The Tech Lab by Aisha Ikram

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...

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. 

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  ...

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 

 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...

High Scalability / Elasticity Your ability to increase your capacity based on the increasing demand of traffic, memory and computing power. Cloud offer high scalability which is otherwise not an easy task to achieve using manual approach. The enterprises need to achieve scalability as their number of end user increase, so do their data hits and network traffic. In order to meet the increased requirement for the system, it needs to be scaled. There are two ways of scaling: Vertical Scaling/ Scaling Up  It means upgrade to a bigger server or powerful machines. If on-premises, this has to be done manually. you need to buy expensive machines/hardware and software to upgrade the server to host the software components. Cloud manages this automatically and you just have to pay accordingly, you don't have to buy any physical infrastructure, just scale up manually based on your specified conditions (e.g; more than 85% of CPU consumption or 70% of memory consumption etc). Cloud portal has sc...

Logic Apps are one of the compute solutions offered by Microsoft Azure. Logic Apps are design first workflows hosted in Azure in a serverless mode and implemented through underlying Azure Service Fabric. They have a visual design to connect your applications, components, services and APIs together in a workflow which is triggered by some event. As Logic Apps are executed in a serverless mode, so you are charged for the consumption plan price which is pay per execution. Logic Apps are used to integrate systems hence they are also called integration service. Components of Logic App Logic Apps require following: Trigger (Only One)  of any supported types (HTTP or other triggers (check list of supported triggers on Microsoft website) to trigger the execution Conditions/loops  (outcome from triggers is checked against a condition or put in a loop) based on which different Actions are executed Actions   are t...