Cloud Environment
Benefits of cloud environments
High scalability/elasticity
Adjust your capacity and resources to the demand in time (ex. more capacities are needed during Christmas Holidays as people shop online).
Vertical scale: add capacity to an asset (ex. CPU, memory, storage).
Horizontal scaling: add more resources to supply the demand (ex. deploy more VMs)
Operational expenditure
Pay as you go model. You only pay for the resources you use. No more, no less. For example, perfect for a small business that plan to expend in the future.
High availability
Data replication around regions/availability zones.
Recovery against small to large outages or disasters.
99,999% runtime and more
Predictability
Prediction of the cost.
Prediction of the power and capacity.
Use of templates (avoid manual configuration) to deploy resources (deploy resources with exactly the same features each single time).
Governance and policies
The use of templates to deploy resources can help to manage resources and make sure those are compliant with policies and governance footprint.
No burden of managing the infrastructures (depending of the services used)
Categories of Cloud Models
Private cloud: Only used by one tenant or company. Managed by a third party providers or on-premise. Isolated from the public cloud. CapEx model (pay/rent for a physical infrastructure and hope that it will be profitable in the future).
Public cloud: Accessible from the internet. Managed by a third party provider. Everyone can buy/use resources. OpEx model (pay as you use).
Hybrid: An environment that use public and private cloud.
Type of cloud environments
Infrastructure as Service (IaaS)
The client has the larger part of responsibility, but give way more flexibility over the resources.
Similar to renting an hardware.
The client needs to manage configuration, OS, maintenance, security, etc.
Platform as Service (PaaS)
In-between IaaS and SaaS.
No control over the OS, database, physical materials, deployment tools. Most of the infrastructure is managed by the Cloud Service Provider.
Good infrastructure for application development, analytics and business intelligence.
Software as Service (SaaS)
Built in solution application managed by the Cloud Service Provider.
Do not necessitate a lot of technical knowledge.
Do not offer a lot of flexibility.
Very low level of configuration needed.
The responsibility of management/configuration/maintenance relies mainly on the CSP.
Ex. Email, Exchange, business applications
Shared responsibility
The concept of shared responsibility is central to any cloud environment. It is the fact that the client and the Cloud Service Provider share responsibility over the management of the cloud services. The level of responsibility of the client and the Cloud Service Provider depends on the services used by the client.
Private vs Public Endpoints
Private endpoints are interfaces in the VNet that give access to Azure services, but that are not exposed to the public. Public endpoints are endpoints that can be access outside of the VNet, for example from the internet.
Regions and Region Pairs
Correspond to geographical areas where multiple data centers are located and interconnected.
The location of data across multiple regions has a many advantages such as
Deploying your infrastructure closer to your clients (lower latency)
Policy compliance (deploy and store data in a specific area that complies with some specific policies)
Resiliency in case of disaster (data replication across multiple regions).
Region Pairs
Each region is paired with another region in the same geographical area, but minimally 300 miles apart. They form a pair. Infrastructure from the two regions can communicate with one and each other.
Provide resiliency. If a small to medium disaster or outage occurs in one isolated region, the datacenter in the paired region can maintain the services.
Update and maintenance operation do not occur at the same time in the two regions to ensure the availability of services and data. If maintenance operations failed in one paired region, the clients can rely on the other regions where data are duplicated to maintain services.
Ex: East Asia with South East Asia, West US with East US, etc.
Special Azure Regions
Networks isolated from the public cloud. For federal agency, specific country and governments. Ex: US Government, China, etc.
Availability Zones
Provide resiliency within a single region (resiliency from a building perspective).
Data are replicated across availability zones.
Prevent consequences from a data center failure.
3 availability zones / region
Zone redundant: replicates across 3 availability zones.
Zonal: resources deploy to specific availability zones.
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