Microsoft Azure Explained - Azure Training | Cloud Academy

0:01 [Music] so what is Microsoft Azure to put it simply it's a collection of online services that organizations can use to build hosts and deliver applications the best part is that you don't need to have your own data center or even any servers because Azure runs in Microsoft's data centers around the world which your users can access over the Internet not only does this approach save you the trouble of having to build and maintain your own on-premises IT infrastructure but it can also save you money because you only have to pay for what you use and you can scale your as your resources up and down as needed for most applications you need three core elements compute storage and networking

0:47 let's start with compute in as yours early days Microsoft offered only one type of compute service virtual machines or VMs for short these are machines that run either Windows or Linux if you currently have an application running on a Windows or Linux server then the most straightforward way to migrate it to Azure is to do what's called a lift and shift migration that is you simply lift the application from your on-premises server and shift it to a virtual server in the cloud as your VMs are known as infrastructure-as-a-service because their traditional IT infrastructure components that are offered as a service later Microsoft came out with what's known as a platform as a service offering called as your app service this platform lets you host web and mobile applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure after doing a minor

1:34 amount of configuration you can just upload your code to an app service instance and let Azure take care of the details in most cases this is a better solution than using virtual machines but there are times when it makes more sense to use VMs for example if you have an application that's not a web or mobile app then you can't use app service so you have to use a VM these days the hottest compute technology is containers these are self-contained software environments for example a container might include a complete application plus all of the third-party packages it needs containers are somewhat like virtual machines except they don't include the operating system this makes it easy to deploy them because they're very lightweight compared to virtual machines in fact containers run on virtual machines Microsoft provides a

2:19 variety of ways to run containers the simplest way is to as your container instances this service lets you run a container using a single command if you have a more complex application that involves multiple containers then you'll probably want to use azure kubernetes service which is what's known as a container Orchestrator it makes it easy to deploy and manage multi container applications before we move on I should mention one more compute service it's called as your functions and it's Microsoft's main server less offering as your functions is kind of like Azure app service except that it executes individual functions rather than entire applications and you only pay for it when it gets used when you provision an app service instance it runs until you shut it down and you pay for it the whole time it's running

3:04 although it's possible to configure as your functions in the same way it's usually better to use the consumption plan which means that it only uses resources when a function is running so you only pay when a function is running okay that was a lot of compute options now let's move on to storage believe it or not there are even more options for storage than for compute that's because I'm also including databases and other data stores in the storage category the simplest form of storage is called blob storage it's referred to as object storage but really it's just a collection of files it's not like a normal file system though because it doesn't have a hierarchical folder structure it has a flat structure it's typically used for unstructured data such as images videos and log files one of the great things about it is that it

3:50 has multiple access tiers hot cool and archive the hot tier is for frequently accessed files the cool tier is for files you expect to access only about once a month or less the advantage is that it costs less than the hot tier as long as you don't access it frequently the archive tier is for files that are rarely accessed such as backup files it has the lowest storage costs but the highest retrieval costs it also takes several hours to retrieve files from the archive tier if you need hierarchical file storage there are a couple of options the one that will probably seem more familiar is Azure file storage which is like a typical SMB file server it serves up file shares that you can mount on Windows servers the less familiar option is Azure data Lake

4:35 storage gen - this is Hadoop compatible storage for use with data analytics applications okay now how about relational databases in an on-premises Microsoft environment sequel server is the most commonly used database the cloud equivalent is Azure sequel database it's very similar to sequel server although it's not 100% compatible if you need to run an open-source database then Microsoft still has you covered it offers Azure database from my sequel Maria DB and PostgreSQL all of these databases including both sequel database and the open source options are suitable for online transaction processing on the other hand if you need to build a data warehouse then Azure synapse analytics is the best choice if you release an

5:21 application that attracts a very large number of users you may find that a traditional relational database can't scale to meet the demand one common solution is to use a so called no sequel database these databases are designed to handle far more data than relational databases however in order to achieve that massive scalability they have to sacrifice something so they don't support all of the features of relational databases nonetheless they have become a cornerstone of many cloud-based applications Microsoft's main no sequel offering is called cosmos DB it's an amazing database service that can scale globally another no sequel service is Azure cash for Redis which is typically used to speed up applications by caching frequently requested data that's a lot of storage options and I

6:08 still didn't cover them all but you don't need to know every single option at this point so let's move on to network services when you create a virtual machine on Azure you have to put it in a virtual network or v-net a virtual network is very similar to an on-premises network each virtual machine in a v-net gets an IP address and it can communicate with other VMs in the same v-net you can also divide a v-net into subnets and define routes to specify how traffic should flow between them by default all outbound traffic from a VM to the Internet is allowed if you also want to allow inbound traffic then you need to assign a public IP address to the VM if you want VMs in one V net to be able to communicate with VMs in another v-net then you can connect the V Nets together using V net peering by the way so far I've only been talking about

6:55 virtual machines but other resources such as kubernetes clusters can be envy nets too if you want to create a secure connection between a V net and an on-premises network then you can use either a VPN which stands for virtual private network or Azure Express route a VPN sends encrypted traffic over the public Internet whereas Express route communicates over a private dedicated connection between your site and Microsoft's azure network Express route is much more expensive than a VPN but it provides higher speed and reliability since it's a dedicated connection there are plenty of other network services available as well but the ones I've covered are enough to give you a good high level understanding about your networking Asia also provides a wide variety of other services outside of the

7:40 core compute storage and networking categories such as in hot areas like artificial intelligence DevOps I'll go over some of those later the easiest way to understand how Azure works is to actually use it so in the next lesson we'll create a virtual machine if you're ready then go to the next video