A quick understanding of Azure Cloud core components?
The purpose of this story to share a basic understanding of Azure building blocks. You may have knowledge of other cloud services like AWS, Google etc. However, when you start working on Azure Cloud it requires to understand the basic concepts of Azure services which helps to deliver the project with a better understanding to suffice the business’ needs. End of this story you will feel ready to take the first step towards spining up your first customer in Azure.
Although each cloud service provider has the best practices to use that allow the companies to fulfil the customer’s requirements with standard approaches. This story will help you to get knowledge on the below aspects:
- Cloud benefits, Cloud service models
- Azure Tenant, Azure subscriptions and management groups.
- Azure resources, resource groups, and Azure Resource Manager.
Cloud benefits:
Cloud provides various benefits than the on-prem environment. For instance, the cloud provides the ease of implementing high availability, scalability, elasticity, agility, and disaster recovery.
Geo-distribution: To give the best performance across the Globe, we can deploy our app in a nearby regional data centre.
Elasticity: As per business need, we can configure the Cloud-based applications/resources.
Agility: Cloud provides the agility to configure your resource quickly.
Scalability: Applications in the cloud can be scaled in two ways while taking advantage of autoscaling:
- Vertically: Computing capacity can be increased by adding RAM or CPUs
- Horizontally: Computing capacity can be increased by adding more virtual machines (instances) to your configuration.
Reliability: Almost no downtime which increases the reliability of the business.
Disaster Elasticity: Azure backup services, data replication, and geo-distribution give functionality to keep data safe in case of any failures.
Service models:
IaaS (Infra-as-a-Service): This model manages physical servers and keeps the hardware up to date but OS and network support will be taken care of by the cloud tenant.
PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service): This model manages the virtual machines (VMs0 and networking resources, and the cloud tenant manages their applications.
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service): In this model the cloud provider manages all aspects of the application environment: VMs + networking resources + data storage + and applications too. Example- Office 365.
What my experience says, until you understand the basic architecture of cloud services and their usage, you can’t produce a robust cloud solution. There might be many cases where IT individual don't have expertise in all streams. For instance, you might be good in the apps area but need to learn how infrastructure needs to be set up or works. You might be good in apps and infra but need to learn security aspects and so on and forth many scenarios you can consider here.
The aim of the Azure platform to help business and meet their organisational goals. It provides a range of cloud services, including compute, Databases, Storage, Analytics and networking. What are the Azure architecture components such as tenant, management groups, subscription and resource group? Think of these core elements that are needed to build a strong foundation in Azure Azure Cloud. It’s the first step in understanding how to build cloud practice.
As we know the Azure cloud platform provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with 100s of cloud services. IaaS is mainly referred to VMs, Storage, Virtual networks etc. whereas PaaS components are packaged services that get to be consumed in a serverless way.
Need to understand first, how the Azure could is structured?
Levels from the top to bottom heriarchy :
A Tenant/directory: At the top level, we have something known as a tenant which is also known as the directory. Tenant or directory has its human-readable globally unique identifier ‘tenant id’ such as arunkrsoam@gmail.com <Company production>. We also refer to it as an account too.
Management groups: These groups help us to manage organisational level access, policy, and compliance for underneath subscriptions. All underneath subscriptions in a management group automatically inherit the policies assigned to the management group.
Subscriptions: An account or tenant may have many subscriptions. A subscription groups together user accounts and the resources that have been created by those user accounts. For instance :
Azure service like Azure VMs, Database will not be deployed until we have a subscription. There are various types of subscriptions that Azure offers e.g free Trial, pay-as-you-go, standard support, developer support and professional direct support
Resource groups: Bottom levels resources are combined into resource groups, which act as a logical container into which Azure resources like web apps, databases, and storage accounts are deployed and managed.
For instance, we have a subscription for a company that has multiple applications where for each application we have a separate resource group to deploy the azure services.
Resources: Resources are instances of azure services that we create, like virtual machines, Azure function, Analytics services, storage, or SQL databases etc
Facts to know more :
- 10,000 management groups can be supported in a single directory/a tenant.
- A management group tree can support up to six levels of depth. This limit doesn’t include the root level or the subscription level.
- Each management group and subscription can support only one parent.
- All subscriptions and management groups are within a single hierarchy in each directory.
- In case we want to implement organisation policies then we can assign them at subscription or at management groups level.
- Organizations can use subscriptions to manage costs and the resources that are created by users, teams, or projects. A subscription helps to track billing for each subscription.
- For each subscription, there are limits or quotas on the number of resources that we can create and use.
Here, I shared my experience that I have faced during my first project on Azure Cloud.
Summary
This article enables you to gain the concept of Azure core services which help to deliver the project with a better understanding to suffice the business’ needs. I had knowledge of AWS cloud services and started working on Azure Cloud without knowing how the Azure Cloud is structured. I would recommend here, first understand that how the Azure cloud is structured and what services it provides rather than start implementing directly with general concepts of other cloud providers.
Please give your feedback to make a better article/story for future usage.
Warm regards,
Arun Kumar
