Day 04: Azure Basics, Purchasing & Licensing Options, Account, Subscription, Support and Billing

Azure Basics

• Azure is Microsoft's private & public cloud computing platform
• Provides developers & IT admins tools to provide, build, manage, and deploy applications.
• More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies run on the Microsoft Cloud

Azure services

• More than 100 services..
• Compute services such as VMs and containers that can run your applications
• Database services that provide both relational and NoSQL choices
• Identity services that help you authenticate and protect your users
• Networking services that connect your datacenter to the cloud, provide high availability or host your DNS domain
• Storage solutions that can accommodate massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data
• AI and machine-learning services can analyze data, text, images, comprehend speech, and make predictions using data

How Azure works

• It uses virtualization
• Azure repeats virtualization in massive scale

Purchasing & Licensing Options

Azure purchasing options

1. From Microsoft by signing up through Azure website Azure.com
2. From Microsoft through a Microsoft representative
3. From a Microsoft partner

Licensing

Free-trial

• Free access to some Azure products for 12 months
• $200 USD credit to spend for the first 30 days on any service.
• Sign-up from sign-up page

Pay-as-you-go

• Get billed for services as you use them

CSP (Cloud Solution Provider)

• Buy Azure services from a Microsoft Partner organization
• You will be billed by the partner organization.
• First line Azure support will be provided by the partner organization.

Azure in Open licensing

• You buy from a third party reseller using a 12 month upfront commitment
• Buy Azure Monetary Commitment credits to use in your subscription.

Enterprise Agreement (EA)

• For big enterprises
• EA Portal: enterprise overview of all the spending and budgeting for organization's Azure spend
• Discounts: E.g. up to 30% cheaper virtual machines.
• Enterprise Level Capabilities and Features: Access to enterprise-only service.

Account, Subscription, Support and Billing

• Requires: Phone number, credit card identity verification, Microsoft/GitHub account.

Subscription

• Used to create and use Azure services
• Created for you when you sign up
• ?? Logical container used to provision resources in Azure such as virtual machines, databases and more.
• ?? When you create an Azure resource like a VM, you identify the subscription it belongs to
• ?? Each subscription is a separate entity that can't be merged.

Multiple Azure Subscriptions

• You can create new subscriptions to separate e.g.
• Or due to subscription limits:

Billing

• You'll receive a monthly invoice with payment instructions provided
• Customize billing

Support

Free

• 24/7 access to the online documentation, community support, and new Azure capabilities demo videos on YouTube
• Demo videos by Azure engineers are available on Azure Friday, Microsoft Mechanics, Azure portal how-to videos playlists
• Azure Quickstart Center: Guided experience in the portal.
• Azure Service Health: Insights on issues related to your Azure services
• Azure Advisor: Personalized recommendations on how to optimize your cost and performance.

Basic support

• Included free for everyone.
• Billing and subscription management support
• Ability to submit as many support tickets as you need

Community support

Channel

Description

Azure Knowledge Center

The Azure Knowledge Center is a searchable database that contains answers to common support questions.

Microsoft Tech Community

Get support by reading responses to Azure technical questions from Microsoft's developers and testers.

Stack Overflow

You can review answers to questions from the development community.

Server Fault

Review community responses to questions about System and Network Administration in Azure.

Azure Feedback Forums

Read ideas and suggestions for improving Azure made by Azure users.

Twitter

Tweet @AzureSupport to get answers and support from the official Microsoft Azure Twitter channel.

Paid

• ?? Azure Support plans
• You can also purchase Azure Premier support