available to all Azure customers for evaluation purposes. These previews can be turned on
through the preview features page as detailed below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDuruX7XSac
https://www.taygan.co/blog/2019/02/07/az-900-azure- funda
mentals-exam-preparation
62