Azure Tutorials Series - Economies of Scale | CapEx vs OpEx | Azure Previews

In previous article we learnt about Azure Monitoring and Azure Health Service. In this article, we will be covering few fundamentals such as Economies of Scale, Capital Expenditure vs Operational Expenditure. This might be the last article in the series of Azure Tutorials Series for the preparation of Az-900, we might cover few practice papers as well which will give you exposure to the real time scenarios where Azure fundamentals comes in handy.

Economies of Scale

As the company grows in size, they can decrease price per unit for their customers.
Concept of buying in more quantities at lower cost, power of volume.
Core principle being when the customer buys the service, he/she has to pay more than what Azure does it to them, the same service can be bought in good rate.

Capital Expenditure(CapEx) vs Operational Expenditure(OpEx)

Capital Expenditure requires upfront cost on infrastructure. It is an investment in on-premises.
The value of infrastructure is such that it degrades with the time for CapEx.
CapEx needs expertise such as architect designing and allocation of resources to be decided.
For an example, consider you have set up an entire organization yourself without taking any service from any other vendor.
On other hand OpEx is like leasing a property for the limited amount of time such that you don't have to spend extra bucks.
OpEx is powerful and recommended. You pay as you wish to use.
OpEx is highly agile.
In CapEx, tax is applied over time, and in OpEx, it can be reduced within a same year.
Azure provides the flexibility between capital Expenditure(CapEx) and operational Expenditure(OpEx)
Azure Reserved VM instances are example of CapEx.

Azure Information Protection

Let's suppose your company wants to add a watermark to Microsoft documents that contain credit card information, in this case company must implement Azure Information protection.

In case, if user wants to raise any request, the same can be created using Azure Portal in Help + Support portal. Additionally, if user wishes to view a list of planned maintenance events that can affect the availability of an Azure subscription, he/she may visit Help + Support section.

Azure Active Directory(Azure AD)

Some of the features for Azure AD are

Custom banned password list
Device management
Smart lockout
Single Sign-on.

Few more additional points to remember -

Besides Azure Service Health, we can also find out about the issues that affect the azure global network in Virtual Machine resource health blade.
Both Powershell and CLI provides the same benefits, it's only a matter of personal choice which one to go for. However, both features are different from each other.
Recommended Identity-as-a-service inside Azure - Azure Active Directory.
Phases in Service Lifecycle -

Previews are generally free of any charges.
General Availability(GA) -

Anyone can use it for any reason
Can be used for Production(not recommended)
If your feature is in GA, you will receive support from Microsoft support channels.
Most GA have SLA.
If the service is live, it is also chargeable.

Public Preview -

No SLA attached to it.
Anyone can use it
Must not be used in Production because it is not supported nor guaranteed to be available. However it "can"be used.

Private Preview mode-

You must apply to get access for private preview. You may or may not be selected to use it.
Formal support is not included in Private Preview mode.
First released for few customers to try out the services.

Availability core concept - Percentage of time system responds properly to requests.
There are 54 regions Azure have around the world.
In Brazil, there is only 1 region of Azure, while in Germany we have 4.
Each region in the world has at least one other region in which it shares an high speed connection.
A single subscription can have up to 250 storage accounts per region.
Each storage account can store up to 250 PB
There are 2 types of DDOS protection services Azure provides

Standard
Basic

Multi factor Authentication can be enabled using Identity Management.
Hadoop is the open source home of HDInsight tools.
Subnets is a part of network security
For high availability, you may desire to avoid a single point of failure.
Azure Tenant automatically gets created when your organisation signs up for a Microsoft cloud service subscription.
Azure Active Directory Premium P2 guarantees at least 99.9% availability.
2 VMs are included in the Azure free account for first 12 months- 1 Windows VM and 1 Linux machine.
AD connect is used to connect corporate AD with Azure AD.
You can implement the Azure spending limit in the Account centre if your Azure account incurring costs is above than your expectation.
Cognitive Services has the collective set of APIs that provides machine learning and Artificial Intelligence services.
Germany and China requires special contracts. Normal user can't simply select the region from the dropdown.
Azure AD can control both the apps and its resources
99.99% is 4 minutes per month of downtime.
Data centre located in Middle east - UAE
Log Analytics workspace is a container which is used to collect log and metrics data from various Azure resources.
VPN Gateway is used to setup a site-to-site network.
Load balancer is not a compute resource, rather it is networking resource.
Local network gateway is used when an IP is already allocated to the appliance.
Powershell can run on Linux machine which has Azure CLI tools installed.
For iPhone, there are 2 Azure management tools

Azure Portal
Azure cloudshell

Azure Powershell can be installed on MacOS, it can run on windows, Linux and Mac OS.
Cloudshell can be accessed from a browser on a Linux computer.
Azure Advanced threat protection comes with built in sensors through which it can monitor user activities, also monitors suspicious user activities
To reduce cost

unused IP addresses an be removed

Just in time(JIT) can be enabled by using Azure Security Center
To use Azure Cost Management, you need Pay-as-you-go subscription.
Only one Azure free account can be created using the same Microsoft account.
An Azure subscription can have only one account administrator
Each Azure subscription can only be managed by using a Microsoft account only.
A free Azure account has only 10 free web apps.
You can change the Azure AD tenant to which an Azure subscription is associated.
An Azure resource can have multiple Delete locks
If an Azure resource has read-only lock, you can add delete lock to the resource.
After 30 days of the activation of the account, you can only able to access the subset of the services.
Creating a budget in Azure cost management can inform if the cost of Azure resources goes beyond a certain threshold limit.
Power shell 5.1x runs only on Windows.
Local network gateway - used for site-to-site connection from an on-premises location to Azure.
Azure Logic apps provides a platform for creating workflows.
Azure Synapse(formerly SQL DW) has the ability to store petabytes of data and able to run complex queries across the data.
VM can only be a part of one resource group.
The Archive access can only be set at the object level and not at the storage account level.

Azure Virtual network is used to connect two virtual machines together
Site-to-Site connection or Azure ExpressRoute used to connect Azure network to on-premises data center.
Azure cosmos DB is used for hosting NoSQL-based workloads.

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