Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Microsoft Azure is a distributed cloud offering with data centers in many geographical regions across the world.These data centers house the the servers and other infrastructure for Azure.The data centers are distributed into various geographies and within each are regions.Regions are groups of data centers that interact to provide redundancy and availability for the services hosted within that region.Each region is then paired with another in the same geography to allow replication in case of a natural disaster or other outages.

Availability Zones

Azure also has another level of availability protection through availability zones, this is a physically separate zone within the region with its own power,network and cooling.Azure has two categories of services for that, a Zonal services that are for a specific zone, and to ensure redundancy you must deploy the services across multiple zones and a Zone-redundant service, in that service Azure replicates the service automatically.

Resources and Resource Groups

A resource group is a logical container for one or more resources,you can then apply various properties the group and those apply to all resources in the group.You can use resource groups to apply policies to a group of resources for example who has administrative permissions for the resources.

Azure Resource Manager

Is the service that enables you to manage resources serving as the deployment and management for Azure and it supports the use of templates for creating,managing and monitoring the resources.

Azure Core Services

A virual machine is a emulation of a computer system that provides the functionality of a physical computer.Virtual machine scale sets simplifies the creating and managing a group of load balancing VMs. A scale set can automatically scale out or in to adjust to changes in demand. Availability Sets are feature in Azure that help you avoid potential outages caused by hardware issues or other events.We have two things that enable availability and these are update and fault domains.A fault domain is a logical grouping of hardware that shares a power source and a network switch.A update domain is a logical group of hardware that undergoes maintenance activites or reboot events at the same time. Azure Container Instances is a service that give you ability to create and deploy containerized applications support both Windows and Linux. If you have a lot of containers it can be difficult and complex to manage them to help you have Azure Kubernetes Service it is a container orchestration service that monitors container health provides container scalability and enables resource sharing among containers in Kubernetes cluster. Windows Virtual Desktop is an Azure service that enables users to run a Windows client in the cloud.The user accesses the Windows client either through a Virtual Desktop Client application or through a HTML 5 browser.It has many benfits not least of which is the capablilty to run Windows a broad range of devices running Windows, Linux.iOS and macOS.