Companies across a wide range of sectors are moving their apps and infrastructure to the cloud more frequently, with Microsoft Azure being a popular platform. The demand for skilled personnel with the ability to administer, implement, and enhance Azure services is fueled by this broad adoption. Learn this from scratch with this Microsoft Azure Tutorial and get started by exploring our Azure course syllabus.
Introduction to Azure
Before learning Azure basics for beginners, you should know about cloud computing.
What is Cloud Computing?
The provision of computer services, including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence, via the Internet is known as cloud computing (“the cloud”).
- You use a cloud provider to access these services as needed rather than owning and maintaining your own computing infrastructure.
- You just pay for the services you use, which helps to save expenses, boost productivity, and grow as required.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
The advantages of cloud computing:
- Cost Savings: Only the resources you use are paid for.
- Flexibility and Scalability: Resources can be readily adjusted to match demand.
- Accessibility: With an internet connection, you can access data and apps from any location.
- Reliability: Reliable infrastructure with inherent redundancy is frequently provided by cloud providers.
- Security: Reputable cloud service providers make significant investments in security protocols.
- Faster Deployment: Introduce new services and apps more rapidly without having to go through the drawn-out setup and procurement procedures.
- Automatic Updates: Software maintenance and updates are usually taken care of by cloud providers.
Cloud Computing Models
The types of cloud environments and methods for accessing computer resources are defined by a number of cloud computing models:
- Deployment Models: Public, private, hybrid, and community clouds are the different deployment models.
- Service Models: Serverless computing, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are examples of service models.
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What is Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a vast and constantly growing collection of cloud computing services designed to assist businesses in developing, maintaining, and implementing applications across a vast, international network.
Imagine it as a huge network of computers and software that are available online, providing everything from networking and artificial intelligence to processing power and storage.
Purpose of Azure:
Azure’s primary goal is to give companies and developers a platform that allows them to:
- Build and deploy applications: Use a variety of programming languages, tools, and frameworks while creating and deploying apps.
- Data management and storage: Providing safe, scalable storage options.
- Analyze data: Offering machine learning and big data analytics services.
- Run virtual machines: hosting different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows.
- Create and manage networks: establishing virtual networks and tying together on-premises and cloud resources.
- Utilize artificial intelligence: Make use of artificial intelligence incorporating AI features into programs.
- Data backup and recovery: Providing catastrophe recovery and business continuity solutions.
Azure wants to eliminate the need for businesses to purchase and maintain their own physical infrastructure by offering a flexible, scalable, and affordable cloud platform that can be tailored to different IT requirements.
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Global Infrastructure of Azure
A huge worldwide network of data centers makes up the Microsoft Azure global infrastructure. It is intended to offer a cloud computing platform that is secure, dependable, and scalable. This infrastructure’s essential elements are:
Azure Geographies
These are certain global locations that have at least one Azure region. Geographies can correspond with nations (like the US and India) or more general markets (like Europe and Asia Pacific). They are made to guarantee data residency, resilience, compliance, and sovereignty. There are usually two or more regions in each geography.
Azure Regions
A collection of data centers situated inside a latency-defined boundary and linked by a specific 1 low-latency network is known as an Azure region. Azure services are housed in these two main building blocks. Microsoft already has more than 60 Azure regions worldwide, and more are on the horizon. A variety of Azure services are offered in each location.
Some of the Azure regions in India include:
- Central India: Pune (with 3 Availability Zones)
- South India: Chennai (no Availability Zones listed in the immediate search results)
- West India: Mumbai (no Availability Zones listed in the immediate search results)
Azure Availability Zones
These are data centers in an Azure region that are physically and logically divided and have their own power, network, and cooling systems. They are linked by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than 2 milliseconds and offer fault isolation.
- You may run mission-critical applications with fault tolerance and high availability by utilizing availability zones.
- There are three Availability Zones in several Azure areas.
- For example, there are three Availability Zones in the Central India region (Pune) in India.
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Azure Portal: Navigating and Using the Web Interface
You may manage your Microsoft Azure resources using a graphical user interface through the Azure Portal, a web-based, unified console.
It seeks to be a user-friendly and all-inclusive platform for creating, implementing, and overseeing your cloud solutions.
Key Components of the Azure Portal Interface
Global Header: At the very top is the Global Header, which offers global controls like,
- Azure Logo: When you click the Azure logo, the home page is often displayed.
- Search Bar: You can look for services, resources, and documentation using it.
- Cloud Shell: A command-line interface that runs in a browser.
- Notifications: Shows updates and warnings.
- Settings: Allows you to alter the initial view, theme, and other aspects of your portal experience.
- Help + Support: Gives users access to resources for support.
- Feedback: Enables you to provide Microsoft with comments.
Portal Menu (Navigation Pane): Usually located on the left (it can be docked or flown out), it offers access to:
- Home: A place to start that offers recent resources and shortcuts.
- Dashboard: A view of your data and resources that you may customize. It is possible to make more than one dashboard.
- All Services: A detailed inventory of every Azure service that is offered.
- Create a Resource: You can begin developing new Azure services by creating a resource.
- Favorites: An area where you may quickly access commonly used services by pinning them.
Content Pane: The content pane is where you interact with services and resources on the portal. Depending on what you choose from the dashboard or menu, the content varies.
A new “blade”, a side panel containing settings or information, often appears in this pane when you choose a resource.
Navigating the Azure Portal
- Using the Menu: To access various services or features, click on items in the Portal Menu.
- Using the Dashboard: To access related resources or information, click on tiles on your dashboard. You can add, remove, and rearrange tiles to personalize your dashboard.
- Using Search: To locate particular resources, services, or documents fast, use the search box located in the global header.
- Breadcrumbs: To assist you in returning to earlier levels of a service, breadcrumbs frequently show up at the top of the content pane when you go deeper into it.
Using the Azure Portal
- Creating Resources: Locate and choose the service you wish to create (such as a virtual machine or storage account) after clicking “+ Create a resource” from the portal menu or the home page. You will be guided through the configuration procedure.
- Managing Resources: You can locate a resource (for example, by searching or by selecting “All resources”) once it has been created. You can customize, monitor, and work with a resource by clicking on it to access its management blade.
- Monitoring: To keep tabs on the functionality and condition of your resources, use Azure Monitor, which is available via the portal.
- Cost Management: You may track your Azure expenditures, examine expenses, and create budgets in the “Cost Management + Billing” area.
- Customization: The portal can be personalized by:
- Changing the theme.
- Configuring the startup view.
- Personalizing your dashboard.
- Pinning favorite services to the menu.
The Azure Portal, which offers both a high-level overview and detailed management over your cloud environment, is intended to serve as your primary point of contact with Azure.
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Azure Subscriptions and Resource Groups
Your Azure resources are grouped together logically by an Azure subscription. It acts as a security and policy border in addition to being the billing base unit.
Consider a subscription to be:
- A billing boundary: You only have to pay for one subscription, which includes all of the costs for the resources you utilize.
- An access control boundary: You can control who has access to the resources included in a subscription.
- A logical organization unit: It assists you in allocating your cloud resources, frequently taking into account project-specific requirements, development/production environments, or organizational structures.
You require at least one Azure subscription to create and use Azure services. A company may have more than one subscription for different uses.
Azure Resource Groups
A logical container for Azure-deployed resources is called an Azure Resource Group. These could be databases, online apps, storage accounts, virtual machines, etc.
Important features of resource groups:
- Logical grouping: They assist you in managing and arranging all of the resources for a project or application collectively.
- Lifecycle management: The life cycles of resources in a resource group are usually comparable. They can all be deleted, updated, and deployed at once.
- Management scope: You can implement policies and access control (RBAC, or role-based access control) at the resource group level. All of the resources in that resource group will inherit these policies.
- Metadata storage: You designate a location when you create a resource group. The info pertaining to the resource group is kept here. The group’s resources may be located in several locations.
Consider your Azure account (the subscription) to be a house. There are various rooms (resource groups) within the house, and each room has appliances and furnishings (Azure resources). You may choose who has access to the entire house or just certain rooms, and the house has an address for invoicing purposes.
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Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Azure’s deployment and management service is called Azure Resource Manager (ARM). You can add, modify, and remove resources from your Azure subscription due to its consistent management layer. ARM manages your requests when you communicate with Azure via the portal, CLI, SDKs, or REST APIs.
Key Benefits of Azure Resource Manager:
Some of the key advantages of ARM:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Using an ARM template or Bicep file, you may specify every aspect of your Azure infrastructure. This enables you to guarantee uniformity throughout your environments and automate deployments.
- Declarative Syntax: ARM templates express the desired state of your infrastructure using JSON (or Bicep) so you don’t have to write the programming commands to get there.
- Repeatable Deployments: Throughout the development lifecycle, deploy your infrastructure in a consistent and recurring manner. Because ARM templates are idempotent, you can use the same template more than once and get the same outcome.
- Orchestration: ARM makes sure that resources are created in the right sequence by managing dependencies between them during deployment. In order to expedite the process, it also deploys resources in parallel where feasible.
- Modularity: Your infrastructure can be linked together by dividing it into smaller, reusable templates.
- Extensibility: ARM has extensive integrations with other Azure tools and services.
- Security: To control who has access to your resources and what they can do, you can use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
- Tagging: Give resources tags to help with management, cost tracking, and logical organization.
ARM Template
A JSON file known as an ARM template specifies which Azure resources should be deployed to a resource group, subscription, management group, or tenant.
Key sections of an ARM template:
- $schema: Indicates the template language’s schema version.
- contentVersion: Indicates the template’s version.
- parameters: Specify the values you can enter when the template is deployed.
- variables: Specify values that your template uses repeatedly.
- functions: Specify unique functionalities that the template allows you to utilize.
- resources: Indicate which Azure resources need to be updated or deployed.
- outputs: Indicate the values that will be returned following deployment.
Example of a simple ARM template (creating a storage account):
{
“$schema”: “https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2019-04-01/deploymentTemplate.json#”,
“contentVersion”: “1.0.0.0”,
“resources”: [
{
“type”: “Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts”,
“apiVersion”: “2021-08-01”,
“name”: “[parameters(‘storageAccountName’)]”,
“location”: “[resourceGroup().location]”,
“sku”: {
“name”: “Standard_LRS”
},
“kind”: “StorageV2”,
“properties”: {}
}
],
“parameters”: {
“storageAccountName”: {
“type”: “string”,
“metadata”: {
“description”: “The name of the storage account to create.”
}
}
}
}
In this instance, a storage account is defined by the template using a parameter called name.
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Offerings of Azure
Here are the offerings of Azure:
Compute:
Azure provides a wide range of services that are divided into categories such as:
- Compute: Use virtual machines to run Linux and Windows instances.
- Example: Using an Azure virtual machine to host a web server.
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): A managed Kubernetes solution for setting up and overseeing containerized apps.
- Azure Functions: With Azure Functions, you can run code without worrying about maintaining infrastructure due to serverless computing.
Storage:
- Blob Storage: Scalable object storage for unstructured data.
- Example: Storing documents and photos for a website.
- File Storage: Cloud-based file shares that are fully managed and reachable over the SMB protocol.
- Queue Storage: A messaging service that facilitates dependable communication between the various parts of an application.
- Disk Storage: Azure Virtual Machines’ block-level storage volumes.
Networking:
- Virtual Network: Create separate, private networks in the cloud using it.
- Load Balancer: Distribute incoming network traffic among several resources using it.
- VPN Gateway: Provide safe, inter-premises communication.
- Azure DNS: A scalable and highly available DNS solution.
Databases:
- Azure SQL Database: One fully maintained relational cloud database service.
- Azure Cosmos DB: It is a multi-model, globally distributed database service designed for NoSQL applications.
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL and MySQL: Open-source engine-based managed database services are provided by it.
Analytics:
- Azure Synapse Analytics: Big data analytics, enterprise data warehousing, and data integration are all combined in Azure Synapse Analytics, an infinite analytics service.
- Azure Machine Learning: A collaborative, code-first, low-code solution for creating, implementing, and maintaining machine learning models is Azure Machine Learning.
- Azure Data Factory: It is a cloud-based data integration tool that lets you design data-driven processes for coordinating large-scale data transformation and transfer.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) + Machine Learning:
- Azure AI Services: Pre-built AI skills including speech, language, vision, and decision-making are available through Azure AI Services.
- Example: Image analysis with Azure AI Vision.
- Azure OpenAI Service: Large-scale AI models, including GPT models, are accessible through Azure OpenAI Service.
Internet of Things (IoT):
- Azure IoT Hub: A managed service that makes it possible for IoT devices and the cloud to communicate in both directions securely and dependably.
- Azure IoT Central: A platform for IoT applications that makes developing IoT solutions easier.
Management and Governance:
- Azure Portal: An alternative to command-line and API-based tools is Azure Portal, a web-based, unified console.
- Azure Cost Management: Resources for tracking, allocating, and optimizing cloud expenditures.
- Azure Policy: Aids in the large-scale assessment of compliance and the enforcement of organizational standards.
Security:
The full suite of services, tools, and integrated features that Microsoft offers to safeguard data, apps, and infrastructure housed on the Azure cloud platform is referred to as security in Azure.
- Physical Security: Microsoft takes strict precautions to secure the actual data centers.
- Infrastructure Security: Azure’s underlying hardware and software are included in the category of infrastructure security.
- Network Security: Controls to restrict network access and guard against dangers are known as network security.
- Identity and Access Management: Making sure that only services and people with permission can access resources.
- Data Security: It is the process of safeguarding data using techniques like access controls and encryption.
- Application Security: Resources and services to help protect Azure-based apps.
This is but a small sample of the wide range of services that Azure provides. It is made to meet a variety of IT needs, from powering intricate, worldwide solutions to running basic applications.
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Conclusion
Azure provides a wide range of security tools and services to help you safeguard your cloud environment. Maintaining a secure posture on Azure requires utilizing these technologies and adhering to security best practices. We hope you have gained fundamental understanding with this Microsoft Azure Tutorial. Hone your skills with our Azure training in Chennai.
