Azure has some key building blocks, which are essential to understand as they connect everything in Azure and foundation for Azure. These are:
- Regions
- Paired Regions
- Availability Zones
- Azure Resource Groups
- Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Understanding Azure Regions and Availability Zones
1. Azure Regions
- What is a Region?: A region is a group of datacenters located close to each other. Each region has more than one datacenter. For instance, East US region has multiple datacenters in Virginia.
- Latency: Latency is the time it takes for data to travel. The datacenters in a region are close enough to each other to ensure low latency.
- Connection: The datacenters in a region are connected through a fast fiber connection.
- User Location: If you know where your users are located, you can choose a region close to them for faster data delivery.
- Features: Not all Azure features are available in all regions. Newer regions may not have all Azure products and services.
- Pricing: The cost of using Azure services varies from region to region. For example, the hourly rate for a virtual machine can vary by 20 to 30% between regions.
- In short, regions are physical locations where Azure resources are hosted. They determine where your data is stored and how fast it can be accessed.
?2. Region Pairs
- What are Region Pairs?: Azure pairs regions for redundancy to ensure data availability even if one region has issues. Each region is paired with another region within the same geographic area. For example, East US is paired with West US. The exception is Brazil South, which is paired with South Central US.
- Why Use Region Pairs?: Using region pairs for multi-region deployments ensures that if the primary region experiences an outage, you can failover to the secondary region.
3. Availability Zones
- What are Availability Zones?: Availability Zones are unique locations within an Azure region. Each zone has one or more datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking.
- Why Use Availability Zones?: Availability Zones protect your data and applications from datacenter failures. If one zone fails, the other zones can continue to serve your customers.
- in short, availability zones are like backup data centers within a region and they provide resilience by distributing resources across zones, also ensures high availability for critical applications.
4. Azure resource groups and the 5. Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Resource Groups
- Essential Containers: Resource groups are like containers in Azure. Everything you create in Azure lives inside a resource group.
- Grouping Related Resources: You can think of a resource group as a way to group related resources together for an Azure solution.
- No Exceptions: Every resource must be part of a resource group; there are no exceptions.Key Facts:
- Single Group: Each resource can exist in only one resource group.
- Adding and Removing: You can add or remove resources from a resource group anytime.
- Cross-Region: A resource group can contain resources from different regions (e.g., a database server in East US and a web app in East US2).
- Access Control: Resource groups help manage access control for administrative actions.
- Metadata Storage: Even though it’s not a resource itself, a resource group stores metadata about the resources it contains.
Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
- ARM is the Foundation and backbone of Azure. It handles creating, updating, and deleting resources. Understanding ARM is key for everything that follows.
- Universal Entry Point: Any interaction with Azure resources (via portal, CLI, APIs, etc.) goes through ARM.
- Consistent Management: Deploy, manage, and monitor resources as a group, ensuring consistent deployment.
- Dependencies and Access: Define resource dependencies and control user access.
- Tagging and Billing: Organize resources using tags and clarify billing.
- An Azure region is a set of datacenters close enough to each other to provide low latency for your users.
- Azure regions are paired for redundancy and to ensure data availability even if one region has failed
- An Availability Zone is a part of a region, and each zone has its own separate power, cooling, and networking. You use Availability Zones to protect your data and applications from failures by replicating them between zones.
- Resource groups organize your resources, and ARM manages everything behind the scenes.
