Diving into Azure AZ900

Hi guys! With this post, we will be diving deep into understanding the various terminologies and practices used in the Azure platform of Microsoft. I have been going through a lot of Azure training recently, where I have learned lots of standard cloud practices implemented by Microsoft through Azure. We will be covering all the basics of Azure, and by the end of this series, you should be good to undergo AZ-900 certification offered by Microsoft, which is a value add in your resume.

I have gone through rigorous training of 16 hours and some more personal training. Let it be a platform to document everything I have learned. If you have any questions feel free to drop it in the comment box, we will be more than happy to help.

What does the cloud platform do?

It provides high availability, scalability, elasticity, agility, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery to your business. Now, what are these terms? We will discuss every feature in the upcoming articles.

Introduction to cloud computing

You must have used Uber services sometime in your life. It is a service which you can customize as per your need, for example, you can book a cab for four people or maybe six or maybe eight or perhaps a luxurious car, all depends upon your requirement. You don't need to buy an expensive car; you can simply use the service and pay for the duration you have traveled. Well, the cloud services work the same as well. You can use it as long as you want and as per your requirement. It saves your time as well as money.

What is cloud computing?

Same as Uber provides its services. Microsoft Azure provides functions such as Computing, Storage, Networking, and Monitoring. There are other competitors as well, such as Google Cloud Platform offered by Google, Amazon web services(AWS) by amazon. A simple example of what we are about to understand can be taken as the use of Virtual Machines in IT companies. Not all companies have huge capital or infrastructure, so rather than investing in physical hardware, it is cost-efficient to invest in virtual machines; that is where cloud services pitch in. It is not only cost-effective but flexible as well.

We have containers that are more effective than VMs, and then we have serverless computing. Container platforms such as Docker doesn't use hypervisors, which are used in VM.

Now let's go through a few terminologies which I have mentioned above -

Availability-  Design that maximizes service availability. One of the first services offered by Azure. Ever faced a situation when websites went down with 500/501, which says servers temporarily unavailable? For the sites hosted in Microsoft Azure, you won't see it 99% of the time. That is what availability is. Please don't confuse availability with the term 'uptime'. How does they do it? Well, they clone your VMs and create three identical copies, if one goes down, we still have other two, right? We have a concept of load balancer here which takes care of this activity.

    Availability =  uptime/ (uptime + downtime)

Fault Tolerance -  Other term closely related to Availability. Fault Tolerance clones the entire region to different geographical location such that if primary region goes down, the service should still be up and running on the secondary sector. That is a backup plan for the central part.

Disaster Recovery - We live in a world of uncertainties, don't we? What if a natural calamity strikes one of the data centers located in one of the regions? Well, even that is well planned by Microsoft. Again, secondary region comes into consideration in this use case as well.

Scalability - We can have horizontal scaling and vertical scaling. Horizontal scaling is when you want to clone your machine into multiple siblings and vertical scaling is if you want to increase the computing power or RAM or something. Microsoft Azure does provide auto-scaling.

Elasticity - Similar to Scalability, Azure provides you the efficient ways to use its services. Let's say you own an online store and the sales increase every time Christmas comes in such that your site needs up-gradation of resources. That is scaling out. And there are days when there is low traffic. That is when you have to scale in. So the store owner won't be sticking to one plan throughout, he has to plan out for Christmas as well as normal days. That is where Azure can support its business by being elastic.

Agility - Platform to develop and deploy quickly. Without a platform and tools you won't be able to build and deploy applications rapidly. Azure provides you the one.

I believe we have covered major principles and terminologies used in cold computing in this article. Looking forward to write more articles in this niche.

Happy learning and happy sharing!