- Welcome to Azure Essentials.
If you're new to Azure as a solution
for infrastructure as a service, or IaaS,
in the next few minutes we'll break down some
of the essentials of what you need to know
to plan and implement your solutions on Azure IaaS
as a primer to your deeper learning.
With cloud computing, the first question you might have
is what's the different between IaaS
and platform as a service, also know as PaaS.
Well, the simplest way to distinguish
between the two models is by taking a look
at what's managed by us as a cloud vendor
and what's managed by you.
With Paas, we run your compute and app services
and you manage your apps and data.
Whereas with IaaS, we manage your compute,
storage, and network infrastructure
and you manage everything else.
Azure offers a robust set of services
that comprehensively supports both PaaS and IaaS scenarios.
Using IaaS services, Azure becomes the equivalent
of your physical data center in the cloud.
We operate over 40 regions globally
and that's growing.
A region represents a collection of data centers,
which allows us to respect your data sovereignty needs
and provides you with a robust failover model.
You can choose the regions where your infrastructure runs
so that it's closest to your data and your customers.
Access can be over the internet
or to optimize the connection to the service,
you can establish a fast and dedicated connection
to Azure by our express route.
In IaaS, computer storage and networking services
resemble those you'll be familiar with
in your data center.
There are some new concepts to help you create resilient
and elastically scalable solutions.
Let's start with compute.
As an IT professional, you'll be familiar
with deploying solutions to
on premises infrastructure using VMs.
Anything you run in Compute and a VM on-prem
whether on Windows or Lennox,
you can easily run in Azure
and you'll only pay for what you use.
Azure also offers a large catalog
of predefined first and third party reference VM images
in the Azure marketplace that you can deploy.
Additionally, you can define your own
from within Azure or deploy images that you already have.
During this specification phase,
you can establish a resource group
to contain your compute, storage,
and networking configurations.
Now, to accelerate this effort,
you can choose from hundreds
of predefined Azure resource manager templates
available on GitHub and make it easy
to configure a complex multi tier application
in a few clicks.
You'll need to specify Azure's location to host your VM
and the size of VM you require.
Azure offers a range of VM sizes,
differing in the power and performance they offer.
But, you can easily switch between VM sizes at any time.
For example, while doing dev-tests,
you may only need the entry level, A-Series VM,
for your application.
Then, for a higher performance, when in production,
you may wanna switch to a D-Series VM
or a series optimized to the needs
of your specific workload.
You can learn more about compute sizes at the link shown.
Now, an important step in defining your compute,
is considering availability and redundancy.
Here, availability sets are an important concept
to become familiar with.
Grouping two or more VMs together in an availability set
will protect your workloads against downtime.
Azure will automatically place VMs
in the same availability set across different hardware
to avoid any single point of failure.
Alongside availability sets,
Azure provides several other options
such as traffic manager, VM scale sets,
and availability zones to make your applications
highly resilient, available, and scalable.
Moving onto storage.
Azure offers multiple storage types
to support both new and existing business applications.
For IaaS based solutions, three storage types are important,
blob, disk, and file storage.
Now, you may only need to store small amounts of data
or you may need to store petabytes.
Like compute, you pay only for what you use
and you can scale up and down based on your needs.
Azure blobs provide highly scalable, unstructured storage
and you can use them to store just about anything
including text files and documents.
Blobs can be made private or available for public access.
Now, you can select from both hot
and cool blob storage tiers.
The hot tier provides high performance, low latency access,
while the cool tier can offer significant cost savings
when you don't require frequent access.
If you do wish to attach data disks to your Vms,
Azure offers conventional hard disk drive options
as well as solid-state drives
for your IO-intensive applications.
The third type of storage available
to support IooS based apps is Azure files.
This is like having a conventional file share in the cloud.
You may need this if you're migrating apps onto Azure
that require support for traditional SNB file storage.
Now, as part of your disaster recovery plan,
you can set up Azure storage to synchronize stored data
across two geographically separated regions,
hundreds of miles apart.
This means your data's durable, even in the event
of a complete regional outage or a disaster.
In addition, you can use Azure site recovery
to protect your entire environment.
Azure site recovery automates the replication
of your VMs to a secondary Azure region
based on policies that you set.
Now, this will not only replicate
your entire Azure IaaS solution but, you can also use it
to replicate your on-premises systems, too.
Now, when it comes to networking in Azure,
the on-prem concepts you're familiar
with will also apply in the cloud.
When you deploy your VMs, you do so into a virtual network.
This becomes your private network address space
in which your machines can seamlessly
communicate with one another.
For security, you can segment this further.
So, you have separate subnets
and you can use IP based access control lists, or ACLs,
within the subnets.
Also, you can apply load balancing
and other common networking concepts
just as you would in your on-prem environments.
With a hybrid connectivity,
you can connect the VMs in Azure
to active directory and on premises resources
using the Azure network gateway.
Moving on to management and security.
Once deployed, you can monitor the health
and availability of your IaaS services
and applications through the Azure portal.
Through Azure monitor, you can easily create dashboards
to surface only what you want to monitor.
You can use Azure log analytics
and Azure application insights
to explore Azure log data
and application performance data.
Also, you can set up alerts around specific SLAs
that you may be tracking.
For granular access, role-based access control,
or RBAC, allows you to set different job roles
into resource groups.
You can use these to define the level
of access users have when administering Azure.
Additionally, for proactive resource optimization,
Azure advisor analyzes your resources based on usage,
and provides personalized recommendations
that can be reviewed and implemented easily.
Now, in terms of security,
one of the most important things you'll want to do
is enable Azure security center.
This provides a view of the security state
of all of your Azure resources.
At a glance, you can verify
the appropriate security controls are
in place and configured correctly
and quickly identify any resources that require attention.
For example, production VMs that aren't using encryption.
You can also set up alerts and receive recommendations.
So, that was a brief tour of the essential things
to know about Azure IaaS as you start
to plan and implement your IaaS solutions on Azure.
This is a big topic and we encourage you
to continue your learning experience
by checking out the additional learning experiences
in the link shown.