What is Azure
Windows Azure is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft that enables businesses to completely run in the cloud. Cloud platform offers a pas-as-you-go payment method to pay for the use of cloud services. For example, if you have a database and you don’t use it, you don’t pay.
Azure offers every service in the cloud a company needs to run its business. It provides infrastructure, hardware, operating systems, document services, storage, databases, data services, software, third-party products, and anything you can imagine.
You can also host your own virtual machines, web servers, database servers, and content storage in Azure. Azure is not only Windows but also supports Linux servers.
What is Cloud Computing
Windows Azure is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft that enables businesses to completely run in the cloud.
Cloud computing is Web-based computing that allows businesses and individuals to consume computing resources such as virtual machines, databases, processing, memory, services, storage, or event number of calls or events and pay-as-you-go. The pay-as-you-go model charges for the resources as much as you use. Unlike traditional computing, if you do not use any resources, you do not pay. It is similar to having a water connection or an electricity line. You have a meter and the meter keeps track of your monthly usage and you pay for that usage at a given rate.
Cloud computing is a culmination of numerous attempts at large-scale computing with seamless access to virtually limitless resources.
Here are some key advantages of cloud computing:
- Cloud computing allows businesses to cut their operational and fix the monthly cost of hardware, employees, and software licenses. All hardware, database servers, web servers, software, products, and services are hosted in the cloud and added to the account as needed.
- Cloud computing offers 24/7 uptime (99.99% uptime). Cloud servers and data centers are managed by the cloud service provider and you do not need to have any employees manage that.
- Cloud computing is scalable and reliable. There is no limit on the number of users or resources. Cloud increases processing and resources as needed. If you do not need resources, you can always scale down. A cloud service provider such as Azure or AWS
- Cloud computing provides maintainability and automatic updates of new software, OS, databases, and third party software. It reduces IT labor cost for a business.
- Cloud service providers have data centers in various locations around the globe that makes it faster and reliable.
What are Azure Services and Resources?
Azure provides thousands of resources and services. The above list is a list of various resources categories. Major featured products of Azure are Virtual Machines, Azure SQL database, Azure Cosmos DB, AKS, Cognitive Services, Windows Virtual Desktop, App Service, PlayFab, Azure Functions, and Azure Blockchain Service.
What is difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
Iaas, PaaS, and SaaS are three major components of Azure and cloud computing.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure – servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems – from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a service (PaaS) refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Software as a service (SaaS) is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure and handle any maintenance, such as software upgrades and security patching.
What is Azure Active Directory and what is its purpose?
Azure Active directory is a comprehensive identity and access management Cloud solution; it combines directory services, advanced identity governance, application access management and a rich standards-based platform for you.
As you know, Windows Azure Active Directory is a multi-tenant Service, that provides an enterprise level identity and access management for the Cloud, built to support global scale, reliability and availability.
Some points are as follows about Windows Azure Active Directory, which are:
- For Azure Active Directory, you must have a Microsoft Account.
- Afterwards, I will create a new Windows Azure Active Directory.
- Subsequently, I’ll add the users to the directory as either a user or a global admin.
- The next step will be optionally enabling multi-factor authentication for the user.
- Afterwards, I’ll optionally add the user as a co-administrator for the subscription.
What is Azure Redis Cache and how to implement it?
Azure Redis Cache is a managed version of the popular open source version of Redis Cache which makes it easy for you to add Redis into your applications that are running in Azure. Redis is an in-memory database where data is stored as a key-value pair so the keys can contain data structures like strings, hashes, and lists. You can cache information in Redis and can easily read it out because it is easier to work with memory than it is to go from the disk and talk to a SQL Server.
- Suppose, we have a web server where your web application is running. The back-end has SQL Server implementation where the SQL Server is running on a VM or maybe it is an Azure SQL database.
- A user comes to your application and they go to a page that has tons of products on it.
- Now, that page has to go to the database to retrieve the information and then that gets sent back to the web server and gets delivered to the user. But if you have thousands of users hitting that web page and you are constantly hitting the database server, it gets very inefficient.
- The solution to this is to add Azure Redis Cache and we can cache all of those read operations that are taking place. So, that goes to an in-memory database on the Azure Redis Cache.
- When other users come back and look for the same information on the web app, it gets retrieved right out of the Azure Redis Cache very quickly and hence we take the pressure of the back-end database server.
While deploying Azure Redis Cache, we can deploy it with a single node, we can deploy it in a different pricing tier with a two node implementation and we can also build an entire cluster with multiple nodes.
How to create and connect to Azure SQL Database
First, we need to log into the Azure Portal with our Azure credentials. Then we need to create an Azure SQL database in the Azure portal.
Click on "Create a resource" on the left side menu and it will open an “Azure Marketplace”. There, we can see the list of services. Click “Databases” then click on the “SQL Database”.
Create a SQL database
After clicking the “SQL Database”, it will open another section. There, we need to provide the basic information about our database like Database name, Storage Space, Server name, etc.
What is Azure SQL Data Warehouse?
The definition given by the dictionary is "a large store of data accumulated from a wide range of sources within a company and used to guide management decisions". As per the definition, these warehouses allow collecting the data from the various databases located as remote or distributed systems. It can be built by the integration of the data from the multiple sources that can be used for analytical reporting, decision making etc. SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud-based Enterprise application that allows us to work under parallel processing to quickly analyze a complex query from the huge volume of data. It is also a solution for the Big-Data concepts.
Learn more here: Getting Started with Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse.
Can you create a Virtual Machine in Azure?
In this article, we will explore what a Virtual Machine is, along with the step by step implementation and the ways of connecting VMs to our local system.
Virtual Machines Service in Azure provides a highly flexible "compute on demand" option for running our application workloads. The Azure portal provides a large collection of templates from which we can get started with our desired server and operating system. We can create multiple virtual machines and group them together in Azure cloud services. Cloud services serve as a network and security boundary for virtual machines. By placing virtual machines in cloud service, we can create multiple instances of any tier of our application. For example, we host our web application on three virtual machines having the same server operating system and place those virtual machines in an availability set so that at least one virtual machine will be available at all the times. Virtual machines use the Hyper-V virtual hard disk format (.vhd) for their hard drives. We can simply upload the fixed-size virtual hard disk files from our infrastructure to Azure and also download the hard disk files from Azure to our data center.
What is Azure Table Storage?
Azure Table storage is a very popular service used across many projects which helps to stores structured NoSQL data in the cloud, providing a Key/attribute store with a schemaless design. Table storage is very well known for its schemaless architecture design. The main advantage of using this is, table storage is fast and cost-effective for many types of applications.
Another advantage of table storage is that you can store flexible datasets like user data for a web application or any other device information or any other types of metadata which your service requires.
You can store any number of entities in the table. One storage account may contain any number of tables, up to the capacity limit of the storage account.
Another advantage of Azure Table storage is that it stores a large amount of structured data. The service is a NoSQL datastore which accepts authenticated calls from inside and outside the Azure cloud.
- It helps to store TBs of structured data.
- For storing datasets that don’t require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures.
- Quickly querying data using a clustered index.
How to migrate a SQL Server database to Azure SQL.
It is common to migrate a SQL Server database to Azure SQL. We can use the SSMS’s Import and Export features for this purpose.
Continue reading: Migrate SQL Server Database To Azure SQL.
What is CosmosDB?
Azure Cosmos DB is globally replicated, multimodal database service that offers rich querying over schema-free data.
The definition of Cosmos DB says 'Globally Replicated' which means, you can replicate your database in different geographical areas. It stores data in JSON format and there is no need to define the schema in advance hence it is schema free. You can execute the SQL query on stored JSON documents. Cosmos DB was formerly known as Document DB and it supports multimodal like SQL, Table API, Graph API etc.
Azure Cosmos DB is the right solution for web, mobile, gaming applications when predictable throughput, high availability and low latency are key requirements. We will cover throughput, availability, latency in detail in upcoming articles.
What is Azure Blob Storage
Azure Storage is one of the cloud computing PaaS (Platform as a Service) services provided by the Microsoft Azure team. It provides cloud storage that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable, and redundant. It is massively scalable and elastic. It can store and process hundreds of terabytes of data or you can store the small amounts of data required for a small business website.
Here, we will see how to create a Storage Account.
Azure Storage Types
A storage account is a container that has a group of Azure Storage services together (Azure Blobs, Azure Files, Azure Queues, and Azure Tables). The following illustration shows a storage account containing several data services.
Azure Storage is a fundamental building block for all of the Azure Services. We can manage them as a group. Once you create the account, we can create any data service inside it and once you delete the account, all the data will be deleted. A storage account can be created in Azure resources. An Azure subscription may contain multiple resource groups, where each group contains one or more storage accounts. Within Azure, there are two types of storage accounts, five types of storage, four levels of data redundancy, and three tiers for storing files.
What is Blob?
Blob is a service for storing large amounts of unstructured data that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS." Blob stands for " Binary Large Object ". It's designed to store large amounts of unstructured text or binary data like virtual hard disks, videos, images or even log files.
The data can be exposed to the public or stored privately. It scales up or down as your needs change. We no longer manage it, we only pay for what we use.
Why do we use Blob?
- Store any type of unstructured data that includes images, videos, audio, documents and backups at exabyte scale. It handles trillions of stored objects, with millions of average requests per second, for customers around the world.
- Blob has Strong Consistency. When an object is changed, it is verified everywhere for superior data integrity, ensuring you always have access to the latest version.
- We can have the flexibility to perform the edits in storage, which can improve your application performance and reduce bandwidth consumption.
- We have many different types of blobs for our flexibility. Automatically we configure geo-replication options in a single menu, to easily empower global and local access.
- One infrastructure but access world wide. With regions around the world, it is ideal for streaming and storing media, whether it is live broadcast events or long-term archive of petabytes of movies and television shows. We can perform secure backup and disaster recovery
What Is Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service which allows you to create data-driven workflows in the cloud for orchestrating and automating data movement and transformation. Using Azure Data Factory, you can create and schedule data-driven workflows (called pipelines) that can ingest data from disparate data stores. It can process and transform the data using compute services, such as Azure HDInsight Hadoop, Spark, Azure Data Lake Analytics, and Azure Machine Learning.
How To Create Azure Functions
Azure Functions is a solution for executing small lines of code or functions in the cloud. We can also select the programming languages we want to use. We pay only for the time our code executes; that is, we pay per usage. It supports a variety of programming languages, like C#, F#, Node.js, Python, PHP or Java. It supports continuous deployment and integration. Azure Functions applications let us develop serverless applications.
What Is Azure Databricks?
Azure Databricks is a fast, easy and collaborative Apache® Spark™ based analytics platform optimized for Azure. Designed in collaboration with the founders of Apache Spark, Azure Databricks combines the best of Databricks and Azure to help customers accelerate innovation with one-click setup; streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace that enables collaboration between data scientists, data engineers, and business analysts.
As an Azure service, customers automatically benefit from native integration with other Azure services such as Power BI, SQL Data Warehouse, Cosmos DB as well as from enterprise-grade Azure security, including Active Directory integration, compliance, and enterprise-grade SLAs.
What is Azure Advisor
The Azure Advisor service provides information about your entire Azure landscape. It gives you a complete overview of your system needs including possible ways to save money.
- High Availability shows you ways to improve the continuity of your business-critical applications.
- Security detects threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to security breaches.
- Performance shows you ways to speed up your applications.
- Cost gives you ways to reduce your overall Azure spreading.
What are Azure App Services
We can develop an application in any language or framework, such as .NET, .NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Python. Applications run and scale as per our need with complex architecture on both Windows and Linux-based environments. The App service has added the power of Azure to our application, such as security, load balancing, scaling, and automated management. We can also develop capabilities such as continuous deployment from GitHub, Docker Hub, Azure DevOps, and other sources, staging environments, SSL certificates, etc.
Azure App Service enables us to create web, mobile, logic and API apps very easily. We can run any number of these apps within a single Azure App service deployment. Our apps are automatically managed by Azure App Service and run in managed VMs isolated from other customers. We can also use built-in auto-scaling feature supported within Azure App Service that automatically increase and decrease the number of VMs based on consumption resources.
Following are additional on the different app types supported by Azure App service.
What Is Azure Kubernetes Service
Kubernetes is an open source system started by Google to help orchestrate (deploy, scale and manage) containerized applications. Azure Kubernetes Service makes working with Kubernetes easier.
Before we learn how to orchestrate containers, let’s discuss a bit about containers.
You can run your applications as containers. Think about containers as isolated processes that have their own directory, user groups, ports, etc. which run in the host machine. They are like virtual machines, but not the same. Virtual machines have their own operating systems, whereas containers use the operating system of the host machine. Also, the containers run from images. Think of images as software installers. But images bundle up the software code with its dependencies, because of which containers run the same way on different environments since they are environment independent to a much larger extent.
What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps was previously known as Visual Studio Team Service. The main use of Azure DevOps is to provide an end-to-end solution to an organization. It is highly scalable and reliable.
Above all are the basic explanations readily available. Just make sure you have gone through it for basic understanding. Now, let's start our process.
No comments:
Post a Comment