Describe Core Concepts

What is Azure?

  • Azure is a cloud computing platform with an ever-expanding set of services to help you build solutions to meet your business goals.

  • Azure services range from simple web services for hosting your business presence in the cloud to running fully virtualized computers for you to run your custom software solutions.

  • Azure provides a wealth of cloud-based services like remote storage, database hosting and centralized account management

  • Azure also offers new capabilities such as AI and IoT

What does Azure support?

Azure supports:

  • IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

  • PaaS (Platform as a Service)

  • SaaS (Software as a Service)

Preparation for Exam AZ-900

The Azure fundamentals learning path series can help you prepare for Exam AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. This exam includes six knowledge domain areas:

AZ-900 Domain Area
Weight

Describe cloud concepts

20-25%

Describe core Azure services

15-20%

Describe core solutions and management tools on Azure

10-15%

Describe general security and network security features

10-15%

Describe identity, governance, privacy, and compliance features

20-25%

Describe Azure cost management and Service Level Agreements

10-15%

Note: The percentages shown indicate the relative weight of each area on the exam. The higher the percentage, the more questions that part of the exam will contain.

Learning Objectives:

  • Describe the basic concepts of cloud computing

  • Determine whether Azure is the right solution for your business needs

  • Differentiate between the different methods of creating an Azure subscription

What is cloud computing?

It's the delivery of computing services over the internet, which is otherwise known as the cloud. These services include: servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and intelligence

Why is cloud computing typically cheaper to use?

Cloud computing is a delivery of computing services over the internet by using a pay-as-you-go price model. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which helps you:

  • Lower your operating costs

  • Run your infrastructure more efficiently

  • Scale as your business needs change

Why should you move to the cloud?

The cloud helps you move faster and innovate in ways that were once nearly impossible

In our ever-changing digital world, two trends emerge:

  • Teams deliver new features to their users at record speeds

  • Users expect an increasingly rich and immersive experience with their devices and with software

To power your services and deliver innovative and novel user experiences more quickly, the cloud provides on-demand access to:

  • A nearly limitless pool of raw compute, storage and networking components

  • Speech recognition and other cognitive services that help make your application stand out from the crowd

  • Analytics services that deliver telemetry data from your software and devices

How does Azure work?

Azure uses Virtualization on a massive scale.

Each server rack runs a special kind of software called fabric controller which communicates through a switch with another special kind a software called an orchestrator. The orchestartor processes the API requests that allow you to deploy anything to the cloud through platforms such as the azure portal or azure cli

What is the Azure portal?

It is a web-based, unified console that provies an alternative to command-line tools. You can manage your azure subscriptions by using a GUI:

  • Build, manage and monitor everything from a simple webapp to complex cloud deployments

  • Create custom dashboards for an organized view of resources

  • Configure accessibility options for an optimal experience

What is Azure Marketplace?

Azure Marketplace helps connect users with Microsoft Partners, independent software vendors and startups that are offering their solutions and services, which are optimized to run on Azure.

Azure Marketplace can find, try, purchase and provision applications and services from hundreds of leading service provides. All solutions and services are certified to run on Azure

The solution catalog spans several industry categories such as:

  • open-source container platforms

  • virtual machine images

  • databases

  • application build and deployment software

  • developer tools

  • threat detection

  • blockchain

Azure Services overview:

Most commonly used categories:

  • Compute

  • Networking

  • Storage

  • Mobile

  • Databases

  • Web

  • IoT

  • Big Data

  • AI

  • DevOps

Compute:

Service name
Service function

Azure Virtual Machines

Windows or Linux virtual machines (VMs) hosted in Azure.

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Scaling for Windows or Linux VMs hosted in Azure.

Azure Kubernetes Service

Cluster management for VMs that run containerized services.

Azure Service Fabric

Distributed systems platform that runs in Azure or on-premises.

Azure Batch

Managed service for parallel and high-performance computing applications.

Azure Container Instances

Containerized apps run on Azure without provisioning servers or VMs.

Azure Functions

An event-driven, serverless compute service.

Networking:

Service name
Service function

Azure Virtual Network

Connects VMs to incoming virtual private network (VPN) connections.

Azure Load Balancer

Balances inbound and outbound connections to applications or service endpoints.

Azure Application Gateway

Optimizes app server farm delivery while increasing application security.

Azure VPN Gateway

Accesses Azure Virtual Networks through high-performance VPN gateways.

Azure DNS

Provides ultra-fast DNS responses and ultra-high domain availability.

Azure Content Delivery Network

Delivers high-bandwidth content to customers globally.

Azure DDoS Protection

Protects Azure-hosted applications from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

Azure Traffic Manager

Distributes network traffic across Azure regions worldwide.

Azure ExpressRoute

Connects to Azure over high-bandwidth dedicated secure connections.

Azure Network Watcher

Monitors and diagnoses network issues by using scenario-based analysis.

Azure Firewall

Implements high-security, high-availability firewall with unlimited scalability.

Azure Virtual WAN

Creates a unified wide area network (WAN) that connects local and remote sites.

Storage:

Service name
Service function

Azure Blob storage

Storage service for very large objects, such as video files or bitmaps.

Azure File storage

File shares that can be accessed and managed like a file server.

Azure Queue storage

A data store for queuing and reliably delivering messages between applications.

Azure Table storage

Table storage is a service that stores non-relational structured data (also known as structured NoSQL data) in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a schemaless design.

These Services all share several common characteristics:

  • Durable and highly available with redundancy and replication

  • Secure through automatic encryption and role-based access control

  • Scalable with virtually unlimited storage

  • Managed handling maintenance and any critical problems for you

  • Accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS

Mobile:

Devs can create mobile back-end services for iOS, Android and Windows apps quickly and easily

Other features of this service include:

  • Offline data sync

  • Connectivity to on-premises data

  • Broadcasting push notifications

  • Auto-scaling to match business needs

Databases:

Service name
Service function

Azure Cosmos DB

Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL options.

Azure SQL Database

Fully managed relational database with auto-scale, integral intelligence, and robust security.

Azure Database for MySQL

Fully managed and scalable MySQL relational database with high availability and security.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Fully managed and scalable PostgreSQL relational database with high availability and security.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines

Service that hosts enterprise SQL Server apps in the cloud.

Azure Synapse Analytics

Fully managed data warehouse with integral security at every level of scale at no extra cost.

Azure Database Migration Service

Service that migrates databases to the cloud with no application code changes.

Azure Cache for Redis

Fully managed service caches frequently used and static data to reduce data and application latency.

Azure Database for MariaDB

Fully managed and scalable MariaDB relational database with high availability and security.

Web

Service name
Description

Azure App Service

Quickly create powerful cloud web-based apps.

Azure Notification Hubs

Send push notifications to any platform from any back end.

Azure API Management

Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at scale.

Azure Cognitive Search

Deploy this fully managed search as a service.

Web Apps feature of Azure App Service

Create and deploy mission-critical web apps at scale.

Azure Signal Service

Add real-time web functionalities easily.

IoT

Service name
Description

IoT Central

Fully managed global IoT software as a service (SaaS) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale.

Azure IoT Hub

Messaging hub that provides secure communications between and monitoring of millions of IoT devices.

IoT Edge

Fully managed service that allows data analysis models to be pushed directly onto IoT devices, which allows them to react quickly to state changes without needing to consult cloud-based AI models.

Big Data

Data comes in all formats and sizes. When we talk about big data, we're referring to large volumes of data. Data from weather systems, communications systems, genomic research, imaging platforms, and many other scenarios generate hundreds of gigabytes of data. This amount of data makes it hard to analyze and make decisions. It's often so large that traditional forms of processing and analysis are no longer appropriate.

Open-source cluster technologies have been developed to deal with these large data sets. Azure supports a broad range of technologies and services to provide big data and analytic solutions.

Service name
Description

Azure Synapse Analytics

Run analytics at a massive scale by using a cloud-based enterprise data warehouse that takes advantage of massively parallel processing to run complex queries quickly across petabytes of data.

Azure HDInsight

Process massive amounts of data with managed clusters of Hadoop clusters in the cloud.

Azure Databricks

Integrate this collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics service with other big data services in Azure.

AI

Service name
Description

Azure Machine Learning Service

Cloud-based environment you can use to develop, train, test, deploy, manage, and track machine learning models. It can auto-generate a model and auto-tune it for you. It will let you start training on your local machine, and then scale out to the cloud.

Azure ML Studio

Collaborative visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy machine learning solutions by using prebuilt machine learning algorithms and data-handling modules.

A closely related set of products are the cognitive services. You can use these prebuilt APIs in your applications to solve complex problems.

Service name
Description

Vision

Use image-processing algorithms to smartly identify, caption, index, and moderate your pictures and videos.

Speech

Convert spoken audio into text, use voice for verification, or add speaker recognition to your app.

Knowledge mapping

Map complex information and data to solve tasks such as intelligent recommendations and semantic search.

Bing Search

Add Bing Search APIs to your apps and harness the ability to comb billions of webpages, images, videos, and news with a single API call.

Natural Language processing

Allow your apps to process natural language with prebuilt scripts, evaluate sentiment, and learn how to recognize what users want.

DevOps

DevOps brings together people, processes, and technology by automating software delivery to provide continuous value to your users. With Azure DevOps, you can create build and release pipelines that provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your applications. You can integrate repositories and application tests, perform application monitoring, and work with build artifacts

Service name
Description

Azure DevOps

Use development collaboration tools such as high-performance pipelines, free private Git repositories, configurable Kanban boards, and extensive automated and cloud-based load testing. Formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services.

Azure DevTest Labs

Quickly create on-demand Windows and Linux environments to test or demo applications directly from deployment pipelines.

Get started with Azure account

To create and use Azure Services you need an Azure subscription.

After you've created an Azure account, you're free to create additional subscriptions.

  • For example, your company might use a single Azure account for your business and separate subscriptions for development, marketing, and sales departments.

What is the Azure free account?

The Azure free account includes:

  • Free access to popular Azure products for 12 months.

  • A credit to spend for the first 30 days.

  • Access to more than 25 products that are always free.

The Azure free account is an excellent way for new users to get started and explore. To sign up, you need a phone number, a credit card, and a Microsoft or GitHub account. The credit card information is used for identity verification only. You won't be charged for any services until you upgrade to a paid subscription.

What is the Learn sandbox?

  • Many of the Learn exercises use a technology called the sandbox, which creates a temporary subscription that's added to your Azure account.

  • This temporary subscription allows you to create Azure resources for the duration of a Learn module.

  • Learn automatically cleans up the temporary resources for you after you've completed the module.

  • When you're completing a Learn module, you're welcome to use your personal subscription to complete the exercises in a module.

  • The sandbox is the preferred method to use though, because it allows you to create and test Azure resources at no cost to you.

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