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Cloud Basics and Fundamentals Series

In order to understand anything for need to communicate or understand the language in which a system or problem is described. Cloud Computing have its own have language or technicalities which are very important to understand in order to understand the potential or the Cloud services. This cloud concept glossary with key terms and description is addressed briefly and concisely under the Series of Cloud Basics and Fundamentals . Microsoft have created an exam with Exam ref Az-900 for the basics of cloud for those people who are using or interacting with cloud in their roles, they could be administrators, clients or users. This Series have following with a great effort to summarise the points in the relevant cloud topics and if you are a beginner in Cloud Computing, you can quickly go through them without wasting much time on long articles and Microsoft documentation . However for deeper dive I found the best resource is Microsoft Docs. Some of the concepts have been re-phrased from the
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Cloud Basics: Tenancy, Directories and Subscription

When I first started learning about cloud the concept of tenancy, and directories was very confusing as I could have multiple tenants and each tenant could have multiple directories and subscriptions etc. As this was the basics of every resource access, creation, assignment , the concept is very important to understand.  I will try to make it as simple as I can. For more information about these interlinked concepts, I will re-direct you to the pertinent topic and it will make it easy to understand.  👉 I would highly recommend to complete your study of Cloud Basics and Fundamental Series to understand the important key terms and concepts of cloud. Tenant Every organization when registers/buy the Azure portal subscription from Microsoft, for them a record is created in the Microsoft Active Directory along with their information. This record of Active directory is called Tenant. 
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Virtual Machines

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Virtual Machines are one of the Azure Compute way to host your solution and is the base Infrastructure component of the Cloud. Virtual Machines are logical machines which are created by the cloud using Hypervisors but for end user they act like physical machines containing all the components like RAM, CPU, Storage and Network. The physical hardware resources of the datacentre are intelligently managed and allocated to the virtual machines and these virtual machines are being paid for according to their location, performance and storage parameters. Hypervisor is a technology which manages these virtual machine allocations. One physical machine share its resource to multiple VMs. VMs have their own Operating system which is selected at the time of the creation of the VM.  Lab : For more information about what features/options Cloud offers for a VM, lets look into the Azure Portal .  you can also create a VM using Azure CLI, CLI, PowerShell and ARM Templates. I will create  separate Labs
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Azure Compute Solutions

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Azure offers a number of ways to host your application code on the cloud. The term compute refers to the hosting model for the computing resources that your application runs on. There are many compute service that Azure offer. The most commonly used are: Virtual Machines (IAAS) App Services (PAAS- Hosting Web APIs, Mobile APIs, Web Apps etc) Container Instances and Kubernetes (clusters of containers) Azure Batch Azure Service Fabric Serverless Solutions  Azure Functions Azure Logic Apps In order to decide which type of hosting environment or compute solution you need. the following flowchart from Microsoft will help you to choose a compute service for your application. Click to Enlarge - (Photo Courtesy: Microsoft) If your application consists of multiple workloads, evaluate each workload separately. A complete solution may incorporate two or more compute services. 👉The first approach to  migrate your solution is to " Lift and shift ". This is a strategy for migrating a work
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Cloud High Durability and Disaster Recovery

 High Durability and Disaster Recovery (DR) Your ability to recover from a disaster and to prevent the loss of data.  Solutions that recover from a disaster is known as Disaster Recovery (DR). This is achieved by high availability due to scalable solutions. These concepts are all related to each other.  The scalable and redundant solutions provide High availability which prevent the disaster recovery. Read more about related concepts of redundancy in  High availability , and  High Scalability   Durability Parameters  Do you have a backup?  How fast can you restore that backup?  Does your backup still work?  How do you ensure current live data is not corrupt? 
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Cloud Infrastructure - Load Balancer

Load Balancer A load balancer allows you to evenly distribute traffic to multiple servers in one or datacentre. If a datacentre or server becomes unavailable (unhealthy) the load balancer will route the traffic to only available datacentres with servers.  Load Balancer is very important infrastructure component which runs in front of every service to mange and route traffic load. Load balancer is used for scalable and available solutions. Running your workload across multiple Availability Zones ensures that if I or 2  AZs become unavailable your service / applications remains available.  load balancer behind the scene manages all the traffic across regions and scaled solutions  For more information about scalability and availability read here High Scalability  and the  High Availability 
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Cloud Basics - Availability and Redundancy

 High Availability  Your ability for your service to remain available by ensuring there is  *no single point Of failure and/or ensure a certain level of performance. High availability is achieved by replicating the images in multiple zones or data centres. So in case of any geo-disaster the alternative systems serve the users, hence it is called highly available. There are three types of redundancies: Local Redundancy Zone Redundancy Global/Geo Redundancy Local redundancy The default behaviour is locally replicating the data/resource images in multiple copies in the same datacentre. The resources by default have three copies. so if one copy fail to serve the other two are still available. This mode has less availability comparing to the other two but still it provides some piece of mind. Zones Redundancy  In this mode three copies of the resources are kept in three different zones or data centres in the same location/city. For example, UK West is a location which may have multiple zone
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