Chapter 1

Introducing Microsoft Azure

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing the cloud

Differentiating among the cloud computing models

Introducing the major Microsoft Azure services

Starting your Azure subscription

Learning how Azure deploys product updates

Welcome to cloud computing, and welcome to Microsoft Azure! I'm not sure what occurred in your professional or personal life to lead you to read this book, but I'm glad you're here with me. In this chapter, I cover ground-level terminology, beginning with precisely what buzzwords the cloud and cloud computing mean.

By the end of this chapter, you'll have your very own Azure subscription running at the free tier. Are you excited? I hope so!

What Is Cloud Computing?

Ask one hundred people to define cloud computing and I am confident the responses may make you laugh, cry, or think a bit. You see, many people at first think cloud technology is anything but shared compute capacity and resources using a common interface.

Most people use cloud services whether they're aware of doing so or not. Think of your smartphone. Where do you think your photos, media, files, and settings are being backed up? What is behind your ability to retrieve your content wherever you are in the world, provided you have an internet connection?

Do you use a web-hosting company to host your personal website? Where is the physical server that houses your website? How about accessing that digital video service or music heard over the Internet?

These scenarios are examples of cloud computing, in which you simply rent resources on another organization's infrastructure.

The resources you rent consist of the following hardware and software components:

• Compute:Compute is raw computing power - the central processing unit (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM) that form the platform for applications and data.
• Storage:Persistent storage means you have a place on Microsoft's servers to store your files and other data. When you save a file to a cloud-hosted storage account, the file should remain in place forever, or at least until you move or delete it.
• Network: Azure provides a software-defined network infrastructure on which you can host your virtual machines and other Azure services. Because the cloud almost always involves an internet connection, online and cloud are essentially synonymous. I say almost always because a business can create a private cloud that shares most attributes of a public cloud but is local to its private network environment. Microsoft also sells a private, portable version of Azure called Azure Stack.
• Analytics: You'll never get to touch the cloud provider's compute, storage, or network resources. The closest you'll get is viewing its telemetry data in your web browser or from a management app. Thus, Azure and other public cloud providers give you tools to see precisely how much of their services you consume each minute. Cloud analytics also gives you valuable troubleshooting and performance-tuning advice for your cloud infrastructure.

Businesses are interested in using the cloud because it allows them to offload a lot of what's scary, annoying, and/or expensive about maintaining an on-premises data center, such as the following:

• Power: It's potentially very expensive to provide electricity to all the equipment necessary to host your applications and services. And what happens if your on-campus data center experiences a utilities outage? When you move your data into the cloud, your provider takes on the risk of these issues.
• Capital expenditure: When you run an on-premises data center, you either rent your physical servers or purchase them outright. As such, you're responsible for all hardware upgrades and repairs. All that hardware can be expensive, too.
• Security and configuration overhead: If you can't afford local systems administrators, or if your existing resources are stretched thin, it can be too easy to leave a vulnerability in place on an on-premises server that can be compromised by bad actors. By contrast, when you use a public cloud service like Azure, you rely upon Microsoft's human and machine learning-based threat intelligence to help keep your applications, services, and data safe.

Do you see the trend here? Cloud computing is popular because it's convenient for the end user and cheaper for the enterprise business. Before I go any further, however, I want to codify what I mean by cloud computing.

NIST definition

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, pronounced nihst), a research laboratory in the United States, developed the standard definition of cloud computing. According to NIST, the five essential characteristics of cloud computing are

• On-demand self-service: Cloud customers can provision services at any time and are charged only for the resources they consume.
• Broad network access: Cloud services are ordinarily offered globally, and the customer is encouraged to place services as geographically near its consumers as possible.
• Resource pooling: Cloud services are multitenant, which means that different customers' environments are isolated. You should never, ever see another Azure customer's data, and vice versa.
• Rapid elasticity: A cloud services customer can accommodate variable traffic patterns by configuring their services to scale accordingly. For instance, you can configure Azure to automatically duplicate your web servers to accommodate traffic spikes and then remove servers automatically when they are no longer needed.
• Measured service: The cloud offers services on demand, which are metered; once again, customers pay only provisioned resources.

If you want to read the source material, check NIST Special Publication 800-145, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, which you can download from https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-145/final.

Cloud computing benefits

As I mention earlier in this chapter, cloud computing is attractive to both businesses and consumers because of its convenience, high availability, and potential cost savings. Whereas organizations had to once buy expensive hardware with limited capacity, also known as a capital expenditure (CapEx), Microsoft Azure uses a consumption-based spending model that's classified as an operational expenditure (OpEx).

So why is OpEx so attractive? The fairly predictable, recurring cost model of OpEx is appealing to cost-conscious organizations. (And which organization isn't cost-conscious nowadays?)

The cloud's rapid scalability and elasticity are capabilities that only the largest companies in the world can afford to manage on their own. Microsoft Azure enables smaller companies and individuals to replicate an SQL database between geographical regions with a couple of mouse clicks. (See Figure 1-1.) Making high availability this accessible to customers is an enormous benefit of cloud computing.

FIGURE 1-1: In Azure, you can ensure that a virtual machine includes disaster recovery in one or several locations around the world with only a couple of clicks.

Economies of scale

The term economies of scale means that a business that purchases its internal resources at a larger volume can pass along savings to its customers.

OTHER CLOUD PROVIDERS

For completeness, I want you to know that although this book's focus is Microsoft Azure, other major public cloud providers also take advantage of economies of scale. These public cloud providers include, but aren't limited to, the following:

• Alibaba Cloud
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• IBM Cloud
• Oracle Cloud
• Salesforce

At this writing, Microsoft has its Azure product portfolio spread across 78 regions worldwide. Within each region are two or more physical data centers. Each data center has untold numbers of server racks, blade servers, storage arrays, routers, switches, and so forth - an immense physical capacity. To further elaborate, while there may be 78 regions worldwide, several regions such as the United States might have many physical data centers. Because there are over 200 physical data centers with compute capacity globally, businesses can be assured their data has a home. I think we can reasonably assume that Microsoft gets a discount from the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) because it purchases in such huge volume. Microsoft's purchase discounts means that the company in turn extends the savings to its Azure customers. It's as simple as that.

Understanding Cloud Computing Models

The working definition of cloud computing is a subscription arrangement under which a person or business rents a cloud service provider's infrastructure and pays only for the services consumed. That definition is fine. In this section, however, I want to sharpen your general understanding of cloud computing by explaining the deployment and service delivery models.

Deployment...