Common scenarios where IaaS might make sense include:
Lift-and-shift migration: You’re standing up cloud resources similar to your on-prem datacenter, and then simply moving the things running on-prem to running on the IaaS infrastructure.
Testing and development: You have established configurations for development and test environments that you need to rapidly replicate. You can stand up or shut down the different environments rapidly with an IaaS structure, while maintaining complete control.
Common scenarios where PaaS might make sense include:
Development framework: PaaS provides a framework that developers can build upon to develop or customize cloud-based applications. Similar to the way you create an Excel macro, PaaS lets developers create applications using built-in software components. Cloud features such as scalability, high-availability, and multi-tenant capability are included, reducing the amount of coding that developers must do.
Analytics or business intelligence: Tools provided as a service with PaaS allow organizations to analyze and mine their data, finding insights and patterns and predicting outcomes to improve forecasting, product design decisions, investment returns, and other business decisions.
Some common scenarios for SaaS are:
Email and messaging.
Business productivity applications.
Finance and expense tracking.
Availability zones are physically separate data centers within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. An availability zone is set up to be an isolation boundary. If one zone goes down, the other continues working. Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.
Most Azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away. This approach allows for the replication of resources across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions because of events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages that affect an entire region. For example, if a region in a pair was affected by a natural disaster, services would automatically fail over to the other region in its region pair.
Types: web apps, API apps, WebJobs, mobile apps
WebJobs is a feature of Azure Web App that enables you to run a program or script in the same instance as a web app, API app, or mobile app. There's no extra cost to use WebJobs.
You can use the Azure WebJobs SDK with WebJobs to simplify many programming tasks. WebJobs aren't supported for App Service on Linux yet.
Azure Functions provides another way to run programs and scripts.
App Service benefits: integrated deployment/management, secure endpoints, quick scaling, high availability
WebJobs: background tasks, scheduled/triggered
Mobile Apps: cloud-based SQL, authentication, push notifications, custom back-end logic, SDK support
Route network traffic: Route tables, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
BGP is the standard routing protocol commonly used in the Internet to exchange routing and reachability information between two or more networks. When used in the context of Azure Virtual Networks, BGP enables the Azure VPN gateways and your on-premises VPN devices, called BGP peers or neighbors, to exchange "routes" that will inform both gateways on the availability and reachability for those prefixes to go through the gateways or routers involved. BGP can also enable transit routing among multiple networks by propagating routes a BGP gateway learns from one BGP peer to all other BGP peers.
Filter network traffic: network security groups, network virtual appliances
Connect virtual networks: virtual network peering, user-defined routes (UDR)
ExpressRoute Direct offers dual 100 Gbps or 10-Gbps connectivity
Storage accounts provide unique namespaces for Azure Storage data, accessible worldwide via HTTP/HTTPS
Redundancy options: LRS, GRS, RA-GRS, ZRS, GZRS, RA-GZRS
Pricing calculator:
Estimates Azure resource costs
Covers compute, storage, network costs
Provides cost estimate, not actual charges
TCO calculator:
Compares on-premises vs. Azure costs
Input servers, databases, storage, network traffic
Accounts for power and labor costs
Shows cost difference between datacenter and Azure
Cost Management:
Quickly check resource costs
Create cost-based alerts
Establish budgets for resource management
Cost analysis:
Visualize Azure costs
Analyze spending trends
Estimate cost trends against budgets
Cost alerts:
Budget alerts: notify when spending exceeds a set amount
Credit alerts: notify when Azure credit commitments consumed
Department spending quota alerts: notify when spending reaches a fixed threshold
Budgets:
Set spending limits
Trigger alerts when reaching thresholds
Advanced use: automate resource modification when conditions met
Tags don't inherit from subscriptions or resource groups
Lock can be applied to individual resources, groups, or subscriptions
Azure Resource Manager (ARM): deployment & management service for Azure
ARM: handles requests from Azure tools, APIs, SDKs, authenticates, authorizes, and processes
Benefits: declarative templates, group resource management, consistent deployment, dependency definition, access control, tagging, organized billing
ARM templates: infrastructure as code, declarative JSON format, parallel resource creation
Azure Advisor: evaluates Azure resources, provides recommendations for reliability, security, performance, operational excellence, and cost optimization.
Recommendations available through Azure portal and API, with notification options.
Advisor dashboard in Azure portal displays personalized recommendations for all subscriptions.
Recommendations categorized into: Reliability, Security, Performance, Operational Excellence, Cost.
Dashboard helps improve business continuity, detect threats, enhance application speed, achieve operational efficiency, and optimize spending.
Azure Log Analytics: Write and run log queries, support simple/complex queries, data analysis.
Azure Monitor Alerts: Automated notifications based on thresholds, set conditions, notification and corrective actions.
Application Insights: Monitors web applications, SDK installation or agent, monitors request rates, response times, failure rates, dependencies, page views, load performance, user/session counts, performance counters.
Periodic synthetic requests for application monitoring during low activity.