Understand Azure Cloud Infrastructure

What is datacenter - Main physical building blocks that enable the Microsoft cloud , its services and partner offerings.

In my earlier article, I`ve explained about the cloud service types.

Components of Datacenter:

• Physical building that houses the infrastructure
• Security
• Physical infra components like Server hardware, Storage types, High-speed networking, Heating and cooling systems, sophisticated back ups.
• Microsoft selects the datacenter location based on the long-term viability criteria - Customer demand, proximity to populated centers, reliable networking and power source, skilled labour, and sustainable energy. These factors play a major role which manages the application and data availability by sharing the downtime across datacenters.

Azure geographies and region:

Microsoft cloud consists of the following hierarchy

• Geography (A country or region ,typically representing the boundaries for data souverneity) . Broader geographies contain one or more countries.There are 60 DC regions globally across more than 30 geographies.
• ** Regions : Each geography includes one or more region. For instance, US has 6 , while Brazil has 1.
• *** DataCenters : Regions contain one or more data centers through a dedicated low latency network . All DCs lie within a perimeter defined to meet MS required network response timeline. This way organizations have the options to implement of redundancy and failover in case the entire DC goes down.

Availability Zones:

As explained above, regions reside inside geographies. Availability zones reside within regions.

Availability zones are physically seperated DCs locations within the azure region that can tolerate to local failure(software or hardware ). Not all the regions contain AZs.

For resiliance and failure tolerance, MS offers minimum 3 AZs in all the zone-enabled regions. Each zone comprises of one or more DCs equipped with power, cooling and networking infra . So even if one zone is affected, other 2 zones can ensure non distrupt service.

Azure networking

MS supports one of the largest network in the world - 175 thousand miles of fiber optic and subsea cables and more than 190 network access points.

Thus , the partners and customers can connect via GLOBAL NETWORK , instead of public internet to access MS services like VMs, Microsoft 365, on-premises machines with low latency and better application response time.

What are the networking services and product offerings?

• Connectivity services - Connectivity between Azure resources, connectivity from an on-premises network to Azure resources using Azure VNets, Virtual WAN, VPN Gateway , Azure DNS
• Application protection services - Protect the applications using Load balancer, Azure Private link, DDoS, Firewall
• Application delivery services - Effective performance using Azure Traffic Manager, Application Gateway, Azure Front door.
• Network Monitoring - Analyse and monitor the azure network resources using Azure Network Watcher, Azure monitor, Expressroute Monitor.

Security & Data Privacy

All data are encrypted at rest and in transit. Also triple replicated in a DCs .For higher availabilty, this encrypted data can be replicated across AZs and even same geographies .

Immutable data concept - in blob and SQL ensure data is not changed.

With these concepts, users can make smart decisions when planning for cloud infrastructure and workloads. In addition, with the available guidance, support, products, technologies, and policies that help users architect and implement solutions with high levels of privacy and security.