Azure Global Infrastructure

 

Regions

• Each region has more than one data center, which is a physical location.
• A group of data centers deployed in a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low latency network.
• Criteria in choosing a Region:
  • Location – a region closest to your users minimizes the latency
  • Features – some features are not available in all regions
  • Price – the price of services vary from region to region
• Each Region is paired within the same geographic area
• If the primary region has an outage, you can failover to the secondary region
• You can use paired regions for replication
• Regions that are unique when it comes to compliance:
  • Azure Government Cloud – only US federal, state, local, and tribal governments and their partners have access to this dedicated instance
  • China Region – data center is physically located within China and has no connection outside of China, including other Azure regions

Availability Zones

• Each availability zone is a physical location within a region
• A zone is composed of one or more data centers with independent power, cooling, and networking facilities.
• Azure services that support Availability Zones fall into two categories:
  • Zonal services – a resource is pinned to a specific zone
  • Zone-redundant services – replicates automatically across zones
  • The data moving in and out of Azure data centers, as well as data moving between Azure data centers, is called bandwidth.
• • Data transfer to Azure is always free.
  • Data transfer between Availability Zones is not free.
  • Data transfer within the same Availability Zone is free.
  • Data transfer between Azure regions and to other continents is not free.

Resource Groups

• A container that holds related resources
• Each resource can only exist in a single resource group
• You can add or remove resources to any resource group at any time
• Allows you to move a resource from one resource group to another
• Resources from multiple regions can be in one resource group
• You can give users access to a resource group
• Resources can interact with other resources in different resource groups
• A resource group has a location, or region, as it stores metadata about the resources

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

• A management layer allowing you to create, update and delete resources within your account.
• You can deploy, manage, and monitor resources as a group
• Resource Manager template is mainly used to deploy the resources consistently and repeatedly.
• Define the dependencies between resources so they’re deployed in the correct order.
• Tag resources to logically organize all the resources in your subscription.
• You can check the costs for a group of resources sharing the same tag.

Azure Site Recovery

• Azure’s disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
• You can minimize recovery issues by sequencing the order of multi-tier applications that run on several virtual machines.
• Keep applications available from on-premises to Azure or Azure to another Azure region during outages with automatic recovery.