Exploring Azure Physical Infrastructure Basics

Hello guys, welcome back to another episode on Azure Fundamentals. This is episode 7 and this time we will be learning about Azure Physical Infrastructure. So things like regions, geographies, data centers and availability zones. Let's do it! Let me start with episode objectives. So what is tested during the exam? In case of episode 7, we will be learning about data center, regions, region pairs, geographies, availability zones. and benefits and the usage of those core architectural components. This is what is tested during the exam, so you should be able to describe those components, but also describe the benefits and how they should be used within your applications. So let me start with Data Center. If you purchase services in Azure, whether this is SQL Database, web hosting, virtual machine, or one of many services within Azure, all those services run on a physical infrastructure underneath, on some sort of servers. A physical facility that hosts those servers is a data center. It is used to host a group of networked servers. A typical data center has its own power, tooling, and networking infrastructure. So data centers are building blocks of global Azure infrastructure. A group of data centers that are connected with each other with high throughput internet connectivity are called regions. And Microsoft has many regions across the globe of different sizes. They can be as small as single data center or they can contain multiple ones. But what is most important is that they are globally distributed. For instance, in United States you have one in East US and one in West US. In Ireland there's a North Europe region and in Singapore we have Southeast Asia region. There's also one in Japan called Japan East. But there's of course plenty more regions available. If you will start putting a dot for every region available within Azure, we would get over 50 dots on that map, being able to choose from whatever location we want on the planet to be as close to our clients as possible. This is of course an important decision for every Azure developer and architect because the closer you are to your clients, the lower the latency between the servers and your clients. When it comes to region, there are a few additional things that you should understand. First of all, region is simply a geographical area on the planet that consists one, but usually more data centers, but they need to be connected with low latency network. We are talking here about under 2 milliseconds latency between the data centers. Additionally, this is the location for your services. Location is a word that will come up very often when you will work with Azure. Whenever you purchase any Azure service, a location will always be mandatory field that you will need to fill. And it simply means To which physical servers on the planet, which region on the planet, should I deploy that service to? But there are also few very important things to remember. First of all, some of these services are not available in all the regions. So you should always check which region has the services that you need to build your application. But also there are some services that are called global services. Those services don't have any specific region, any specific location assigned. Things like traffic manager for DNS routing, or Azure Active Directory, but there are a few other examples here. Additionally, Azure is globally available with over 50 regions available. New regions are being announced and built pretty much every day. So in future, there might be more than that. And lastly, there are some special regions like government regions for government regulations and partner regions like China regions where Microsoft is providing the services, but it doesn't really manage and run the data centers themselves. With that said, let me go to Azure Portal to show you how to create a resource and choose a specific location. For that, I will use the menu on the left hand side, where I can choose either create a resource option or go to, for instance, storage account, a service that allows me to store files. I will select storage account and select add to create new storage account service. There are many fields that I need to fill in, but the one that I want to show you right now is location field. Location field is what we were talking about. This is the region of Azure on the globe where I will be deploying my service to. This is an of course important decision to which region you should deploy to and this should not be taken lightly. You should always take time and consider what are the options that you have here. To help with that decision there are two portals that I want to show you. The first one is called Azure Speedtest. This webpage makes a very simple test. It calculates an average latency between your current location and all the available Azure regions. So let me run it for a couple of minutes to see the closest data centers, the closest Azure regions to my current location, which is Poland. After about 2 minutes, the winner is pretty clear. Germany North Region is the closest region available to me. But should I choose data center in Germany North or maybe I should choose the second best West Europe? So if you remember one of the points on my slide, not all of these services are available in all of the regions. This is why Microsoft prepared a second website. This website will list all the available services per region. This site is called Products available by region. This is a Microsoft Azure page where you select regions. In this case, I will select in Europe, I will select West Europe, but also I will select in Germany, Germany North. So those are the two regions that I had here, right? The Germany North and West Europe. When you select those regions, click on select all products and it will give you a list of all services within Azure and their availability within specific region. As you can see, On the left hand side we have West Europe, on the right hand side Germany North. If you scroll through this list you will see that there are plenty more services available within West Europe. So for me it's pretty easy choice. I should go with West Europe because I want to be sure that my application will be future proof and it will most likely be able to handle any kind of scenario. Especially because West Europe is one of the oldest data centers, one of the oldest regions in Europe. So let me go back to presentation. Additional term that you will learn today is availability zone. Availability zones, if you remember our data center and region infrastructure, they have multiple data centers, they have their own power, cooling and network infrastructure, and they are connected with super fast internet. But in a typical scenario, you don't have a control to which data center are your services deployed to. That's why availability zones were created. This is a regional feature where each data center gets a number. A number that represents a grouping of physically separate facilities. And simply said, availability zones are designed to protect from data center failures. Because each availability zone has its own power, cooling and network infrastructure, whenever there's a failure in a single data center, other two will continue working. But if you think about it, this is how data centers operate normally. So how does Availability Zones help here? By introducing this feature, Microsoft also created services and features within services that can take advantage of this information. Those services are split into two categories. The first ones are zonal services. With zonal services, you can choose to which availability zones are you doing the deployment to. In case of virtual machines, now you have a choice. You can create two virtual machines for highly available environment and specify that the first virtual machine goes to availability zones number one, and second one goes to availability zone number two or three. This way you ensure that if case there's a data center level failure, your virtual machine, at least one of them, will continue working. In the classical scenario without availability zones, it is possible that your virtual machine, even in a big region, could be deployed to the same data center or even to the same physical server. That's why zonal services are so good and availability zone allow you to create those highly available applications. The second type of the service are zone redundant services. Those services like SQL database, storage accounts, allow you to take advantage of multiple availability zones out of the box. With a simple check of an option, your services will automatically replicate data across multiple availability zones and will work in a redundant way. So if there's a data center level failure, you wouldn't even notice it in your application. Few things that you should note here. First of all, not all regions support availability zones. About seven regions right now support it, with more coming in the future. Second of all, if the region supports it, there's at least three or more zones within that region. That means there's at least three data centers required. And lastly, availability zone is built from one or more data centers, so it's not necessarily a single data center. So if we look back at our map, Some of Azure regions will have logical groupings over their data centers, making them zone-enabled regions. In this case, if we go back to Azure Portal, let me go back to my example where I was creating a storage account. In here, remember that I was choosing the location. When I chose location East US 2, which is one of the zone-enabled locations, in the replication option, I have zone-redundant storage. So this is an example of the zone-redundant service. because I can choose so that this storage account will automatically replicate data across multiple availability zones. In case I would choose a region that does not support it, like South Central US, I would no longer have this replication option on the list. So now let me show you how this would work with zonal service. By going to the menu on the left hand side, selecting virtual machines, hitting on the add virtual machine option to create a new virtual machine. In here, from the region, I can again leave East US 2, which will allow me to select availability option and select availability zone. Now from the drop down, I can choose a specific availability zone that I want to deploy to. And that's the primary difference between the zonal and zone-redundant service. But what happens if there's a region-level failure? If entire region goes down? Then it doesn't matter if you did use availability zones. For that reason, Microsoft also creates region pairs. So each region has a region pair. Paired regions are at least 300 miles away from each other to ensure that there's enough distance to cover the natural-level disasters. like floods, storms, earthquakes, and similar things. This way, Microsoft ensures that if one region goes down, the second region that is paired with that region will be up and gives you a set of features to allow you to replicate your data, replicate your application across multiple regions. So what you should remember about region pairs is that each region is paired with exactly one region. Second of all, each region pair is static, so you cannot choose which region are you pairing to. Just check the documentation to which region is your region currently paired to. Each region pair also resides within the same geography, with an exception of a single Brazil South, which is replicating two US. Each region pair has a physical isolation with at least 300 miles distance from each other, and as I said, this is just to ensure that a large-scale natural disaster will not take two regions down at the same time. One of the cool features of region pairs is that some services will provide a platform level replication. Again, with a simple check of an option, you will automatically replicate your data and your services across multiple regions, therefore protecting yourself from region level failures. Additional benefit of region pair is that Microsoft is planning updates across pairs. Therefore, if you will replicate to another pair, Microsoft is making sure that the planned updates plan rollout of the services don't happen to the same paired regions at the same time. Therefore, it will roll out all the updates and all the necessary things to the first region. If everything is working correctly, the updates will be rolled out to this paired region, making sure that even the platform updates will not impact your application. Therefore, it is a preferred option for you to replicate to a paired region. Of course, replication to other regions is also possible, but the pair is always preferred. So if you are planning for disaster recovery scenarios, you can ensure data residency is maintained for your applications. Some examples of region pairs are East US is paired to West US, UK West to UK South, North Europe located in Ireland is paired to West Europe in Netherlands, East Asia in Hong Kong to South East Asia in Singapore. So as you see, tours are not always within the same country, but they must be close enough to maintain high-speed connectivity but far enough to ensure that natural level disasters will not take them down. Which brings me to the last point. All regions and region pairs are grouped into geographies. Each geography describes a discrete market and contains typically at least two or more regions. And their purpose is to ensure that all the data level requirements are met, like residency, sovereignty, resiliency, and compliance. Additionally, geographies are fault tolerant, so they also protect you from region-wide failures. And geographies are broken into areas like Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. And lastly, remember that each region belongs to only one geography at a time. For this episode, we are done. Remember to navigate to my website to episode number 7 to learn more about regions, geographies, availability zones, check out the study guide, check the cheat sheets, and then... test yourself on the practice test. Additionally, this is the first episode where I added a new section Expand Your Knowledge with some extra resources which you can use to expand your knowledge even further. And that's it for this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you like what I do, support the channel by subscribing, liking, and commenting. If you want to move to the next episode, simply use playlist or hit the icon at the side. And I'm hoping to see you in the next one. See you!

Let's do it! Let me start with episode objectives. So what is tested during the exam? In case of episode 7, we will be learning about data center, regions, region pairs, geographies, availability zones. and benefits and the usage of those core architectural components.

This is what is tested during the exam, so you should be able to describe those components, but also describe the benefits and how they should be used within your applications. So let me start with Data Center. If you purchase services in Azure, whether this is SQL Database, web hosting, virtual machine, or one of many services within Azure, all those services run on a physical infrastructure underneath, on some sort of servers.

A physical facility that hosts those servers is a data center. It is used to host a group of networked servers. A typical data center has its own power, tooling, and networking infrastructure.

So data centers are building blocks of global Azure infrastructure. A group of data centers that are connected with each other with high throughput internet connectivity are called regions. And Microsoft has many regions across the globe of different sizes.

They can be as small as single data center or they can contain multiple ones. But what is most important is that they are globally distributed. For instance, in United States you have one in East US and one in West US.

In Ireland there's a North Europe region and in Singapore we have Southeast Asia region. There's also one in Japan called Japan East. But there's of course plenty more regions available.

If you will start putting a dot for every region available within Azure, we would get over 50 dots on that map, being able to choose from whatever location we want on the planet to be as close to our clients as possible. This is of course an important decision for every Azure developer and architect because the closer you are to your clients, the lower the latency between the servers and your clients. When it comes to region, there are a few additional things that you should understand.

First of all, region is simply a geographical area on the planet that consists one, but usually more data centers, but they need to be connected with low latency network. We are talking here about under 2 milliseconds latency between the data centers. Additionally, this is the location for your services. Location is a word that will come up very often when you will work with Azure. Whenever you purchase any Azure service, a location will always be mandatory field that you will need to fill.

And it simply means To which physical servers on the planet, which region on the planet, should I deploy that service to? But there are also few very important things to remember. First of all, some of these services are not available in all the regions. So you should always check which region has the services that you need to build your application. But also there are some services that are called global services.

Those services don't have any specific region, any specific location assigned. Things like traffic manager for DNS routing, or Azure Active Directory, but there are a few other examples here. Additionally, Azure is globally available with over 50 regions available. New regions are being announced and built pretty much every day. So in future, there might be more than that.

And lastly, there are some special regions like government regions for government regulations and partner regions like China regions where Microsoft is providing the services, but it doesn't really manage and run the data centers themselves. With that said, let me go to Azure Portal to show you how to create a resource and choose a specific location. For that, I will use the menu on the left hand side, where I can choose either create a resource option or go to, for instance, storage account, a service that allows me to store files.

I will select storage account and select add to create new storage account service. There are many fields that I need to fill in, but the one that I want to show you right now is location field. Location field is what we were talking about. This is the region of Azure on the globe where I will be deploying my service to.

This is an of course important decision to which region you should deploy to and this should not be taken lightly. You should always take time and consider what are the options that you have here. To help with that decision there are two portals that I want to show you.

The first one is called Azure Speedtest. This webpage makes a very simple test. It calculates an average latency between your current location and all the available Azure regions. So let me run it for a couple of minutes to see the closest data centers, the closest Azure regions to my current location, which is Poland. After about 2 minutes, the winner is pretty clear.

Germany North Region is the closest region available to me. But should I choose data center in Germany North or maybe I should choose the second best West Europe? So if you remember one of the points on my slide, not all of these services are available in all of the regions. This is why Microsoft prepared a second website.

This website will list all the available services per region. This site is called Products available by region. This is a Microsoft Azure page where you select regions. In this case, I will select in Europe, I will select West Europe, but also I will select in Germany, Germany North. So those are the two regions that I had here, right?

The Germany North and West Europe. When you select those regions, click on select all products and it will give you a list of all services within Azure and their availability within specific region. As you can see, On the left hand side we have West Europe, on the right hand side Germany North.

If you scroll through this list you will see that there are plenty more services available within West Europe. So for me it's pretty easy choice. I should go with West Europe because I want to be sure that my application will be future proof and it will most likely be able to handle any kind of scenario.

Especially because West Europe is one of the oldest data centers, one of the oldest regions in Europe. So let me go back to presentation. Additional term that you will learn today is availability zone.

Availability zones, if you remember our data center and region infrastructure, they have multiple data centers, they have their own power, cooling and network infrastructure, and they are connected with super fast internet. But in a typical scenario, you don't have a control to which data center are your services deployed to. That's why availability zones were created.

This is a regional feature where each data center gets a number. A number that represents a grouping of physically separate facilities. And simply said, availability zones are designed to protect from data center failures.

Because each availability zone has its own power, cooling and network infrastructure, whenever there's a failure in a single data center, other two will continue working. But if you think about it, this is how data centers operate normally. So how does Availability Zones help here? By introducing this feature, Microsoft also created services and features within services that can take advantage of this information.

Those services are split into two categories. The first ones are zonal services. With zonal services, you can choose to which availability zones are you doing the deployment to.

In case of virtual machines, now you have a choice. You can create two virtual machines for highly available environment and specify that the first virtual machine goes to availability zones number one, and second one goes to availability zone number two or three. This way you ensure that if case there's a data center level failure, your virtual machine, at least one of them, will continue working. In the classical scenario without availability zones, it is possible that your virtual machine, even in a big region, could be deployed to the same data center or even to the same physical server.

That's why zonal services are so good and availability zone allow you to create those highly available applications. The second type of the service are zone redundant services. Those services like SQL database, storage accounts, allow you to take advantage of multiple availability zones out of the box. With a simple check of an option, your services will automatically replicate data across multiple availability zones and will work in a redundant way.

So if there's a data center level failure, you wouldn't even notice it in your application. Few things that you should note here. First of all, not all regions support availability zones.

About seven regions right now support it, with more coming in the future. Second of all, if the region supports it, there's at least three or more zones within that region. That means there's at least three data centers required. And lastly, availability zone is built from one or more data centers, so it's not necessarily a single data center.

So if we look back at our map, Some of Azure regions will have logical groupings over their data centers, making them zone-enabled regions. In this case, if we go back to Azure Portal, let me go back to my example where I was creating a storage account. In here, remember that I was choosing the location.

When I chose location East US 2, which is one of the zone-enabled locations, in the replication option, I have zone-redundant storage. So this is an example of the zone-redundant service. because I can choose so that this storage account will automatically replicate data across multiple availability zones. In case I would choose a region that does not support it, like South Central US, I would no longer have this replication option on the list.

So now let me show you how this would work with zonal service. By going to the menu on the left hand side, selecting virtual machines, hitting on the add virtual machine option to create a new virtual machine. In here, from the region, I can again leave East US 2, which will allow me to select availability option and select availability zone. Now from the drop down, I can choose a specific availability zone that I want to deploy to.

And that's the primary difference between the zonal and zone-redundant service. But what happens if there's a region-level failure? If entire region goes down?

Then it doesn't matter if you did use availability zones. For that reason, Microsoft also creates region pairs. So each region has a region pair.

Paired regions are at least 300 miles away from each other to ensure that there's enough distance to cover the natural-level disasters. like floods, storms, earthquakes, and similar things. This way, Microsoft ensures that if one region goes down, the second region that is paired with that region will be up and gives you a set of features to allow you to replicate your data, replicate your application across multiple regions. So what you should remember about region pairs is that each region is paired with exactly one region. Second of all, each region pair is static, so you cannot choose which region are you pairing to.

Just check the documentation to which region is your region currently paired to. Each region pair also resides within the same geography, with an exception of a single Brazil South, which is replicating two US. Each region pair has a physical isolation with at least 300 miles distance from each other, and as I said, this is just to ensure that a large-scale natural disaster will not take two regions down at the same time.

One of the cool features of region pairs is that some services will provide a platform level replication. Again, with a simple check of an option, you will automatically replicate your data and your services across multiple regions, therefore protecting yourself from region level failures. Additional benefit of region pair is that Microsoft is planning updates across pairs.

Therefore, if you will replicate to another pair, Microsoft is making sure that the planned updates plan rollout of the services don't happen to the same paired regions at the same time. Therefore, it will roll out all the updates and all the necessary things to the first region. If everything is working correctly, the updates will be rolled out to this paired region, making sure that even the platform updates will not impact your application. Therefore, it is a preferred option for you to replicate to a paired region. Of course, replication to other regions is also possible, but the pair is always preferred.

So if you are planning for disaster recovery scenarios, you can ensure data residency is maintained for your applications. Some examples of region pairs are East US is paired to West US, UK West to UK South, North Europe located in Ireland is paired to West Europe in Netherlands, East Asia in Hong Kong to South East Asia in Singapore. So as you see, tours are not always within the same country, but they must be close enough to maintain high-speed connectivity but far enough to ensure that natural level disasters will not take them down. Which brings me to the last point.

All regions and region pairs are grouped into geographies. Each geography describes a discrete market and contains typically at least two or more regions. And their purpose is to ensure that all the data level requirements are met, like residency, sovereignty, resiliency, and compliance.

Additionally, geographies are fault tolerant, so they also protect you from region-wide failures. And geographies are broken into areas like Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. And lastly, remember that each region belongs to only one geography at a time.

For this episode, we are done. Remember to navigate to my website to episode number 7 to learn more about regions, geographies, availability zones, check out the study guide, check the cheat sheets, and then... test yourself on the practice test.

Additionally, this is the first episode where I added a new section Expand Your Knowledge with some extra resources which you can use to expand your knowledge even further. And that's it for this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed it.

If you like what I do, support the channel by subscribing, liking, and commenting. If you want to move to the next episode, simply use playlist or hit the icon at the side. And I'm hoping to see you in the next one.

See you!

Transcript for:Exploring Azure Physical Infrastructure Basics

Transcript for:
Exploring Azure Physical Infrastructure Basics