Azure Core Concepts

Welcome to the core concepts of Microsoft Azure. Understanding these fundamental building blocks is essential for effectively designing, deploying, and managing cloud solutions on Azure.

1. Regions and Availability Zones

Azure is a global network of data centers. These data centers are organized into Regions, which are geographical areas that contain one or more data centers. Each region is designed to be independent, providing fault tolerance and disaster recovery capabilities.

Regions: For example, "East US", "West Europe", "Southeast Asia". Choosing a region is critical for latency, data residency, and compliance requirements.
Availability Zones: Within many regions, Availability Zones are physically separate locations within a datacenter that have independent power, cooling, and networking. They provide high availability by ensuring that applications and data are protected from datacenter failures.

2. Resource Groups

A Resource Group is a logical container that holds related Azure resources for a solution. You can create, manage, and monitor all the resources for an application as a single entity. This simplifies management, deployment, and lifecycle control.

Key Benefit: Resource groups enable you to deploy, update, and delete all the resources for your application as a unit. You can also manage access control at the resource group level.

3. Azure Resources

Azure Resources are the fundamental building blocks of your cloud solutions. These can include virtual machines, storage accounts, virtual networks, databases, web apps, and much more. Each resource is managed by its resource group.

4. Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription. ARM allows you to manage your infrastructure through declarative templates (ARM templates).

ARM Templates

ARM templates are JSON files that define the infrastructure and configuration for your solution. They allow for automated, repeatable, and consistent deployments.


{
  "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2019-04-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
  "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
  "parameters": {},
  "variables": {},
  "resources": [
    {
      "type": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts",
      "apiVersion": "2021-04-01",
      "name": "[uniqueString(resourceGroup().id, 'storageaccount')]",
      "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
      "sku": {
        "name": "Standard_LRS"
      },
      "kind": "StorageV2"
    }
  ],
  "outputs": {}
}

5. Azure Subscriptions

An Azure Subscription is a logical container that holds your Azure resources. It represents a billing boundary and provides access controls for managing your resources. You can have multiple subscriptions within an Azure Active Directory tenant.

6. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service. It helps your employees sign in and access resources, such as Azure, Microsoft 365, and many other SaaS applications.

Authentication: Verifying who a user is.
Authorization: Determining what a user can do.

            Important: Azure AD is distinct from Azure subscriptions, though they work together to manage access to resources.
        

7. Azure Virtual Network (VNet)

An Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is the foundational building block for your private network in Azure. It enables you to securely connect Azure resources to each other, to the internet, and to your on-premises networks.

8. Azure Storage

Azure Storage offers a massively scalable and secure cloud storage solution for a variety of data needs. Key storage types include:

Blob Storage: For unstructured data like images, documents, and backups.
File Storage: For fully managed cloud file shares accessible via SMB and NFS protocols.
Queue Storage: For reliable messaging between application components.
Table Storage: For NoSQL key-attribute data stores.

These core concepts form the foundation for building and managing your cloud infrastructure on Azure. As you explore different Azure services, you'll see how these concepts are applied consistently across the platform.