AZ - 900 Short Notes

Module 1

Episode 01: Cloud Computing, High Availability, Scalability, Elasticity, Agility, Fault Tolerance, and Disaster Recovery ๐Ÿ”—

Define cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of services over the internet, including:

  • ๐Ÿ’ป Compute (e.g., Windows/Linux VMs, containers)

  • ๐Ÿ“ฆ Storage (e.g., files, databases)

  • ๐ŸŒ Networking (e.g., connecting internal resources or hybrid environments)

  • ๐Ÿ“Š Analytics (e.g., performance monitoring, telemetry)

These services are designed to be scalable, agile, and resilient, fulfilling key characteristics that define cloud computing. Below is a summary of these critical concepts:


๐Ÿ”‘ Key Concepts in Cloud Computing

TermDefinition
ScalabilityThe system's ability to increase or decrease resources as needed. Includes:
๐Ÿ”น Vertical scaling (scale up/down)
๐Ÿ”น Horizontal scaling (scale out/in)
ElasticityThe system's ability to scale dynamically based on workload demand. Often powered by auto-scaling mechanisms.
AgilityThe ability to respond quickly to change โ€” provisioning resources within minutes instead of days/weeks.
Fault ToleranceThe systemโ€™s ability to remain operational despite hardware or service failures. Resources automatically shift to healthy instances.
Disaster RecoveryThe systemโ€™s ability to recover from region-wide or service-wide outages by maintaining replicated environments in different regions.
High AvailabilityA measure of system uptime versus total time, often guaranteed by Azure SLAs.

๐Ÿ“Œ Example: 99.9% uptime allows for ~8.76 hours downtime per year.

Azure VM Availability/Azure Virtual Machine SLA

Deployment ScenarioDisk TypeVM Connectivity SLA
2+ VM instances across 2+ Availability Zones (same region)Any99.99%
2+ VM instances in same Availability Set or Dedicated Host GroupAny99.95%
Single instance VMPremium SSD or Ultra Disk99.9%
Single instance VMStandard SSD Managed Disks99.5%
Single instance VMStandard HDD Managed Disks95%
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lorenzo nicholas
lorenzo nicholas