You're reading from The Self-Taught Cloud Computing Engineer

Product typeBook

Published inSep 2023

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781805123705

Edition1st Edition

Concepts

Cloud Computing

Author (1)

Dr. Logan Song

Microsoft Azure Cloud Foundation Services

In the first two parts of the book, we dove into AWS and GCP and explored and provisioned the cloud services. We have now reached the third part of the book, which is about the Microsoft Azure cloud. In this part, we will focus on two things:

Comparing the three clouds as we introduce the Azure cloud
Expanding to look at more advanced Azure cloud concepts and integrations, based on the cloud discussions we have covered so far

In this chapter, we will explore Azure’s foundation services. We will cover the following contents:

Understanding the Azure resource hierarchy, by comparing cloud resource hierarchies for AWS, GCP, and Azure
Learning about Azure compute services by comparing VM instances, containers, and serverless services for the three cloud platforms
Learning about Azure storage services by comparing object, file, block, and archive storage for the three cloud platforms
Practicing Azure...

Azure cloud resource hierarchy

First, let us review the AWS hierarchy. An AWS account is an isolated unit for all the AWS services, such as EC2 instances and S3 buckets. AWS Billing is implemented at the AWS account level to charge for all AWS cloud resource consumption. When a new AWS service resource is created, it is always created within an AWS account. An AWS organization represents an organizational entity such as a company, and it includes multiple AWS accounts. In the AWS resource hierarchy, between the organization and the accounts are Organization Units (OUs), which may represent departments, teams, or projects within the company – each OU has one or multiple AWS accounts.

In contrast, a Google Cloud project is the isolated unit for Google Cloud resources and can be associated with a billing account that manages the Google Cloud resource consumption costs. Typically, there is a GCP organization, which has multiple projects, and between the organization and the projects...

Azure cloud compute

Azure cloud compute services include Azure VMs, Azure containers, and Azure serverless.

Azure cloud VMs

Azure cloud VMs are very much like AWS EC2 VMs. To provision a VM instance in the cloud, we need to specify the software (OS and apps) and hardware (CPU, RAM, HD, and so on). While the software categories are very much the same for different cloud platforms, the hardware categories (such as VM types) are named quite differently. Table 12.1 lists the current VM types for the three cloud platforms: AWS EC2, GCP GCE, and Azure VM:

...

Azure cloud storage

We have learned about EBS, EFS, and S3 in the AWS cloud, and PD, Filestore, and GCS in GCP. Azure has similar services. The following is a summary to help us review AWS/GCP storage and learn about Azure storage services.

Object storage

Here is a comparison of object storage for three clouds:

AWS S3 offers multiple storage classes, Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive, each optimized for different use cases. S3 has object versioning and object life cycle management.
GCP GCS provides multiple storage classes: Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive. GCS offers object versioning and object life cycle management.
Azure Blob Storage offers similar features to S3 and GCS. It includes Blob Storage, Archive Storage, and Premium Blob Storage tiers. Azure offers blob storage versioning and life cycle management as well.

File storage

The following is a comparison of file storage for three clouds:

AWS EFS...

Azure cloud networking

We discussed AWS VPC and GCP VPC previously. They are very similar except that an AWS VPC is regional and a GCP VPC is global (with regional subnets). Azure offers a similar cloud networking service called Azure Virtual Network (vNet), and it is regional. Like VPC peering in AWS and GCP, Azure vNets can be peered across different regions and different accounts. We know that AWS VPC peering can be initialized from one VPC and accepted by the other, and GCP VPC peering is implemented by creating peering from VPC1 to VPC2, and then from VPC2 to VPC1. In Azure, vNet peering is done similarly, and vNet peering is also non-transitive.

Like AWS provides SGs and NACLs to protect EC2’s and VPC/subnets, Azure offers NSGs and Azure Firewall to protect cloud network resources. NSGs provide basic network traffic filtering capabilities at the subnet and network interface level, whereas Azure Firewall offers more advanced traffic control at the network and application...

Azure Cloud Foundation service implementation

In this section, we will implement an Azure global V-WAN network using the hub-and-spoke architecture. We will build a V-WAN with two hubs, one in us-east and the other in us-west. Each hub will be connected to two spoke networks: Hub1 connects to spoke networks vNet1 and vNet2; Hub2 connects to spoke networks vNet3 and vNet4. We will create one VM in each spoke. Figure 12.2 shows a typical V-WAN architecture where all the networks are connected efficiently using a hub-and-spoke topology, including Azure cloud vNets, branch office networks, remote networks, and on-premises networks:

Figure 12.2 – Azure V-WAN infrastructure

In our lab, we will just implement the Azure V-WAN hub-and-spoke network with vNet connections. Let’s get started:

Create an Azure V-WAN:

Go to the Azure portal at portal.azure.com, then go to Virtual WANs. Create a V-WAN called azure-vwan in the Central US region...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the organization of the Azure cloud and its compute, storage, and networking services by comparing them with the AWS and GCP services. We dove deep into the Azure V-WAN infrastructure and concepts, and created a V-WAN with two hubs, connecting to four global vNets. We built an Azure V-WAN and managed all the cloud resources in a centralized manner.

In the next chapter, we will examine the Azure data analytics services, including databases and big data, using the same method of learning by comparison, but going deep and beyond the basics.

Practice questions

The following scenario should be referenced when answering questions 1-10:

An Azure team is implementing a network architecture, as shown in Figure 12.19.

Figure 12.19 – Azure infrastructure architecture

The subscription is subs1.
The resource group is azurerg.
The Storage account is store.
200 VMs are in the spoke vNets. The VMs are numbered, and each VM has a public IP and a locally installed application, App-X, where X is the VM number.
vNet1 has two subnets, sub1 and sub2. Azure Firewall is deployed in sub2.
Azure Front Door is deployed.
Azure Active Directory (AAD) is used for the infrastructure.
ExpressRoute is used between on-premises and the Azure cloud.

1. store stores blob objects that need to be accessible to Azure Databricks, leveraging AAD. What should be enabled for store?

A. File shares

B. Hierarchical namespace

C. Network file shares

D. Blob access policies...

Answers to the practice questions

1. B

2. C

3. A

4. D

5. D

6. A

7. C

8. C

9. D

10. D

Dr. Logan Song is the enterprise cloud director and chief cloud architect at Dito. With 25+ years of professional experience, Dr. Song is highly skilled in enterprise information technologies, specializing in cloud computing and machine learning. He is a Google Cloud-certified professional solution architect and machine learning engineer, an AWS-certified professional solution architect and machine learning specialist, and a Microsoft-certified Azure solution architect expert. Dr. Song holds a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, an MS in computer science, and an ME in management engineering. Currently, he is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, teaching cloud computing and machine learning courses.
Read more about Dr. Logan Song

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Use Case	AWS EC2	GCP GCE	Azure VM
General Purpose	A1, M4, M5, M5a, M5n, M5zn, M6g, T2, T3, T3a, T4g, Mac	E2, N2, N2D, N1	B, Dsv3, Dv3, Dasv4, Dav4, DSv2, Dv2, Av2, DC, DCv2, Dv4, Dsv4, Ddv4, Ddsv4