Topics Discussed:
- Brief History
- Azure History
- Architecture
- Working of Azure
- Azure Tenant
- Identity and Access Management
- Virtual Machine Scale Set
- Azure Load Balancer
- Azure DevOps
Cloud Platform and virtualization started in the early 2000s. Microsoft started their journey into cloud with a virtualization platform called Hyper- V. In the next phase Microsoft promoted the cloud into a different level called Private Cloud. It is a platform where they created Virtual MAchine above physical hardwares. Then a self service platform was introduced.
● 2014 Windows Azure was changed to Microsoft Azure and they began to use Linux platform.
● 60+ Azure Regions are available in 140 countries.
● There are special regions also. It’s not accessible to normal people or companies. It’s for government agencies.
Architecture
3 availability Zones in a region. Each availability zone is a data centre and are connected with high speed low latency fibre connection. For the new region there will be initially 1 availability zone. Gradually they increase the zones. Region Pair – In India there are 3 region pairs. And each region pair has 3 data centers. Each region will be paired with another region. This is an advantage when compared with AWS. But Azure decides the region pair. In a data center, we can have an additional layer of redundancy. It comes when working with Infrastructure As a Service.
Working of Azure
● The main part is virtualization.
● There is a hypervisor server and we can add a host OS. They are controlled with a fabric controller.
● It has an orchestrator along with an API. It accepts the requests.
● We can access azure via CLI, SDK, Console
Azure Tenant – Directory Service
When creating an account in Azure originally a tenant is created. It’s an Azure active directory domain. In a single Tenant we can have single/multiple subscriptions and there we can have different services.
The Resource Group contains all the services we use and we can give individual permission.
Identity and Access Management We can include access restrictions to a particular resource in an account. For that we use roles and user account groups. In azure this is done with the help of Azure active directory. There are two types of roles. Azure AD Roles and RBAC Roles.
● Compute, Storage and Networking are the backbone services of Azure
● Compute service container VirtualMachin, Container, Serverless
● Virtual Machines are windows and linux based
● VM can be scaled vertically with minimum downtime.
● Horizontally scaling means increasing or decreasing the number of instances/systems for your applications. Its common for web applications.
Virtual Machine Scale Set
● High Avaliablity
● We can add a minimum/maximum number of instances which needs to be scaled.
● Scaling is done based on CPU usage
Azure Load Balancer
● Works on Layer 4
● Application Gateway is on Layer 7
● We can’t load balance to different regions with application Gateway. For that we use the Front Door.
Azure DevOps
ARM Templates – infrastructure automation only to be used in Azure. Its written in Json. Bicep language is the modified one. It’s a domain specific language, uses declarative syntax to deploy azure resources. Azure DevOps server is a microsoft product that provides an entire application lifecycle and enables DevOps capabilities.
