Azure Fundamentals- Beginners Guide, Part-1
Guide to clear Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 certification exam.
1. Basic Definitions
- 1.1 What is Cloud Computing
- 1.2 Resources & Resource Group
- 1.3 What is Subscription
- 1.4 High Availability
- 1.5 Cloud Service Models IAAS, PAAS, SAAS
2. Azure Core Services
2.1 Virtual Machines
- 2.1.1 Creating a Virtual Machine
- 2.1.2 Connecting to the VM
- 2.1.3 VM Details- Types, Series
- 2.1.4 Deleting a VM
- 2.1.5 Availability Sets
- 2.1.6 Availability Zones
2.2 Networking
- 2.2.1 Virtual Network
- 2.2.2 Network Security Groups
- 2.2.3 Application Security Groups
2.3 Storage
- 2.3.1 Creating a Storage account
- 2.3.2 Types of Storage Accounts
- 2.3.3 Service offered by Storage Accounts
- 2.3.4 Storage Accounts- Replications
- 2.3.5 Access Tiers
- 2.3.6 Working with the blob service
3. More Azure Features
- 3.1 Load Balancer
- 3.2 Azure Function, Web Apps and Logic Apps
- 3.3 Azure Traffic Manager
- 3.4 Azure Kubernetes Service
- 3.5 Azure Devops
These are my study notes which I made while preparing for the exam. I have prepared for the exam from Microsoft Learning and youtube videos.
1. Basic Definition
1.1 What is Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services- servers, storage, database, networking, software, analytics, intelligence, and more over the internet.
1.2 What are Resources & Resource Groups
When we create something from the Azure products or services that becomes Resource. Like creating a virtual machine, SQL database, or other services that become Azure resources.
Resource Groups are logical grouping of resources together. Or A container that holds related resources for an Azure solution
Example- Database, storage, network interface they are resources and they belong to some Resource Group. So you can make changes from the resource group level which will automatically be applied to all resources.
1.3 What is Subscription
As the name suggests, things which you are entitled to use within Azure. All resources and resource groups are part of some subscription.
So when we create some resources, we have to mention the resource group, location, and the subscription.
All resources are part of some subscription and it’s mainly for restricting the access level of the user.
1.4 High Availability
Technologies that help us to minimize the IT disruption and try to provide maximum availability of application/infrastructure.
In Azure can also increase the availability for your virtual machines by distributing them across Availability Zones or Availability Sets.
Example- If your application is deployed on a single VM and if it goes down your application will not be available. To make it more redundant and tolerant failure we host applications in the collection of servers. So if one VM goes down we would still have another VM to access your application.
1.5 Disaster Recovery
Technologies that help us to minimize the IT disruption by providing complete availability of your application.
Example- When your application runs on a single Datacenter and if your application’s data center goes down, your application also goes down. To avoid this unwanted situation we can replicate applications across different data centers, so if one DC goes down we would still have other DC to access your application.
1.6 Cloud Service Models
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Azure VM is an IaaS. We don’t need to manage underlying infrastructure such as (virtualization, networking..) we get the VM of our choice. However, we need to manage storage and physical server/VM.
Platform as a service
Azure SQL Database service or the Azure Web App service. We don’t need to manage underlying infrastructure such and underlying OS also. We just start storing data to the application.
Software as a service
Microsoft Office 365 is an example of SaaS. Here we don’t need to manage the underlying infrastructure, underlying OS, or even the software. Here you just start using the software directly.
2. Azure Core Services
2.1 Virtual Machines
When we deploy a virtual machine using Azure apart from the VM a few other things also get deployed.
1. Virtual Network- An isolated network for your VM
2. The Disks- Required for holding the OS level data, we can add a data disk to your VM.
3. Network Interface- All the packets of data come and goes to VM used this Network Interface. It could have Public and Private IP address.
4. Network Security Group/Firewall — It gets assigned to the network interface where we can set rules for security.
2.1.1 Creating a Virtual Machine
For deploying a Virtual Machine you can directly go to the virtual machine and click on add, there are other ways also available for the same as you can search on the search tab.
When we deploy a VM, it will ask for all basic details for your VM like subscription name, resource group name, VM name, OS type, CPU size, and other required things.
Once you fill in all the required details, after deploying a VM, you will get other resources as well apart from the VM as we have discussed above already. Other components like OS disk, Network Interface, Network Security Group, and more…
2.1.3 Connecting to the VM
Click on your newly created VM, click on overview, click Connect and you will see the different methods to connect. You can also connect it via the direct ip-address of the newly created machine.
2.1.4 VM Details- Types, Series
When we create a VM all offered images have the type of Gen1 and Gen2, you can choose with your choice which one you want.
More details can be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/azure/virtual-machines/generation-2
As per our requirement of VM machines, each VM is categorized in different series with different pricing.
2.1.5 Deleting a VM
When it comes to deleting a VM, either you can delete it from the resource group and all underlying resources.
Or you can delete the VM directly but make sure you also delete the other VM components like NIC, OS disk, and others else you will be getting chareged.
2.1.5 Availability sets
It’s mainly to provide Availability to your deployed VM. It also ensures that VM is deployed across multiple isolated hardware nodes in a cluster.
We can create Availability sets from the portal itself there are 2 main components to select while creating Availability sets that is Fault domains and Update domains.
Fault domains are a group of VMs that share the same power supply and network switch. So we can have our VMs in different fault domains to avoid failure.
Update domains are a group of VMs that will be started together for planned maintenance work. Update domains are assigned it to the VM
Note- Availability sets can only be assigned only when we create a VM. There is no way to assign it later after creating a VM.
Using Availability sets we can get an SLA of 99.5%, if you want to achieve a higher SLA like 99.99% then we can use the Availability zone.
2.1.6 Availability Zones
It provides us SLA of 99.99%, it’s a group of data centers deployed across the globe.
Let’s suppose if your application is running in 3 VM(replicated across 3 VM) then each VM will be a part of different data centers so if 1 data center goes down, your application will be up and running from the other 2 data centers.
The main difference between Availability sets and Availability zone is, sets are only defined only in 1 data center whereas Availability zones are defined across multiple data centers.
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Link to part 2
