AZ-900 Cheatsheet

What is the Cloud?

On-Premises Information Systems Architecture

• WORKLOAD
• SERVICES
• VIRTUAL MACHINES
• VIRTUALIZATION
• PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
• PHYSICAL FACILITY

Cloud Architecture

• WORKLOAD
• SERVICES
• VIRTUAL MACHINE
• MANAGEMENT PLANE(ex Azure Portal)
• VIRTUALIZATION(managed by provider)
• PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE(managed by provider)
• PHYSICAL FACILITY(managed by provider)

Types of Cloud Services

• SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE
• PLATFORM AS A SERVICE
• INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE

Accessing Cloud Services

• VPN GATEWAY(over internet)
• EXPRESS ROUTE(WAN)

What is Azure?

Azure as a Cloud Provider

• Management plane allows you to manage every services with management tools
• Azure portal, Azure Powershell, REST API are examples of management tools

Azure Clouds

• Azure Public Cloud
• Microsoft Cloud for US Government
• Microsoft Cloud Germany
• Azure and Office 365 operated by 21Vianet in China

Azure Regions

Azure Billing Models

• Capacity based billing
• Consumption based billing
• Fee-based billing

Why Choose the Cloud?

Cloud Economics

• Storage
• Compute
• Networking

CapEx vs OpEx

• On-premises capacity expansion = capital expense
  • Purchase equipment and licensing up-front
  • Depreciate and replace equipment
  • Renew licenses

• Cloud-base capacity expansion = operation expense
  • Billed monthly for what is used
  • No equipment purchase
  • May or may not require license purchase

• Capacity reduction
  • On-premises — possibly sell excess equipment
  • Cloud — reduce monthly costs

Consumption-Base Spending

• Capacity-based spending
  • On-premises resources
  • Some Azure resources – virtual machines

• Consumption-based spending
  • Pay only for what is used
  • Function apps, logic apps, storage accounts

Functional Advantages

• Provision environments in minutes rather than days, weeks, or months
  • No capital equipment purchases
  • Streamlined provisioning process
• Built-in access and allocation management
• Reduced administrative overhead

Azure Management Tools

Azure Management Plane

• Regardless of the way you manage Azure, you are using REST API as a pipeline

Azure Portal

• Web-based
• For every types of users

Azure Command Line Tools

• Azure PowerShell cmdlets
• Azure CLI

Azure REST API

• Communicates through HTTPS
• Allows to build custom applications

Azure Cloud Shell

• Web-based console interface
  • Bash shell
  • PowerShell
  • Cross-platform
• https://shell.azure.com

Azure Subscription Management

Azure Subscriptions

Subscription Types

• Pay as you go — Most common
• Enterprise — Most common
• 3rd party
• Free
• Credit

Subscription Access

Management Groups

Enterprise License Agreement

• Azure stand-alone enrollment or as part of on-premises enrollment
• Azure EA port
  • Departments, accounts, subscriptions
  • Roles — enterprise administrator, department administrator
• Cost reporting is different
  • Spending Quota — department level
• Enterprise Dev/Test Subscriptions
  • Lower cost
  • No SLA
  • Licensed for dev/test only

Azure Service Lifecycle

• General availability
• Public preview
• Private preview

Azure Cost Planning

Azure Service Purchasing

• Reserved Instances
• Low priority compute
• Performance and feature tiers
• Free accounts
• Free services

Azure Pricing Models

• Capacity-based pricing
  • Virtual machines
  • Virtual network gateways
  • Charges typically accrue per minute
• Consumption-based pricing
  • Function and logic apps
  • Storage accounts
• Combination pricing
  • Cosmos DB
  • Service bus
• Almost consumption-based
  • Container instances — charges accrue per second

Key Azure Cost Factors

• Size/Capacity
• Pricing tier
• Infrastructure versus platform functionality
• Region
• Regional zone
• Data transfer costs

Azure Cost Management Best Practices

Cost Analysis

• Many builtin tools for cost analysis

Spending Limits & Quotas

• Spending Limits
  • Apply to credit-based subscription — MSDN, Trial
  • Subscription is disabled
• Spending Quotas
  • At the enterprise department level
  • Subscriptions are not disabled
  • Sends notifications at 50%, 75%, 90% and 100% of quota
• Budgets
  • At the subscription level
  • Subscription is not disabled
  • Custom set alert/notification levels
• Using Tags
• Using Policies
• Azure Reservations & Spot Pricing
  • 1 year reserved with AHB = ~40% savings
  • 3 years reserved with AHB = ~62% savings
  • Spot with AHB = ~80% savings
• Optimizing Location
  • Regional cost differences
  • Pricing zones

Using Azure Costs Tools

• Azure Cost Advisor
• Azure Pricing Calculator
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
• Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management Tools

Azure Cost Advisor

• Reduce costs by eliminating unprovisioned ExpressRoute circuits
• Buy reserved virtual machine instances to save money over pay-as-you-go costs
• Delete unassociated public IP addresses to save money
• Use Standard Snapshots for Managed Disks

Azure Pricing Calculator

Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

Cost Management & Billing

Azure Support

Azure Support Plans

• Basic
  • Billing and subscription support
  • Azure advisors
• Developer
  • Business hours e-mail support
  • <8 hour response time
• Standard
  • <8 for minimal impact incidents
  • <1 hour response for critical business impact incidents
  • 24/7 access via e-mail and phone
• Professional direct
  • <4 hour for minimal impact incidents
  • Architecture guidance, operational support, training
• Premier
  • Dedicated architecture guidance and review
  • On-demand training
  • <15 minute response with Azure Rapid Response or Azure Event Management

Support Tickets

Azure Service Level Agreements

Azure SLAs

• Many services at 99% or 99.5 SLA for availability and performance
• Virtual Machine availability
  • 99.5% – single, premium VM
  • 99.95% – 2 or more VMs in availability set
  • 99.99% – 2 or more VMs in availability zones
• Web apps – 99.95% available
• Azure SQL database availability — up to 99.995%
• Azure CosmosDB — up to 99.99% throughput, 99,999% availability

Composite SLAs

• Solutions may implement multiple services with independent SLAs
• Services may be dependent or independent
  • Dependent – Use the sum of downtime. Example
    • Solution includes a web app (99.5% available) which is dependent on a service running in a premium virtual machine (99.9% available)
    • Downtime minutes per month ( assuming 43,200 minutes/month):
      • Web app – 21.6
      • Virtual machine – 43.2
      • Total – 64.8
    • Composite availability – 99.85%

Shared Responsibility Model

Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource

• Everything in Azure
• Sometimes referred to as services
• Fundamental object in the “management plane”
• Charges accrue at the resource level
  • Billing is at the subscription level

Azure Management Model

Azure Resource Groups

• Primary Organizational Object
• Administrative roles
• Governance by policy
• Life cycle management
• Spending allocation

Azure Marketplace

• All Azure resources
• Provided by Microsoft
• Provided by partners
• Organized by service type
• Searchable

Azure Regions & Availability Zones

Azure Regions

Availability Zones

• Storage Geo-Redundancy
  • Locally Redundant Storage
    • All regions
    • All services
    • All tiers
    • 99.9% availability
    • 11 9s durability
  • Zone Redundant Storage
    • Limited regions
    • General prupose V2, FileStorage, BlockBlob
    • All tiers
    • 99.9% availability
    • 12 9s durability
  • Geo Redundant Storage
    • Limited regions
    • General purpose V2, GPv1, Blob
    • All tiers
    • 99.99% read availability
    • 16 9s durability
    • Preview GZRS,RA-GZR
• Azure SQL Database Geo-Redundancy
  • Geo-Replication
    • Up to 4 secondaries
    • Different regions
    • Read-only
  • Auto-failover
    • Single databases
    • Multiple databases
    • Entire server(managed instance)
• CosmosDB
  • 99.99% single region
  • 99.999% multi-region(read and/or write)