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Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
Azure Basics
- Azure is Microsoft’s private & public cloud computing platform
- Provides developers & IT admins tools to provide, build, manage, and deploy applications.
- on a massive global network
- freedom to choose tools and frameworks
- More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies run on the Microsoft Cloud [source]
Azure services
- More than 100 services..
- Compute services such as VMs and containers that can run your applications
- Database services that provide both relational and NoSQL choices
- Identity services that help you authenticate and protect your users
- Networking services that connect your datacenter to the cloud, provide high availability or host your DNS domain
- Storage solutions that can accommodate massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data
- AI and machine-learning services can analyze data, text, images, comprehend speech, and make predictions using data
- See also list of Azure services
How Azure works
- It uses virtualization
- Uses an abstraction layer called hypervisor.
- Separates tight coupling between hardware (CPU, RAM, GPU..) and its operating system
- Emulates a real computer in a virtual machine
- Can run multiple virtual machines in same time
- Optimizes capacity of abstracted hardware
- Can run any OS such as Windows, Linux & macOS
- Azure repeats virtualization in massive scale
- Each data center has many racks filled with servers
- Each server includes a hypervisor to run multiple virtual machines.
- A network switch provides connectivity to all those servers
- One server in each rack runs a special software called fabric controller
- Each fabric controller is connected to another software called as orchestrator
- Orchastrator manages everything in Azure, including responding user requests
- Users requests using Azure API
- Azure API can be reached in many ways including Azure Portal
- Orchestrator packages everything it’s needed and sends to package & request to fabric controller.