Pass Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Exam in First Attempt Easily

AZ-900 2020/2021 - Azure Fundamentals

1. AZ-900 Exam Requirements

So let's talk about this exam in a little bit more detail. By the way, if you do a search for Azed 900 using your favorite search engine, you will find the official Microsoft landing page for this exam. If we extend this, we can see that this exam is intended for candidates from nontechnical backgrounds. So it could be someone who, as I said, is not interested in becoming a developer or an architect, going the full route. With that, maybe you will have to understand Azure as a business owner, as a salesperson, or as somebody who's involved in projects.

It's also useful for people with a technical background who want to learn about Azure but don't have one and are interested in taking some of the more advanced exams. It could be an optional first step. This is not a prerequisite exam for any Microsoft product or any Microsoft exam. You can take any of the other exams without taking this one, but it is optional. But it could be your first step before you dive right in and become an administrator, architect, or anything like that. The exam is a little bit cheaper than regular exams.

That is $99. Most exams are $165. It's available in English or Japanese. To schedule the exam, you just need to click on this button. It will take you to the Pearson View site, where you can choose a location close to you to take this exam in terms of the skills measured. We briefly talked about that in the last video, but we'll talk about it here. Again, the basic cloud concepts are not specific to Microsoft Azure. This is worth about one fifth of the exam, 15% to 20%. And we'll see terms in here such as high availability, scalability, elasticity, et cetera. Don't worry if you don't know these things yet. The next section of the course goes through these fundamental cloud concepts in more detail, and hopefully we'll answer all your questions relating to that.

But as we can see here, we're going to be talking about why it's better to do cloud computing from an operational expenditure point of view as opposed to having to invest significant capital up front to run your own computers or your own data centers. We'll look at some of the alternate charging mechanisms, such as paying for consumption as opposed to paying for time. the differences between infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. These are the fundamental models for designing and deploying software in the cloud. So this first section really is just going over some general terms, more like definitions, so that when you hear these terms like "public cloud," you'll understand what people are talking about, and it's not specific to Azure.

This definition will remain whether you're using Amazon, Google, or any of the other cloud services. So that's one fifth of the exam, basically. Then we move up to the core Azure services. And we can see that that is a full one-third of the exam. Perhaps the largest section of this talks about specifically the way that Azure is specifically created and some of the services that Azure offers when we get into the portal. When you get into using Azure resources, you really do need to understand how Microsoft and Azure break up the world in terms of geographies or GEOS regions, even within a region, how datacenters are distributed, availability zones, etc. So this is sort of fundamental knowledge in terms of the way that Azure itself, the underlying cloud model, is architected. Then we're going to talk about the different products that you can rent within the cloud. So I'm alluding to it, but within Microsoft's cloud or any cloud computing model, typically you're basically renting resources.

If you need a computer, a Windows server, or a Linux server, you can rent it by the second, essentially. As a result, this is referred to as computing. Anytime you need computing power, you rent computers. And there are many different types of compute within Azure. Computers don't live in silos. They need to be hooked up to something. and that's the networking aspect. And so, whether the two computers are running on the same network and talking to each other, whether you need that computer to connect to the Internet, or whether you need that computer to connect to your own network and not connect to the Internet, there are many different configurations for setting up your networks within Azure. Another of the most popular services besides compute is storage. Because cloud computing is so cheap, in order to store things, we're basically putting files into the cloud.

And so if you have a 100-gigabyte backup for a server, that's going to cost you a whopping $5 a month to store that in the cloud. and so there are many different storage options. It's extremely popular within Azure and within Amazon and other cloud providers to use it either just to store files or to store files in conjunction with those virtual machines and applications that are running and need those files. However, you can simply store files as a location for them. Of course, applications are nothing without databases. Microsoft was the innovator of SQL Server 20+ years ago, and that SQL Server still continues to be used and used to grow.

And now we have multiple different database options besides SQL Server for working with data in the cloud, there are thousands of vendors willing to sell your software into the Azure marketplace. You can just go in if you need a firewall or a network appliance, if you need an Oracle database, if you need anything. There will almost certainly be a market component to this. If Microsoft doesn't apply it, it's provided itself.

When we're talking about solutions, we're talking about more advanced things besides these core services. So we're talking Internet of things: big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; server less computing, such as fabric or functions. So these are sort of software-as-a-service offerings that Microsoft provides that you can use as opposed to setting up your own server farms to do Hadoop or other big data implementations. We also have to understand all of the options we have working with Azure, we have the Azure Portal, which is a web interface. There's also a command-line interface and PowerShell. So that's the second section of this course and the second section of the exam. and it is a significant portion.

So if you go through this, it might behoove you to watch those videos a couple of times just to make sure you really got it. Because getting this right will get you a long way to passing the exam. Getting into security now within IT is a huge concern. It's one of the fastest growing areas of technology and computers. So when you're looking at how spending happens year over year, the amount of spending in the security space is one of the fastest-growing elements of all of the other types of spending. And so you're not going to be required to set up a firewall to pass this exam. But you need to understand what a firewall is. You need to understand that when you're creating a solution, you're going to want both a firewall and a network security group. You may even want denial of service protection in some kind of arrangement to really protect your solution. So you don't have to design a solution. You don't have to implement these things. But understanding these options that Microsoft provides Identity is one of the huge leads that Microsoft has in the IT space. Most companies in the world use Microsoft Active Directory as their identity solution within their enterprise. If you're logging into Windows at work, chances are there's an Active Directory that is validating that your user ID and password are correct and is enabling you to change your password, et cetera. And so Microsoft extends that Active Directory that runs in your corporation into the cloud using Azure Active Directory, and we'll talk about that. Of course, security continues to be a huge topic, so we're going to talk about other ways that Azure provides you with ways to store secrets, keep your keys safe, keep your password safe, use artificial intelligence methods like Azure Information Protection and Advanced Threat Protection, which can protect your Active Directory accounts and protect your networks from attack, etc.

Governance is a huge topic for a lot of companies. And so, being able to have policies in your company and enforce those policies within the cloud is a good match. So understanding that you don't just want to say, "Oh, we don't use this technology or we do things a certain way," but being able to enforce that in an automated fashion or at least have reports that come out to say that you're in compliance or not in compliance is going to be a huge thing, and we'll talk about that in that section. We're getting into monitoring and reporting. Microsoft provides a couple of core services here to monitor your Azure usage or Azure as a whole and provide methods for alerting you when things are not going as you're expecting. And of course, we live in a world of standards.

We've got GDPR, which is a big news last couple of years. The ISO pushes out dozens of standards that you may not want to follow, and understanding how Microsoft implements those standards, how you can be in compliance with those standards if you want to be, et cetera, Azure government. Microsoft is working with the United States government, the German government, even the Department of the Interior, to create separate Azure portals for those environments as well. final section, which is still worth 25%. pricing and support.

So, how do you create your Azure subscriptions, who pays for them, whether you need multiple subscriptions, how do you divide resources among them, how are things billed, how pricing works, and how can you estimate pricing using a pricing calculator? the concept of the total cost of ownership. This has been a big deal in the Microsoft space for decades. understanding that when you buy a computer, you're not just paying $700 to own a computer. There is the cost of the electricity, the cost of the software, the cost of storing that computer, the cost of maintaining it, having to do updates, any sort of employees that are required to keep that computer running, et cetera. concept of service level agreements.

A lot of us, in our business lives, have service level agreements with our own customers. We have promises that we make—that we will respond to them within this many hours and that their request will be resolved within this much time. Microsoft makes those same promises, and there are penalties—financial penalties—if they don't achieve them. The final topic of this exam is the distinction between public preview and private preview, as well as how to access preview. If you want to get in on a preview feature, you can apply for it, etc. So that's pretty much it for this exam. We're going to start off with the first topic of this exam, understanding cloud concepts.

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AZ-900 Course for 2020 - Understand cloud concepts

1. Benefits of using cloud services

Section of the course, we're going to be talking about the first section of the exam, which is understanding core cloud concepts. So if you look at the exam landing page, the AZ 900 exam has the following cloud concepts they want you to know, and there are a lot of them. So this is going to be where we go through definitions of these terms. We're going to compare and contrast them against each other. You can see terms like availability, scalability, elasticity, economies of scale, capex and opex, consumption-based modelling, as well as terms like platform as a service and software as a service, and public cloud and private cloud. So these are the fundamental terms and concepts that are common to all cloud vendors, not just Azure.

These are the basic ideas. The first one we're going to talk about is the concept of high availability. Even in general, availability refers to the percentage of the time your system responds to user requests correctly. So if you think about a website like Google.com, the search engine, there's a pretty high expectation that when you enter that into your browser, as long as your own Internet is working, that Google will serve you up a web page with a text box in it, and you're able to enter in a term and get back a list of search results. That is a basic expectation, and basically the world would fall apart if that stopped working, right?

So you would expect Google search to have a very high percentage of availability. I don't know if Google publishes their own expectations for that and if they published the back history of how that was, but they probably have a very high percentage of uptime. Your own WordPress website might have a lower percentage of uptime. For instance, If we go back in history for six months and we look at the log files and we see that your website needs to be rebooted this many times because Press was installing the monthly patches or you had a new plugin and it was going to break something while you were fiddling around with it, Then you might have many minutes a month of downtime where that your website is not properly serving. But then it might not be that important. Okay, so the importance of a Google.com versus the importance of your own WordPress site There's going to be a discrepancy there too. So let's look at this 99.99%. It sounds very high. It's basically 100 in most people's view, but in its view and the view of computers, that is four minutes a month of acceptable downtime.

So certainly Google.com would not want four minutes a month of downtime. They'd prefer their site to be closer to 100, whereas your WordPress site taking four minutes would be ideal. You would love to only have four minutes a month of downtime. So that's the concept of availability; now related to that is the idea of scalability. Now, scalability is your website's ability to grow as your users and your number of concurrent users grow. So every system, even Google, Amazon, Facebook, and your WordPress site, has a maximum capacity. There's going to be a number of users that are trying to access your site, after which the next person is going to get an error message. Okay, this is inevitable. As previously stated, even Facebook couldn't handle 2 billion people trying to access Facebook at the same time. So your application has a failure point.

What you want is for that failure point to be much higher than your current maximum number of users. And let's say you publish a particularly popular article. You want the ability to grow very easily. You want to be able to go to a higher level of server. You want to be able to add a second server very easily or to have caching kick in once you reach a certain level of popularity. So if you can grow your number of concurrent users easily, then you have a scalable system. If you would need to, then go and order a new computer, wait for that to arrive, install the software, set that up, back up the data, and restore the data. If it's going to take you a week to scale your application, then you do not have a scalable system within cloud computing. One of the great benefits of cloud computing is the concept of elasticity. So we talked about how being able to easily add more capacity to your system makes it scalable. The ability for a system to automatically grow and automatically shrink makes it elastic, very similar to the concept of an elastic band. It has the ability to grow and to grow shrink based on demand. So if we look at the user demand for your system as going up and then subsequently going down, if your system can grow as the demand grows and shrink as the demand shrinks, that is optimizing the system and improving the efficiency. Everything between the curve and the lines is a waste.

That is a CPU that is not being used. That is a storage device that has excess storage. Anything that is between capacity and demand can be looked at as a waste. And so one of the goals of the elasticity of cloud computing is to minimize waste and to be as efficient as possible in the usage of computing resources. The next topic we're going to talk about is agility. Now, because you have the ability within cloud computing to go and create a new server within five minutes of having the idea, you have the ability to respond quickly to changes in the market, to changes in your environment, or to any sort of idea to test things out. The fact that cloud computing provides you with hundreds and hundreds of services that you can choose from, pay per usage, fire up, try something out, and then close it down without any ongoing costs It gives you the agility that you need to respond to a rapidly changing market. So, if you worked in an environment where computing services were provided, there was a contract involved, and all you had was all you had, you couldn't request more, which would essentially tie your hands. So there's an agility element to cloud computing. Now we were talking beginning of this, talking about availability.

One of the ways that you gain availability is through your ability to tolerate any kind of failure. Listen to the fact that computers fail all the time; power supplies go bad, drives die, memory gets bad, etc., etc. But within computing, basically, hardware does fail from time to time. I once heard, and I don't know if this is just a story or not, but if you think of a site like Google.com, which has a million servers serving those search results at any one time, those servers can die. And the story that I heard is that there are something like 100,000 dead servers within the Google search network, and they don't fix them. That's a commodity that servers are to Google, but it's basically the resilience that they have that's at fault. Okay, so if a fire supply dies or your networking dies, can you handle that? and that's what's going to get you the availability.

So if you had four copies of your web server and four copies of your files distributed over the globe, and one of them died or went down, the other three could take over, and that's fault tolerance. But we're not all Google, and if we had 100,000 dead services, we'd probably want to try to restore them from them. And so let's say a disaster does happen—a flood happens or a power outage happens—and how do you recover from that? the ability of the system to recover from failure. Within the concept of recovery, there is both the time span and the amount of data lost. So let's say you did off-site backups of your server every hour.

Then, if that server was to die, let's say there was a flood and the computer just got totally destroyed, the most you could lose is an hour because you had a backup from less than an hour ago. The second question is how long it takes you to migrate that backup to a new system and switch over the traffic so that the new system takes over. So it's the time it takes you plus the amount of data you could potentially lose. Obviously, to get a highly available and recoverable system, you would have much more frequent data backups and you would have systems running, maybe already running or ready to be run, in order to minimize the amount of time it takes you to get back. If you would have to go to Dell and order a new server and wait for it to arrive in 24 hours, then your system could be down for many days. Under the non-cloud model The next concept is called economies of scale. Now, economies of scale is an economic concept that states that the more you buy, the greater your purchasing power. So if you're going to go to buy a million servers or a million hard drives, you're going to get the best possible price that vendor can give you, and then you're going to be able to set that up in your environment in a super-efficient way.

You're going to develop. Microsoft has these server pods—just get them delivered. A truck drops them off, they can plug it in, and you've got basically a little server farm going just by plugging in some cables, right? So Microsoft, Amazon, and all these other cloud vendors have developed ways for them to have a cheaper cost of running a server than you could possibly do yourself for a single server or even for a few dozen. So that's the concept of economies of scale. And so when you get to something like that, Microsoft can turn around and offer you a gigabyte of storage for two cents a month. And you think, Wow, how can they offer that for two cents a month? Or how can I get a server, a Windows server, from Microsoft for less than $20 a month? They do that because they have that economy of scale. So next up, we're going to talk about a couple of financial terms. These terms are capital expenditure and operational expenditure.

This is referred to as Capex and Opex. Now, capital expenditure is basically looked at in business as an investment. If you were to talk to your CFO or the owner of the business, they would say that they're going to take a million dollars and they're going to buy a building or lease a building, and they're going to buy some hardware, buy some computers, the networking, and all the investment that goes into getting that installed. and that's an upfront cost. Before they've even made a single dollar from that investment, they have to spend that money. And so what they expect over time is that the building and the hardware are going to return them money as a return on investment. So they say, "Well, we spend a million dollars, but that's going to return back to us $100,000 a year, and that's a 10% ROI. And that's the kind of investment that they're looking for. And so that's a CAPEX expenditure. It's basically upfront money that is treated like an investment. And you can't even deduct that from your taxes, depending on your location, I guess.

But typically, you're going to have to take that as depreciation. You get $100,000 a year to deduct from your taxes in terms of the depreciated cost. And you can't just take the whole million in one shot. That's opposed to operating expenditure, or Opex. So OpEx is basically your operating expenses. It is the cost of doing business. And in the case of the cloud, you're not paying for Microsoft's building; you're not paying for those servers in a lump sum cost. You're paying by the hour. And basically, you're going to get charged every month in terms of the bill coming to you. And so you're basically using the money that you're making to pay off the expenses as they come in. and you can deduct those expenses from your gross revenues to make your net profits.

And so operating expenditures are preferred by many businesses compared to capital expenditures because of the favorable tax treatment and the fact that you're making the money that you spent. If you spent $100 today, then you're making $200 in revenue. So the money is basically being paid for day by day instead of taking years and decades to get back to you. The next core concept we're going to talk about is this consumption-based model. So in the Capex versus Opex discussion, we were saying some companies would go and spend a million dollars on a building and on some computer hardware and all the investment required to set that up. But cloud computing often operates in a consumption-based model, which means that not all services are like this, but most services or some services can be paid for as you use them. So if you look at Azure functions, we're not going to get into specific Azure services quite yet, but it's the kind of thing where the number of times the programmer is called means you get charged one fraction of a cent every time it executes.

And that's a consumption-based model. Now, within the cloud, you also have hourly, which are essentially time-based models, or monthly. So if you want a virtual machine, it will charge you a dollar per hour or $0.10 an hour, depending on which machine you get. And so if you use it for an hour, you pay only for an hour. If you use it for 24 hours, you only pay for 24 hours. It's a time-based model. But there are many services within the cloud that basically charge you per execution. Storage. An unmanaged storage account will charge you per gigabyte. So basically, for every service that you use, you pay as you consume it. So it could be pay-per-minute, pay-per-hour, or pay-per-execution.

2. Paradigms for hosting applications - IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

Next up, we're going to talk about those things as a service that are within the requirements. So first up is infrastructure as a service. That's abbreviated IaaS, sometimes IAS, but that's an awkward acronym. So infrastructure as a service Now these are typically infrastructure, which is virtual machines, networking, load balancers, firewalls, and all of those things that you would have to purchase and install within your own data centre or within your own corporate environment that you're renting. So that is infrastructure. And a thing like a virtual machine is basically a Windows or Linux operating system that is bare.

It doesn't do anything by itself. You have to go and develop the software or install the programmes to get it to run. That is the lowest level you can achieve in a cloud environment. The next higher level is called Platform as a Service. PaaS or PaaS That basically means that you just have to upload the code, and the cloud provider will take care of executing it. So these are typically things like web apps. Okay, so you're going to upload the code, and then you upload some configuration, and the cloud provider will execute it.

But you don't have direct access to the hardware. You don't even know what kind of hardware it runs on. Basically they give you a promise of performance, but you're notbasically in charge of the C drive and the D driveand the number of CPUs and all that stuff. The next higher level is called software as a service. And these are the types of software applications that you would typically install on your own server. So you might have SQL Server, or you might have Microsoft Word, or any of these kinds of software. However, rather than installing them on your own servers, they are available for use within the cloud, so effectively, something like SQL Server is already there.

You're not developing software. They provide you the software, and you just do the configuration. So you create tables, and you create the databases, the schemas, and the store procedures. Obviously there's some code involved in some of that stuff, but you're not writing C++ code for SQL Server, right? It's another abstraction layer above Platform as a Service. So let's talk about the differences. So we talked about infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, and your traditional setup of having your own server installed in your own environment. This graphic makes a good example of comparing and contrasting. So on the left side, you have the server running in your office. That means you are responsible for everything. You have to purchase the server, plug it into the power, plug it into the network, assign it an IP address, make sure the hard drives are there if there is any kind of VMware or anything that runs on top of that, install the operating system, all of your server software, your own code, your own data, or anything else you install. So on the left, you are responsible for installing, maintaining, and managing all of it.

When you move into the infrastructure as a service model, then basically the cloud provider, in this case Microsoft Azure, provides you with networking, servers, storage, and the operating system. You go online, you go into the Azure Portal, and you choose a Windows 2016 server with four CPUs and 8GB of RAM. They provide that to you, and they're responsible for providing that to you. And if they don't provide that to you, then you have the right, obviously, to be upset with them and to contact their support. But everything above that is your responsibility. So you're given this operating system, but then you get to install applications on it.

C drive, the D drive, your own software, third-party software, setting that up, providing the Internet role, the File Server role, or FTP role, whatever role you want to run it in, that's entirely your choice. And you'll see in the middle that those are the things for which you're responsible for in the middle.There we go. platform as a service. And that is basically taking away the ability to install applications on a platform as a service. You're uploading code; you're uploading package configuration; you're setting up the data access, but everything below that is being delivered by the cloud provider.

Again, it's another level of abstraction above the infrastructure. And finally, on the right, something like SQL Server will be provided to you in the cloud. Azure SQL Database, in this case, is all provided by the provider. And you're just setting up the configurations and using the software as it's designed, so that's software as a service. So those are the contrasts between this and that. It's a level of responsibility. The further you move to the right, the less likely it is that you have a server within your own environment, and the more likely it is that you simply logged into the web and have a function that you can use.

3. Public, private and hybrid clouds

We're getting close to the end of the concepts. We're going to talk about the public cloudversus the private cloud and the hybrid cloud. Now, the public cloud is where you can just go and sign up for cloud services. You can go to the Microsoft website and create an account with a credit card, and you will have cloud services basically without even talking to anyone. You can do the same thing for Google and for Amazon. AWS is basically available to the public, and it's available for anyone to sign up.

When we get into the private cloud, then we're talking about it as a private offering. You would need to if you can't just go, and I don't think there's an IBM public cloud. You can just go to them and say, "I need a cloud." They'll sign up for a contract. There's a sales process. Typically, it's a private network. So whether you own the hardware or not, it's basically being provided to your company and not available to anyone else. So computing services are offered. Basically, you have to go through a sales process to get a private cloud. And the final concept is hybrid clouds.

So this would be a combination of public and private clouds. An example of this would be if you have your applications mostly running in your own environment; let's say you have your own data center and private cloud. Everything's going great, but then you need to grow, you do need to scale, and you're going to have a spike in traffic. And so you augment or supplement your private cloud with public cloud services. And this combination between public and private, where you've got private for the privacy and for the control, but you use public for the growth factor, for the elasticity, and for the scalability, then that's called a hybrid model. So if we compare and contrast the three—public versus private versus hybrid—then the difference is pretty stark, right?

Anyone can sign up for it. You just go with the credit card. You don't even need to talk to anyone. You might end up with a Microsoft rep and have a corporate account. Private means, obviously, that you control the hardware, whether it's being leased to you or whether you're running it in your own data center. There's a contract involved. You can't just walk in with your credit card and sign up for private cloud or this hybrid where you're essentially a mix of public and private. So that's the first section. We just went through it a bit quickly, but we went through the core concepts of cloud computing. If you have any questions, leave them in the questions area, and we're going to move on. In the next section, talk about the next.

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AZ-900 Course for 2020 - Understand core Azure services

1. Azure architectural components

So the second big topic of this exam is to understand core Azure services, and that's worth a full 30% to 35%. This is by far the largest of the sections, so they're all pretty even, but this is 35%. Now there are a lot of topics covered. When we expand the requirements on that landing page we can see we're talking about regions, availability zones, Arm, everything from Azure Marketplace and all of the things that you can get. So we're really going to dive deeper into all of the available services. Now, I said earlier in this course that there are over 1000 individual services within that, and so we're not going to be able to cover all of them in great detail.

So this is going to be a bit of a 300-foot view. We'll start off talking about Azure regions. Now, one important benefit of using the cloud is how geographically diverse a place like Microsoft Azure is. There are currently 54 regions where you can get computing services. I'll put up a map here. We can see that it's basically almost every continent except for Antarctica. But you've got Canada, the United States, and Brazil. You've got lots of them in Western Europe.

There are two new regions that just opened up in Africa. South Africa north and South Africa west. You've got UAE. You've got India There are Asian regions and Australian regions. So, no matter where you are in the world, chances are there are Azure Computing Services within a few hundred or thousand kilometers of you. Now again, there are a lot of areas of the world that are underserved. You can see large parts of Africa or large parts of South America in Russia. It doesn't exist. But these have been growing. I can remember when there were 28, 30, 32 regions.

So over the years, Microsoft has kept opening new ones. But this is, I think, by far even larger than the availability in terms of the number of regions that AWS has. So Microsoft has the most regions in the world. This represents locations where you can obtain one or more of those Azure services. It's going to basically be: where are your users, and do you want to put your services as close to them as possible? Of course. Now the truth is not all ofthese regions are available to everyone. For instance, we can see that the US has a lot of government regions.

There's. Virginia, Texas, the Department of Defense You're not going to have access to those unless you're involved in the US government. Also China. You need to have a specific relationship with the Chinese company in order to get access to that, et cetera. One thing that's been relatively new within the Microsoft environment is this concept of availability zones. Despite the fact that AWS has had this for quite some time in each of those regions. So, if we go back and scroll to the map here, and take a region like North Central US as an example, North Central US is actually made up of multiple data centers. There are at least two data centres or more in that region that have a little bit of geographic distance between them.

So many miles, or so many kilometers, separate these buildings. So presumably, if something were to happen—if there were to be a natural disaster of some sort—then chances are that one region would be good even if the other region was taken offline. And I go back to the map again. You'll see that there are these little diamonds. that says availability zones, and not all of them have them, but more and more do. So both east of us and east of us two have small diamonds. That means that it supports those three availability zones. Availability Zones give you, as the consumer, the ability to deploy your resources into those Availability Zones specifically. So, if you're designing a system in the East United States, And if you want to have three Web servers and you want those Web servers to be distributed across three different buildings for the maximum amount of availability, then you can actually specify that Web Server One goes in Zone One, Web Server Two goes in Zone Two, and Web Server Three goes in Zone Three.

So availability zones are not available in all regions. It's only available in a few But it gives you the maximum amount of control in terms of where your Web servers and other servers get deployed. Now, one of the fundamental concepts within Azure is this concept of resource groups. So resource groups are basically a way of organizing resources. I often refer to them as a folder structure. We can see on screen a diagram of an example where at the bottom you might have resources such as virtual machines, virtual networks, table storage, a SQL database, or some other types of resources. These things get organized into resource groups. So, similar to the way files are stored in folders, resource groups are basically a way of grouping these.

Now you can even have multiple subscriptions. And so your resource groups themselves can be specific subscriptions if you want to. And you can manage those subscriptions through a management group. So basically, it allows you to not only logically group them, but then you can do group operations. So resource groups can have security elements. You can restrict access to specific employees. If you wanted to set up a resource group, that must be used by things that you Can do that with Azure Policy, et cetera. So it gives you organization, billing, and security on top of resources. Now, if you had any involvement in Azure at all, you may have heard of the Azure Resource Manager, or Arm, model of deployments. Now, this is relatively new.

I guess it's been out for five years now. But before that, Microsoft used another thing called the Azure Service Manager model, ASM, so the resource management model is relatively new. What that is is a common API that applies no matter how you interface with Azure. You're using the same API across all of them. So if you're using the Portal, or you're using the command line PowerShell CLI, or you're using some kind of SDK, no matter how you're accessing Azure, it all goes through a common API, which means you have common functionality among all the different methods.

This Azure Resource Manager then interprets those calls and basically passes on those commands to the virtual machines, to the networks, and to all of the other elements. So basically, it's how you, as a developer, operations manager, et cetera, interface with Azure. Now, there are many different benefits to using the Arm Azure Resource Manager model. and those include the ability to deploy things as a group. So you can create multiple servers and multiple networks and just put them in a package and deploy them all at once.

You can repeatedly deploy these things. And so you have what are called ARM templates. and that can allow you to deploy the same solution every single time with no variance. You can use things in declarative templates. The arm templates Again, access Control. So there's a thing called rule-based access control, or RBAC, which allows you to make sure your resources are maximally secure by tagging, et cetera. So Arm Azure Resource Manager basically enables the interface with AD.

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