Skip to content

Azure Fundamentals

Cloud Concepts

Language of Cloud Computing

  • High availability Maintaining Acceptable continuous performance despite temporary load fluctuations or failures in services, hardware, or data centers

    • Data Center Redundancies
      • Power
      • Cooling
      • Networking
      • ETC
    • Availability Zone Redundancies
      • 1 or more data centers
    • Region Redundancies
      • Multiple Availability Zones
  • Fault Tolerance A system's ability to continue operation properly when one or more of its component fails

    • Proactive
      • Regularly back up data/apps/resources
      • Deploy to multiple azs or regions
      • Load Balance across multiple availability zones or regions
      • Monitor health or data/apps/resources
    • Reactive
      • Restore data/apps/resources to different availability zones or regions
      • Deploy to different availability zones or regions
  • Disaster Recovery A system's ability to back up and restore data/apps/resources when needed

    • Can use Azure to Restore
      • On-premises to on-premises
      • On-premises to Azure
      • Other cloud to Azure
      • Azure to Azure
  • Scalability The ability to increase the instance count or size of existing resources

    • Scaling Out
      • Increase instance count of existing resources
      • Non-disruptive
    • Scaling Up
      • Increase instance size of existing resources
      • Disruptive
  • Elasticity is the ability to increase or decrease the instance count or size of existing resources based on fluctuations in traffic, load, or resource workload

    • Ability to scale in both directions ( in+out, up + down )
    • Can be manual or automatic
    • Based on changes in load or workload
    • Pay only for what you use
  • Agility means do the ability to rapidly develop, test and launch software applications

    • Focus on Time to Value
    • Innovation
    • Low Latency
    • Economic Effectiveness
    • Rapid Adaptation
    • Flexibility

Language of Cloud Economics

  • Economies of scale

    • Supply-Side Savings
      • Lower costs of land, servers, power, labor, etc
    • Demand-Side Savings
      • Serving more customers means using more server resources ( 80% CPU)
      • Higher server utilization rates mean lower costs
    • Multi-Tenancy Savings
      • More tenants (customers or users) lowers the cost of servers and management per tenant
  • Capital expenditure (CapEx) is buying hardware outright, paid upfront as a one time purchase

    • Up-front investment
    • Creates benefits over long period of time
    • Usually non-recurring
    • Usally related to purchase of permanent assets
  • Operational Expenditure (OpEx) is ongoing costs needed to run your business

    • No upfront investment
    • Creates immediate benefits
    • Recurring cost of doing business
    • Usually not related to purchase of permanent assets
  • Consumption-based pricing let's you pay only for what you use

    • Compute - Pay by CPU/hour
    • Storage - Pay by GB
    • Data Transfer - Pay by GB for data out, not in

Cloud Service Models

  • IaaS provides servers, storage and networking as a service

    • You Manage
      • O/S
      • Middleware
      • Runtime
      • Data
      • Applications
    • Microsoft Manages
      • Virtualization
      • Servers
      • Storage
      • Networking
  • PaaS is a superset of IaaS and also includes middleware, such as database management tools

    • You Manage
      • Applications
      • Data
  • SaaS is when a service is built on top of PaaS, like Office 365

    • You Manage
      • Nothing
  • Serverless means that you don't have any servers. Let's a single function be hosted, deployed, run and managed on its own

Cloud Architect Models

  • Private Cloud is azure on your own hardware in a location of your choice. All the benefits of public cloud, but you can lock it down. A Lot of staff required

  • Public Cloud Is Azure, AWS, GCP. No upfront costs, but monthly usage. Little control over services and infrastructure

  • Hybrid Cloud model is the best of private and public, but could be complex

Core Azure Products & Services

Azure Architecture

  • Regions
    • Groups of multiple Azure data centers withing a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network
    • Deploying your applications/systems to multiple regions allows for resiliency to region-wide outages
    • Multi-Region Failover (Active/Passive)
      • Failover across regions instantly
      • Resiliency to region-wide outages
      • Best when all users are in the same region
    • Multi-Region Deployments (Active/Active)
      • Distribute traffic/load across regions
      • Resiliency to region-wide outages
      • Best when all users are in different regions
  • Availability Zones
    • Unique physical locations within An azure region made up of one or more data centers
    • Allow for high availability by protecting your applications and data from data center failures
    • Some Azure services can be deployed to two or more AZs within an Azure region
  • Resource Groups - Containers of related Azure services grouped together
    • All the resources in the group should share the same lifecycle - They should be deployed, updated, and deleted together
    • A resource can only exist in one resource group
    • A resource group can contain resources that are located in different regions
    • A resource group can be used to scope access control for administrative
    • A resource can interact with resources in other resource groups (When two resources are related but don't share the same lifecycle; for example web apps connection to a database)
  • Azure Resource Manager
    • The Azure deployment and management service
    • Provides a consistent management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription, including wihth templates
    • You can use its access control, auditing, and tagging features to secure and organize your resources after deployment

Azure Products and Services

Compute

  • Virtual Machines
    • Pricing - Calculated Hourly
    • A Virtual Machine is your machine exclusively
    • You don't buy, own or control any hardware. Azure does this
    • VMs are an IaaS offering, where you are responsible for the entire machine
    • Azure virtual machines take advantage of azure tools
    • Pricing goes up as resources go up, and you pay by the hour
  • Scale Sets
    • Auto-scaling pool of virtual machines
    • Centrally manage, configure and update a large number of vms
    • Scale sets are identical VMs. They can be activated or deactivated as needed
    • A baseline VM for the scale set ensures application stability. A baseline VM is what you copy to make up the scale set VMS
    • As resources usage increases, more VMs are activated to take the load
    • You only pay for the VM, storage and networking resources you use. Nothing additional for scale sets
  • App Services
    • On-Demand, auto-scaling web/mobile/api app hosting
    • Linux & Windows platforms
    • App services are a PaaS offering on Azure
    • Web Apps are used to ost web sites and web applications
    • Web Apps for containers can host your existing container images
    • API Apps can host your data backend services
  • Serverless functions
    • Event-driven serverless compute resources
    • Auto-scale on demand
    • Pay only for what you consume
  • Kubernetes
    • Kubernetes = AKS
    • EMR = ACR

Networking

  • VNet
    • An address space is a range of IP addresses you can use for your resources
    • A subnet is smaller network, which is part of your VNET. Use these for security and logical division of resources
    • A VNet is in a single region and single subscription
    • VNets in the cloud can scale, have high availability and isolation
  • VPN Gateway
    • A VPN Gateway is a specific VNet Gateway, It consists of two or more dedicated VMNets
    • VNET Gateway + "vpn" becomes a VPN Connection
    • Send encrypted data between Azure and on premises network
    • Azure Gateway Subnet, secure tunnel and on-premises gateway makes up a VPN Gateway Scenario
  • Azure Load Balancer
    • AWS ELB Similiar
  • Azure APP Gateway
    • AWS ALB Similiar
    • It works on the HTTP request of the traffic, instead of the IP address and port
    • Traffic from a specific web address can go to a specific machine
    • Is a fit for most other Azure Services
    • Supports auto-scaling, end-to-end encryption, zone redundancy ans multi-site hosting
  • Azure content Delivery Network
    • Efficently dlivers web content from locations that are close to end users to minimize latency

Storage

  • BLOB
    • Highly scalable, REST based object store
    • Unstructure data
    • Types
      • Block
        • Store text and binary data up to 4.7TB. Made up of individually managed blocks of data
      • Append
        • Block blobs that are optimized for append operations
        • Works well for logging where data is constantly appended
      • Page
        • Store files up to 8TB
        • Any part of the file could be accessed at any time, for example a virtual hard drive
    • Pricing
      • Hot
        • Frequently accessed files. Lower access times and higher access costs
      • Cool
        • Lower storage costs and higher access times. Data remains here for at least 30 days
      • Archive
        • Lowest costs and highest access times
  • Tables
    • Massive auto-scaling NoSQl Store
    • Dynamic scaling based on load
    • Scale to PBs of table Data
    • Fast Key/value lookups
  • Queues

    • Reliable queues at scale for cloud services
    • Decouple and scale components
  • Disk - Types

    • HDD
      • Spinning hard drive. Low cost and suitable for backups
    • Standard SSD
      • Standard for production. Higher reliability, scalability and lower latency over HDD
    • Premium SSD
      • Super fast and high performance. Very low latency. Use for critical workloads
    • Ultra Disk
      • For the most demanding, data-intensive workloads. Disks up to 64 TB
  • Files
    • AWS EFS
    • Fully managed File Shares in the cloud
    • SMB and Rest Access
    • Lift and shift legacy apps

Databases

  • Cosmos DB
    • Globally distributed database. It is super fast and easy to manage
    • Scale to infinite performance and size
    • Can be Costly
    • Supports multiple APIs, including SQl, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables & Gremlin
    • Supports analytics through Apache Spark
  • Azure SQL
    • IaaS
      • SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
      • Pay-as you-fo for SQL server license or use an existing license
    • PaaS
      • Fully managed SQL database engine
      • Available as single database, elastic pool, and managed instances
  • Azure Database for MySQL
  • Azure Database for PostGreSQL
    • Horizontal scaling
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse
    • Cloud based Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)
    • Leverages massively parallel processing (MPP) to quicly run complex queries across petabytes of data
    • Key component of a Big Data solution
  • Database Migration Services
    • Enables seamless migrations from multiple database sources to azure data platforms with minimal downtime
    • Offline migration: Application downtime starts when the migration starts
    • Online migration: Downtime is limited to the time to cut over the end of the migration

Azure Marketplace

  • An online applications and services marketplace
  • Offers technical solutions and services from Microsoft and parteners that are designed to extend azure products and services

Azure Solutions

IoT

An IoT solution is made up of one or more IoT devices and one or more back-end services running in the cloud that communicate with each other Devices usually have sensors and connect to the internet

  • IoT Hub
    • PaaS Solution that provides more control over the IoT data collection and processing
    • Enables reliable and secure bidirectional communications between milions of IoT devices and cloud solution
    • Managed and Secure
    • Ease of Deployment
    • Platform-as-a-service
    • Scaling and Authentication
  • IoT Central
    • SaaS solution that provides pre-made IoT connections and dashboards to get set up quickly
    • Software-as-a-service
      • Simplify and speed up the implementation of your IoT solution
    • No Coding Needed
      • You don't have to know how to write code to deploy your IoT project
      • Receive feeds from devices and focus on metrics and business value
    • Pre-made Connectors
      • Use any of the hundreds of connectors that are ready to use in IoT Central

Big Data

  • Data Lake Analytics
    • Large Amounts of Data
      • A data lake is a very large body of data
    • Parallel Processing
      • Two or more processes or computers processing the same data at the same time
    • Ready to Go
      • Servers, processes and any other needed services are ready to go from the start Jump straight into the data analytics
  • HD Insights
    • Similar to Azure Data Lake Analytics
    • Open Source, which is free and community supported
    • Includes Apache Hadoop, spark and kafka
  • Azure Databricks
    • Based on Apache Spark, a distributed cluster-computing framework
    • Run and process a dataset on many computers simultaneously
    • Databricks provides all the computing power
    • Integrates with other Azure Storage Services
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse
    • Cloud-based enterprise warehouse (EDW)
    • Leverages massively parallel processing (MPP) to quickly run complext queries across petabytes of data

Artificial Intelligence

  • Machine Learning/AI
    • Models
      • The definition of what your machine learning application is learning
      • A model is a set of rules of how to use the data provided
      • The model finds patterns based on the rules
    • Knowledge Mining
      • Use Azure search to finding existing insights in your data
      • File relationships, geography connections and more
    • Built-in Apps
      • Azure has a number of built-in apps that you can use for machine learning and AI straight away.
      • These include cognitive services and bot services
  • Azure Cognitive Services
    • Vision
      • You can use the vision service to recognize, identify and caption your videos and images. Automatically
    • Decision
      • Apps can make decisions based on content. Detect potential offensive language, detect IoT anomalies and leverage data analytics
    • Speech
      • Automatic speech-to-text transcription. Speaker identification and verification
  • Azure Machine Learning Studio
    • Supports all Azure Machine Learning tools
    • Pre-made modules for your project
    • Use for real world scenarios such as twitter sentiment analysis, photo grouping and movie recommendations
    • Use this if you want to experiment with machine learning models quickly and easily, and the built-in machine learning algorithms are sufficient for your solutions
    • Uses prebuilt and preconfigured machine learning algorithms and data handling modules
    • Collaborative, drag-and-drop visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy machine learning solutions without the need to write code
  • Machine Learning Service
    • End-to-End Service
      • The service to use AI and machine learning almost anywhere on Azure
    • Tooling
      • The Machine Learning service is a collection of tools to help you build AI applications
    • Automation
      • Azure automatically recognizes trends in your applications and creates models for you
    • Use this if you work in a python environment, you want more control over your machine learning algorithms, or you want use open-source machine learning libraries
    • Fully supports open-source technologies: tens of thousands of open-source machine learning components are available
    • Provides a cloud-based environment tou can use to prep data and train, test, deploy, manage, and track machine learning models

Serverless

  • Azure Functions
    • Configure your code to load and run only when triggered
    • Triggers can be HTTP requests, data from other Azure Services, etc
    • Can Return data or call other azure services
  • Logic Apps
    • Are a quick and simple way to integrate systems and applications inside and outside of azure
    • Visual designer for automating and orchestration tasks processes and workflows
    • Great for integrating apps/data/systems and for business-to-business(B2B) integrations
    • Connect Systems
      • Connect systems bot inside and outside of the Azure platform
      • Integrate not only apps, but also data flows, services and entire systems
    • Automation
      • A lot of ways to schedule, automate and orchestrate tasks and processes
    • Quick Start
      • No coding required to get started straight away. You just need access to your apps to integrate
  • Event Grid
    • Fully managed event routing service
    • Greatly simplifies the development of event-based applications and serverless workflows
    • Handles all event routing from any source, to any destination for any application

Azure Management Tools

Azure cli, PowerShell, Azure Portal

  • Azure Cli
    • Command line experience for managing Azure resources
    • You can use it in your browser with Azure cloud shell (interactive browser-accessible shell that runs basb or powershell)
    • You can install it on macOs, Linux, and Windows and run it from the command line
  • Power Shell
    • Set of PowerShell cmdlets for managing Azure resources
    • You can use it in your cloud shell
    • Uses .NET standard making it available for windows, macOS, and Linux
  • Azure Portal
    • Build, manage and monitor every Azure resource in a single unified console
    • Browse active resources modify settings, provision new resources, and view basic monitoring data from all your azure products and services

Azure Advisor

  • Personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your azure deployments
  • Analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry
  • Recommends solutions to help improve the cost effectiveness, performance, security, and availability your resources

Security, Privacy, Compliance, and Trust

Network Security

Azure Firewall

  • Managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your azure virtual Network resources

  • Centrally create, enforce, and log application and network connectivity policies across subscriptions and virtual networks

  • Fully integrated with azure monitor for logging and analytics

Network Security Groups (NSGs)

  • Enforce and control network traffic rules at the networking level

  • Security rules allow or deny inbound network traffic to, or outbound network traffic from, several types of Azure resources

  • For each rule, you can specify a source, destination, port, and protocol

Azure DDoS Protection

Choosing an Azure Security Solution

  • Isolation

    • Use different virtual networks, or virtual network subnets, to segment your network or isolate resources when required
  • Principle of least privilege

    • Limit each user's access rights to the bare minimum permissions they need to perform their work
  • Use NSGs for Bare Minimum Network Connectivity

    • Use network security groups (NSGs) to enforce rules allowing only the minimum network access needed
  • Use Azure Firewall and Azure DDoS Protection

    • Use Azure Firewall and Azure DDoS protection to protect your resources and prevent large unanticipated costs

Azure Identity Services

  • Authentication and Authorization
  • Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
    • Something you know ( Typicall password)
    • Something you have ( a trusted device that is not easily duplicated, like a phone)
    • Something you are ( biometrics )
  • Azure Active Directory (AAD)
    • Comprehensive, highly available identity and access management (IAM) cloud solution
    • Fully managed identity service - requires no hardware, virtual machines, etc
    • Main objects are users (pay per user) and groups(free)
    • Users are assigned a license based on which edition of Azure AD they should have
    • Groups can be assigned multiple licenses, which are inherited by all users in the group
    • Active Directory (AD) is not the same as Azure Active Directory
    • Different skillset from AD to Azure AD
    • Every Azure account will have and azure AD service
    • Organization
      • A tenant represents the organization
    • Dedicated AAD
      • A tenant is a dedicated of AAD that an organization receives when signing up for Azure
    • Separate
      • Each tenant is distinct and completely separate from other AAD tenants
    • One User - One Tenant
      • Each user in Azure only belong to a single tenant
      • Users can be guests of other tenants
    • Azure AD can help manage users in a hybrid cloud setup

Azure Security tools and features

  • Security is built into every layer of azure
  • Secure Foundation
    • State-of-the-art security in Azure data centers around the world, integrated security controls in Azure hardware and firmware components, and protection against threats such as DDoS
  • Simplify security with Built-In Services
    • Easily manage identify and control access, secure your network, safeguard data, manage secrets and certificates, prevent attacks, and gain centralized visibility
  • Detect threats early with unique intelligence
    • identify new threats and respond quickly with services that are informed by real-time global cybersecurity intelligence

Azure Security Center

  • Protects Azure and non-Azure servers and virtual machines - including windows and linux servers - when the microsoft monitoring agent is installed
  • Events collected from azure and the agents are sent to the security analytics engine, which provides threat detection alerts and tailored recommendations for securing workloads
  • Azure PaaS services - including SQL databases and storage accounts - are automatically monitored and protected by Azure Security Center

Azure Key Vault

  • Encrypt and safeguard authentication keys, storage account keys, data encryption keys, certificates, and passwords
  • Data is protected by hardware security modules (HSMs)
  • Control access to keys using Azure Active Directory
  • Grant access to individual users or to applications and systems

Azure information Protection (AIP)

  • Cloud-based solution that helps organizations classify and protect documents and emails
  • Manually or automatically classify sensitive data using 80+ built-in data types (credit card numbers, ID/SSN numbers)
  • Enforce policies on classified daa - require credit card numbers to be encrypted
  • Can be retroactively applied to existing documents and emails

Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

  • Cloud-based security solution that identifies, detects, and helps you investigate advanced threats, compromised identifies, and malicious insider actions
  • Built-in advanced threat detection using data from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Azure Monitor logs, and Azure security Center

Azure Governance

Azure Policies

  • Service in Azure that you use to create, assign, and manage policies
  • Policies enforce different rules for your resources
  • Policies can be assigned to Management Groups, subscriptions, or Resource Groups and are inherited downward
  • Evaluate your resources for non-compliance with assigned policies
  • Policies can be audited or applied to resources

Azure Initiatives

  • A collection of policy definitions that are tailored toward achieving a single overarching goal
  • Simplify managing and assigning policy definitions
  • Initiatives can be assigned to Management Groups, subscriptions, or Resource Groups and are inherited downward

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

  • An authorization system built on Azure Resource Manager that provides fine-grained access management for azure resources
  • Roles are defined and assigned to a security principal: User, group or service principal (i.e., application account)
  • Role can be scoped to management groups, subscriptions, resources groups, or resources and are inherited downward

Resource Locking

  • Prevent other users in your organization from accidentally deleting or modifying critical resources
  • Locks can be set to prevent deletion only, or to prevent modifications and deletion
  • Locks can be assigned to Management Groups, subscriptions, resource groups, or resources and are inherited downward

Hierarchy : Management groups -> subscriptions -> resource groups -> resources

Security Assistance n Azure Advisor

  • Azure Advisor integrates with Azure security Center to bring you security recommendations in addition to the high availability, performance, and other recommendations already included in Azure advisor
  • Periodically analyzes the security state of your azure resources and makes recommendations for any potential security vulnerabilities

Azure Monitor

Subscription

  • Billing Entity
    • All Resources within a subscription are billed together
  • Cost Separation
    • You can have multiple subscriptions within a tenant to separate costs
  • Payment
    • If a subscription ins't paid, all the resources and services associated with the subscription stop

DevOps

  • Azure Boards
    • Keep track of work tasks, timelines, issues, planning and much more
  • Azure pipelines
    • Produce and test your software automatically and continuously
  • Azure Repos
  • Azure Test Plans
    • Design tests of applications to implement automatically
  • Azure Artifacts
    • Share applications and code libraries with other teams inside and outside your organization
  • Azure DevTest Labs
    • Environment Management
      • Allow developers and engineers to create environment for test and development
    • Cost Management
      • You won't incur unexpected costs and will even minimize wast of resources on your account
    • Templates
      • Tailor your development and test environments and reuse them with template deployments

Security

  • Azure Security Center
    • Threat Alerts
    • Ready for Hybrid architectures
    • Each VM has an agent installed that sends data
    • Azure analyzes the data and alerts if necessary
    • Policy and compliance metrics
    • A "secure score" to entice great security hygiene
    • Integrate with other cloud providers
    • Alerts for resources that aren't secure
    • Define policies
    • Protect Resources
    • Response
    • Azure Advisor for security Assistance
  • Azure Key Vault
  • Azure Information Protection
  • Advanced Threat Protection
    • Monitor users
    • Baseline Behavior
    • Suggest Changes

Privacy, Compliance and Trust

Azure Policy

  • Azure Policy ensures that policies applied to resources are compliant
  • A policy is a set of rules to ensure compliant resources

  • RBAC

    • Security Principal
      • An object representing an entity such as user or group, which can access the resource
    • Role Definition
      • A collection of permissions such as read, write and delete
    • Scope
      • The resources the access applies to. Specify which role can access a resource or resource group
  • Locks
    • Assigning
      • Assign a lock to a subscription, resource group or resource
    • Types
      • A lock can be of two types.
      • Delete, where you can't delete the locked object.
      • Read-only, where you can't make any changes to the object

Azure Blueprints

  • Templates for creating standard Azure environments
  • Use Blueprints
    • Resource templaes
    • Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
    • Policies
    • Samples for common regulations

Azure Monitor

  • Constant Feed
    • Most Azure services feed telemetry data into Azure Monitor
    • Even on-premises services can send telemetry data to Azure Monitor
  • Fully Managed
    • Azure Monitor is centralized and fully managed. You can analyze all the data from one place
  • Query Language
    • Full access to an interactive query language to learn about the telemetry data
  • Machine Learning
    • Predict and recognize problems faster with built-in machine learning

Azure Service Health

  • Dashboard
  • Custom Alerts
  • Real-Time tracking
  • Free Service

Compliance

  • Industry Regulations
    • General Data Protection Regulation
    • ISO Standard
    • NIST
  • Azure compliance manager
    • Azure knows about compliance and resources, and can give you recommendations through the compliance manager
    • Recommendations
    • Tasks
    • Compliance Score
    • Secure Storage
    • Reports
  • Exam Tips
    • GDPR, ISO and NIST are regulations and standards to ensure compliance with applicable legislation
    • Azure compliance manager provides recommendations, tasks to assign team members, a compliance score, secure document storage and reports
    • Azure government cloud provids dedicated datacenters to US Government bodies. Compliant with US federal, state and local requirements
    • Azure china region contains all data and datacenters within china. Complies with all applicable chinese regulations

Privacy

  • Azure Information Protection
    • Classify, label and protect data based on data sensitivity
  • Azure Policy
    • Define and enforce rules to ensure privacy and external regulations
  • Guides
    • Use Guides on azure to respond and comply with GDPR privacy requests
  • Compliance Manager
    • Make sure you are following privacy guidelines

Trust

  • TrustCenter
    • Learn about Microsoft's effort on security, privacy, GDPR, data location, compliance about trust in each product and service
  • Service Trust Portal
    • Review all the independent reports and audits performed on Microsoft products and services
    • Azures complies with more standards than any cloud provider

Pricing

Subscriptions

  • Multiple Subscriptions
    • Any Azure account can have multiple subscriptions
    • Useful for organizing who pays for what
  • Billing Admin
    • One or more users can be a "billing admin", which manages anything to do with billing and invoicing on azure
    • Ensures separation of responsibility
  • Billing Cycle

    • A billing Cycle on Azure is either 30 or 60 days
  • Management Groups

    • Group subscriptions
      • Take action across subscriptions in bulk
      • Very useful in large organizations with many subscriptions
    • Organize
      • Manage access, policies and compliance in bulk
      • E.g. have a management group per country or department
    • Billing logic
      • You maintain the billing associated with the right budgets
      • Nest management groups to indicated hierarchy and relationship

Cost Management

Pricing Calculator

  • Limit
    • Default Limit
      • Some Azure accounts with monthly credits to use will have default spending limits
      • When the credits are used, the limit kicks in
    • No increase
      • When the credits are gone, either remove the limit entirely or leave it in effect
    • No spending limit
      • Pay-as-you-go accounts have no spending limit functionality
  • Quotas
    • Property limit
      • A quota is a limit on a certain property of an azure service
      • For example, a maximum of 100 namespaces for event hub
    • Ensure service level
      • The quotas are necessary to ensure azure can maintain high service level
    • Quota Change
      • If you need to increase the quota for a particular service, you can ask Microsoft to increase them
  • Tags
    • Identity Roles
      • Protect sensitive data by defining which roles can access a resource
    • Filter
      • Filter resources per project, customer or for reporting purposes
    • Related Resources
      • To make bulk processing and updating easier, define which resources are related
    • Unambiguous
      • Create a list for tags used that includes: description, tag name, and potential values

Support

Plans

  • Basic
    • 24/7 Access
    • Online Self-Help
    • Forums
    • Azure Advisor
    • Service Health
  • Developer
    • Bus. Hours Email
  • Standard
    • 24/7 Email/phone
  • Professional Direct
    • Operations Support - Onboarding Reviews
    • Webinarrs
  • Premier
    • Tech reviews, Reporting, Tech Account Man
    • Training On-demand

Support Channels

  • Azure Documentation
  • Forums
  • Social Media