AZ900

AZ900

1. Management & Governance

   • Facts that affects costs
     • Resource Type
       • The type of resources, the settings for the resource and the region will have an impact on how it will be charged.
     • Consumption
       • Pay as you go. If you use more compute this cycle, you pay more. 
     • Maintenance
       • Cloud allows you to rapidly adjust resources based on demand. Keep an eye on your resources and manage all to make sure you're keeping around only resources that are needed.
     • Geography
       • Azure resources can differ in costs to deploy depending on the region you choose. 
       • Bandwith Concept
         • Refers to data moving in and out of Azure Datacenters. Some inbound data transfers are free, for outbound data transfer the pricing is based on datazones.
     • Subscription Type
       • Some subscription types also include usage allowances, which affects costs.
     • Azure Marketplace
       • AM lets you purchase Azure based solutions and services from third-party vendors. When you purchase products in there, you may pay the Azure Service that you're using AND the services and expertise of the third-party vendor. Billing structures are set by the vendor.
   • Understanding potential expenses
     • Pricing Calculator
       • Designed to give you an estimated cost for provisioning resources in Azure. Focus: cost of provisioned resources
     • TCO Calculator
       • Designed to help you compare the costs for running an on-premises infrastructure compared to an Azure Cloud Infrastructure. You give your current infra configuration and the calculator comes up with an estimation of costs to have the same configuration on Azure.
   • Cost Management
     • Provides info regarding the resources costs, create alerts based on resource spend and create budgets that can be used to automate management of resources.
     • Cost analysis
       • Subset of Cost management that provides a quick visual for your Azure costs.
     • Cost Alerts
       • Provide a single location to quickly check on all of the different alert types that may show up in the Cost Management Service.
       • Budget Alert
         • Notifies you when spending, based on usage or cost, reaches or exceeds the amount defined in the alert condition of the budget. Budgets are defined by cost or by consumption usage and can be based on a subscription, resource group, service type or other criteria.
       • Credit Alert
         • Notifies you when your Azure credit monetary commitments are consumed. Monetary commitments are for organizations with Enterprise Agreements.
       • Department spending quota alert
         • Notifies you when department spending reaches a fixed threshold of the quota. Spending quotas are configured in the EA portal.
   • Organizing resources
     • Placing in their own subscription
     • Resource Groups to manage related resources
     • Resource Tags
       • Tags provide extra information or metadata about your resources. You can add, modify or delete resource tags.
       • Use Azure Policy
         • Enables you to create, assign and manage policies that control or audit your resources. To enforce tagging rules and conventions. Both individual and group related policies. Prevent no compliant resources from being created.
   • Data Governance, Risk and Compliance
     • MS Purview
       • Risk and Compliance Solutions
         • For risk, compliance and legal teams. Protects sensitive data across clouds, apps and devices. Identify data risks and manage regulatory compliance requirements.
       • Unified Data Governance
         • For data consumers, data engineers and data officers. Manage your data stored in Azure, SQL and Hive Databases, locally or even in clouds like Amazon S3.
     • Azure Policy
     • Resource Locks
       • Prevents resources from being accidentally deleted or changed.
       • Delete Type
         • Authorized users can still read and modify a resource but they can't delete it.
       • ReadOnly Type
         • Authorized users can read a resource but they can't delete or update the resource.
     • Service Trust Portal
       • Provides access to various content, tools and other resources about MS security, privacy and compliance practices.
   • Ways of interact with Azure
     • Azure Portal
       • Graphical interface, web based. Alternative to command line tool. Designed for resiliency and continuous availability.
     • Azure PowerShell
       • Shell with which developers, DevOps and IT professionals can run commands. There commands call the Azure REST API to perform management tasks in Azure. Power Shell commands
     • Azure Command Line Interface (CLI)
       • Equivalent to PowerShell with the difference on the syntax of commands. Bash commands. Similar to PowerShell.
   • Azure Arc
     • Simplifies the governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform.
     • Outside of Azure
       • Allows you to manage the following resource types hosted outside Azure: servers, kubernetes clusters, Azure Data Services, SQL Server and VMs.
   • Infrastructure as a Code
     • Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
       • deployment and management service for Azure. Provide a management layer that enables you to create, update and delete resources in your Azure account.  receives a request, authenticates and authorizes it, send the request to the Azure Service.
     • ARM Templates
       • You can describe the resources you want to use in a declarative JSON format. The deployment code is verified before any code is run. This ensures that the resources will be created and connected correctly.
       • Declarative Sintax
       • Repeatable results
       • Orchestration
       • Modular Files
       • Extensibility
     • Bicep
       • Language that uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure Resources. Bicep file defines the infrastructure and configuration, then ARM deploys that environment based on your bicep file.. Similar to ARM template, bicep file tend to use a simpler, more concise style.
   • Monitoring Tools
     • Azure Advisor
       • Evaluates your Azure resources and makes recommendations to help improve reliability, security and performance, reduce costs. Saves time on cloud optimization. Via Azure Portal or API, also allows alerts. Filter to specific resources recommendations.
       • Reliability
       • Security
       • Performance
       • Operational Excellence
       • Cost
     • Azure Service Health
       • Gives you a complete view of your Azure environment all the way from global status of Azure services and regions down to specific resources. Historical alerts are also stored.
       • Azure Status
         • Broad picture of the status of Azure globally. Good reference for incidents with widespread impact.
       • Service Health
         • Focuses on services and regions you're using.Best place to look for service impacting communications about outages, planned maintenance activities and other health advisories.
       • Resource Health
         • Provides information about the health of your individual cloud resources, such as a specific vm instance.
     • Azure Monitor
       • Platform for collecting data on your resources, analysing that data, visualizing the information and even acting on the results. For Azure, on-premises and multicloud resources.
       • Azure Log Analytics
         • Tool in Azure Portal where you'll write and run log queries on the data gathered by Azure Monitor.
       • Azure Monitor Alerts
         • Automated way to stay informed when Azure Monitor detects a threshold being crossed. It can both alert and attempt a corrective action.
       • Application Insights
         • Monitors your web applications which are running on Azure, on-premisses or in a different cloud environment.
         • Install a SDK in your app
         • Use the Application Insights Agent

2. Cloud Concepts

   • Cloud Computing
     • Service delivery model over the internet (cloud). This includes but is not limited to...
     • Networking
     • Compute Power
     • Analytics
     • Storage
   • Key Concepts
     • Scalability
       • Is the ability to scale, so allocate and deallocate resources at any time.
       • Vertical Scaling
         • Scaling Up
           • Increase the size of the resource
         • Scaling Down
           • Decrease the size of the resource
       • Horizontal Scaling
         • Scaling in
           • Decrease the amount of instance of a given resource.
         • Scaling out
           • Increase the amount of instance of a given resource.
     • Elasticity
       • is the ability to scale dynamically
     • Agility
       • is the ability to react fast (scale quickly)
     • Fault tolerance
       •  is the ability to maintain system uptime while physical and service component failures happen
     • Disaster Recovery
       • is the process and design principle which allows a system to recovers from natural or human induced disasters
     • high availability
       • is the agreed level of operational uptime for the system. It is a simple calculation of system uptime versus whole lifetime of the system. availability = uptime/(uptime + downtime)
   • Principles of economies of scale
     • As company grows in size,  they can decrease price per unit for their customers.
     • Capital Expenditure (CapEx)
       • Action of spending company funds upfront.
     • Operational Expenditure (OpEx)
       • You pay as you go. You spend money on services every month but you'll deduct the taxes yearly.
     • Consumption-based model
       • is a pricing model used in the cloud so that customers are only charged based on their resource usage.
       • No associated upfront cost
       • No wasted resources
       • Pay for what you need
       • Stop paying when you don’t
   • Service Models
     • It means which party will manage the particular layer and all the layers below.
     • SaaS
       • Application
       • Data
     • PaaS
       • Runtime
       • Middleware
       • Operating System
     • IaaS
       • Virtualization
       • Servers
       • Networking
       • Storage
   • Cloud Deployment Models
     • Separation which describes where are the company resources deployed. Whenever this is in public cloud provider environment or private datacenter.
     • Public
       • Cloud Provider
     • Private
       • Own Datacenter
     • Hybrid
       • Both
       • Nice for Legacy/On-prem Apps

3. Architecture & Services

   • Architectural Components
     • Geography
       • Typically contains two or more regions. Ensures data residency, sovereignty, resiliency, and compliance requirements are met. Fault tolerant to protect from region wide failures. Each region belongs only to one Geography
       • Region Pair
         • Each region is paired with another region making it a region pair. Cannot be chosen. Each pair resides within the same geography. Physical isolation. Planned updates across the pairs. Data residency maintained for disaster recovery
         • Availability Zone
           • Grouping of physically separate facilities. Designed to protect from data center failures. Supported region has three or more zones. A zone is one or more data centers.
           • Region
             • Geographical area on the planet that contains one but usually more datacenters connected with low-latency network. Location for your services
             • Datacenter
               • Physical facility with its own power, cooling & networking infrastructure.
           • Categories
             • Zonal services
             • Zone-redundant services
     • Resources
       • Purchased services. Object used to manage services in Azure. Saved as JSON definition. Each resource must be in one, and only one resource group. Resources can be moved between the resource groups but can't be nested.
     • Resource Groups
       • Grouping of resources. Typically organized by Type, Lifecycle (app,environment), Department, Billing, Location or combination of those. Resources in the resource groups can reside in a different locations
     • Azure Resource Manager
       • Management Layer for all resources and resource groups. Controls access and resources.
   • Azure Core Products
     • Services to deploy a web app/service
       • Virtual Machine
         • Emulation of a computer system in the cloud.
         • Virtual Machine Scale Sets
           • Resource type which enables customers to deploy and manage a set of identical VMs using the same image.
       • App Service
         • Allow for hosting web applications by either deploying packaged code or entire containers. 
       • Container Instances
         • Designed purely for container deployments.
       • Kubernetes Service
         • Open source container-orchestration platform for automating application deployment, scalling and management. High customizable and scalable orchestration platform. Designed purely for container deployments.
     • Functions
       • Azure Functions delivers a serverless hosting platform and SDK that allow customers to develop small pieces of code and host them as web services, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure and platform. Scales nicely being a good option for unpredictable workload demand.
   • Database services
     • Cosmos DB
       • Globally distributed NoSQL (semi-structured data) database service. Schema-less. Multiple APIs. Designed for highly responsive, perfect for serverless.
     • Azure SQL Database
       • Relational database service in the cloud based on SQL Server, structured data service defined using schema and relationships, Rich Query Capabilities (SQL), high performance, reliable, fully manage and secure. 
       • Managed Instance
         • Fully fledged SQL Server managed by cloud provider
       • SQL Data Warehouse
       • SQL VM
         • Fully fledged SQL Server on IaaS
       • MySQL
         • Azure SQL version for MySQL database engine
       • PostgreSQL
         • Azure SQL version for Postgree database engine