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MS Azure Fundamentals - Describe cloud concepts

• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Describe cloud concepts - Training | Microsoft Learn

What is Cloud Computing

• Lets you choose only the services you need
• Compute Power - Can increase or decrease on demand
• Storage - Can increase or decrease on demand
• Providers manage upkeep

Describe the Shared Responsibility Model

• The responsibility is shared between the cloud provider and the consumer
• Physical security, power, cooling and connectivity is the responsibility of the provider
• Consumer is responsible for the data and information stored in the cloud. Responsible for access security
• Some items where responsibility depends on the situation
  • SQL Database
    • Provider responsible for the patching and maintenance
    • Consumer responsible for the data being ingested
  • Virtual Machine
    • Consumer responsible for maintenance and data
      
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - Most of responsibility lies with the consumer
• SaaS - Most of responsibility lies with Provider
• PaaS - Somewhere in between

You’ll always be responsible for:

• The information and data stored in the cloud
• Devices that are allowed to connect to your cloud (cell phones, computers, and so on)
• The accounts and identities of the people, services, and devices within your organization

The cloud provider is always responsible for:

• The physical datacenter
• The physical network
• The physical hosts

Your service model will determine responsibility for things like:

• Operating systems
• Network controls
• Applications
• Identity and infrastructure

Define Cloud Models

Private Cloud

• Cloud used to deliver IT services over the internet to a single entity

Public Cloud

• Built and maintained by a 3rd party cloud-provider
• General Public accessibility is the main difference between public and private clouds

Hybrid Cloud

• Computing environment containing both Public and Private clouds.
• The following table highlights a few key comparative aspects between the cloud models.

Public cloud	Private cloud	Hybrid cloud
No capital expenditures to scale up	Organizations have complete control over resources and security	Provides the most flexibility
Applications can be quickly provisioned and deprovisioned	Data is not collocated with other organizations’ data	Organizations determine where to run their applications
Organizations pay only for what they use	Hardware must be purchased for startup and maintenance	Organizations control security, compliance, or legal requirements
Organizations don’t have complete control over resources and security	Organizations are responsible for hardware maintenance and updates

Multi Cloud

• Use multiple (two or more) public cloud providers
• Different features from each one
• Manage the resources and security in all environments/cloud

Azure Arc

• Set of technologies that helps you manage your cloud environment
• Private/Public/Hybrid/Multiple environments, does not matter, it can help

Azure VM Solution

• Lets you run VMWare workloads in Azure with seamless integration and scalability

Describe the Consumption-based Model

• Two expenses
  • Capital Expenditure (CapEx)
    • One time expenditure to secure resources
    • Buying a company vehicle, building a datacenter, repaving the parking lot
  • Operational Expenditure (OpEx)
    • Spent over time for products or services.
    • Renting a convention center, leasing a vehicle
    • Cloud computing
• Cloud computing is OpEx because it operates on a consumption based model
  • Meaning if you do not use anything you do not pay anything
• Consumption Model Benefits
  • No upfront costs
  • No need to purchase and manage costly infrastructure
  • Ability to pay for more resources as needed
  • Ability to stop paying for resources that are no longer needed
• Traditional datacenters you have to estimate future requirements and stand the change to overspend more than you need or underestimate and run up costs to add resources to the datacenter
• Cloud-based model you only pay for the machines you are using not the extra capacity that cloud provider has on hand
• Cloud computing is a way to rend compute power and storage from someone else’s datacenter.

Module 2

Describe the Benefits of High Availability and Scalability in the Cloud

High Availability

• focuses on the maximum availability of a deployed resource or service, regardless of disruptions or events that may occur.
• Need to account for service availability when architecting a solution.
• Different for each Azure services, Uptime is part of the SLA (Service Level Agreements)

Scalability

• Benefits include
  • Ability to add / remove resources as demand on your systems go up or down
  • Not overpaying for services by reducing resources not in use
• Two varieties
  • Vertical Scaling
    • Focuses on the capabilities of the resources (cpu/ram)
    • If you under-specced the requirements you can easily add more cpu or ram
    • Conversily, you can reduce cpu or ram if you over-specced the VM.
  • Horizontal Scaling
    • Focuses on the amount of resources
    • Can be added and removed either automatically or manually

Describe the Benefits of Reliability and Predictability in the Cloud

Reliability

• Ability of a system to recover and continue to function
• Cloud is naturally reliable and resilient, because of decentralized design
• Enables you to have resources in different regions around the word
• If one region has a catastrophic event, you can move to another region
• Azure can sometimes do this automatically

Predictability

• Cost
  • Focused on the predicting or forecasting of cloud spend
  • Tools like Total Cost of Ownership or Pricing Calculator to get an estimate of potential cloud spend
• Performance
  • Predicting the resources needed for a positive customer experience
  • Autoscaling, load balancing and high availability some of the concepts that support performance predictability
  • Autoscaling adds/removes resources to meet demand
  • Load balancing helps redirect traffic to less stressed areas
• Heavily influenced by the MS Azure Well-Architected Framework

Describe the Benefits of Security and Governance in the Cloud

• Governance
  • Templates help ensure all deployed resources meet corporate standards
  • Cloud-based auditing helps flag resources that is out of compliance
  • Depending on operating model, patches and updates may also be automatically applied
• Security
  • Maximum control - IaaS
  • PaaS or SaaS to have patches and updates installed automatically
  • Cloud provider typically well suited to handle things like DDoS, making for a more robust and secure network

Describe the Benefits of Manageability in the Cloud

• Two types of manageability for cloud computing
• Management of the cloud
  • Automatically scale resources
  • Deploy resources based on templates
  • Monitor health of resources and automatically replace failing resources
  • Receive automatic alerts based on configured metrics
• Management in the cloud
  • Web Portal
  • CLI
  • APIs
  • PowerShell

Module 3

Describe Infrastructure as a Service

IaaS

• Iaas most flexible category of cloud services
• Maximum control over cloud resources
• Provider only maintains hardware, security and network connectivity
• Consumer responsible for installation and configuration, patches and updates and security
• Possible scenarios:
  • Lift and Shift migration: move things running on-prem to running on the IaaS infrastructure
  • Testing and Development: You can rapidly stand up or shut down different configured testing environments that you need to replicate.

PaaS

• Middle ground between IaaS and SaaS
• Provider maintains physical hardware, connection and physical security. The also maintain the OS, middleware, dev tool and business intelligence tools.
• Consumer does not need to worry about licensing or patching of OS and databases.
• Provides a complete development environment without the headache of maintaining all the infrastructure.
• Possible scenarios:
  • Development Framework:
    • PaaS provides a framework developers can work upon to build or customize cloud-based applications
    • Scalability, high-availability and multi-tenant capability included, reducing the amount of coding needed
    • Create applications using built-in software components
  • Analytics or business intelligence:
    • Tools provided on PaaS lets orgs analyze and mine their data to make better business decisions

SaaS

• Least flexible
• Easiest to get up and running with the least amount of technical expertise and knowledge
• Email, financial software, messaging applications are common SaaS implementations

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📇 Additional Metadata

• 🗂 Type:: note
• 🏷️ Tags:: Azure Cloud Computing
• 📡 Status:: #status/🌲