Azure Fundamentals Part 1
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This document provides an overview of Azure cloud concepts for exam preparation. It begins with an introduction to cloud computing benefits like scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness. It then covers Azure architecture including regions, availability zones and performance service level agreements. The document reviews cloud deployment models and compares infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service. It also discusses how to use the Azure pricing calculator and reduce infrastructure costs. Potential exam questions are provided at the end.
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Azure Fundamentals Part 1
- 1. FUNDAMENTALS OF AZURE : AZURE CLOUD CONCEPTS
- 2. HOUSEKEEPING Contact Information: Phillip Scanlon - CCG Email: pscanlon@ccganalytics.com
- 3. AGENDA Fundamentals of Azure : Azure Cloud Concepts 1. Exam Prep 2. Introduction To Cloud Computing and Concepts 3. Azure Architecture and Service Guarantees 4. Using Azure Calculator and Pricing Azure 5. Potential Exam Questions
- 4. AZURE TRAINING AND CERTIFICATIONS
- 5. AZ-900 EXAM LAYOUT 1. Understand cloud concepts (15-20%) 2. Understand core Azure services (30-35%) 3. Understand security, privacy, compliance, and trust (25-30%) 4. Understand Azure pricing and support (20-25%)
- 6. EXAM PREP - STUDY MATERIALS Microsoft Learn Platform Whizlabs
- 7. CLOUD STATISTICS • Cloud data centers will process 94% of workloads in 2021 (Source: Cisco) • Main reason for cloud adoption (Source: Sysgroup) o Access to data anytime (42%) o Disaster recovery (38%) o Flexibility (37%) • The US is the most significant public cloud market with spending of $124.6 billion in 2019 (Source: IDC) 1. United States – $124.6 billion 2. China – $10.5 billion 3. UK – $10 billion 4. Germany – $9.5 billion 5. Japan – $7.4 billion
- 8. INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD COMPUTING AND CONCEPTS
- 9. TYPICAL COMPUTING SERVICES Compute Power Networking Storage Analytics
- 10. TOP BENEFITS OF CLOUD COMPUTING Cost- Effective Scalable Secure Global Reliable Current Elastic
- 11. TWO INVESTMENT APPROACHES: CAPEX VERSUS OPEX
- 12. CAPEX COMPUTING COSTS AND BENEFITS Benefits: With capital expenditures, you plan your expenses at the start of a project or budget period. Your costs are fixed, meaning you know exactly how much is being spent. This is appealing when you need to predict the expenses before a project starts due to a limited budget. Costs: • Server costs • Network costs • Backup and archive costs • Organization continuity and disaster recovery costs • Datacenter infrastructure costs • Technical personnel - Not a capital expenditure, but…
- 13. OPEX CLOUD COMPUTING COSTS AND BENEFITS Benefits: • Simplicity - Predictable monthly or annual fee • Enhanced Security with maximum uptime • Rapid deployment = ROI Savings • Ability to scale with no limitation on resources • IT team members are proactive revenue generators • Increased service and support • Tax Savings • Agility: react quickly to changing business needs Costs: Costs associated with an on-premises datacenter are shifted to the service provider. Operational expenses: • Leasing software and customized features • Scaling charges based on usage/demand instead of fixed hardware or capacity • Billing at the user or organization level
- 14. CLOUD - TYPES OF DEPLOYMENT
- 15. PUBLIC CLOUD Pros: • Services are owned and operated by a third party provider • Reduced management costs o Heating/cooling, Patching, Hardware maintenance • Pay-as-you-go model • Easy access to data • Flexibility to add and reduce capacity • Continuous operation time • 24/7 upkeep • Scalability Cons: • Lesser security as the platform is shared • Lesser flexibility & control over the cloud environment
- 16. PRIVATE CLOUD Pros • Individual development • Dedicated to a single organization • Storage and network components are customizable • Greater flexibility to control the cloud environment • High control over the corporate information • High security, privacy and reliabilityCons • Cost intensiveness - considerable expenses on hardware, software and staff training • Purchase and maintenance has to be bared by the organization
- 17. HYBRID Pros: • Improved security and privacy • Enhanced scalability and flexibility • Reasonable price / balances costs Cons: • Only makes sense if companies can split their data into mission-critical and non-sensitive. • Combines both public and private cloud • Greater flexibility and more deployment options
- 18. WHICH ONE DO I CHOOSE? Depends on… • Data security • Regulations or compliance • Ease of use • Length of Project
- 19. COMPARING CLOUD SERVICES IaaS: Move VM On-Premise to Cloud offering. No need to manage heating, cooling and hardware. PaaS: Remove VM and other responsibilities of VM and focus on Service only. User only needs to manage actual database. Great for digital transformations. SaaS: Everything is managed by Microsoft. Example: Microsoft 365. User ONLY leverages email and files. Needs to be secure and integrate with existing services.
- 21. AZURE: HOW DOES IT WORK?
- 22. EXPLORE WHAT IS AZURE
- 23. AZURE ARCHITECTURE AND SERVICE GUARANTEES
- 25. AVAILABILITY ZONES What is an Availability Zone? Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region. Each Availability Zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. Isolation boundary - if one zone goes down, the other continues working.
- 26. REGION PAIRS Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away. • Examples of region pairs in Azure are West US paired with East US, and SouthEast Asia paired with East Asia.
- 27. AZURE BACKUP Backs up and restores your data to and from Azure • Secure and reliable • Protects File and folder, Application workload backup, and Azure virtual machines • Off-site backup solution • If you need to restore data from Azure back to your on-premise, you will not incur a charge for that Advantages • Encrypted • Compressed • Automated • Storage auto-scaling
- 28. AZURE SITE RECOVERY Azure Site Recovery • On-premises virtual machine replication • Easy failover and recovery • Simple and automated • Can be used as migration strategy to move VM to Azure Advantages • Replication frequency • Application consistent snapshot Flexible Recovery Plans • Manual actions • Scripting
- 29. PERFORMANCE: SERVICE-LEVEL AGREEMENTS Formal documents capture the specific terms that define the performance standards that apply to Azure. • SLAs describe Microsoft's commitment to providing Azure customers with specific performance standards for products and services. • SLAs specify what happens if a service or product fails to perform to a governing SLA's specification. Measures to plan for redundancy and determine customer SLAs: • MTTR: Mean time to recover is the average time it takes to restore a component after a failure. • MTBF: Mean time between failures is how long a component can reasonably expect to last between outages.
- 30. UPTIME AND CONNECTIVITY GUARANTEES https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/summary/
- 31. SERVICE CREDITS Customer has a discount applied to their Azure bill, as compensation for an under-performing Azure product or service.
- 32. USING AZURE CALCULATOR AND PRICING AZURE
- 33. PURCHASING AZURE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES Products and services in Azure are arranged by category, which has various resources that you can provision.
- 34. FACTORS AFFECTING COST There are several elements that will affect your monthly costs when using Azure services. • Services • Location • Resource Type • Azure Billing Zones
- 35. RESOURCE TYPES : USAGE METERS When you provision an Azure resource, Azure creates one or more meter instances for that resource that tracks the resources' usage, and generate a usage record that is used to calculate your bill. A single virtual machine that you provision in Azure might have the following meters tracking its usage:
- 36. AZURE BILLING ZONES A Zone is a geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes. Most of the time inbound data transfers (data going into Azure datacenters) are free. For outbound data transfers (data going out of Azure datacenters), the data transfer pricing is based on Billing Zones. The following zones exist and include the listed countries (regions) listed.
- 37. AZURE PRICING CALCULATOR Free web-based tool that allows you to input Azure services and modify properties and options of the services.
- 38. AZURE ADVISOR
- 40. REDUCE INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS Use Azure Credits Use Spending Limits Use Reserved Instances Choose Low Cost Locations and Regions Research available cost-saving offers Right size underutilized virtual machines Deallocate virtual machines in off hours Delete unused virtual machines Migrate to PaaS or SaaS services
- 41. EXTRA : POTENTIAL EXAM QUESTIONS
- 42. EXTRA : POTENTIAL EXAM QUESTIONS
- 43. EXTRA : POTENTIAL EXAM QUESTIONS
- 44. EXTRA : POTENTIAL EXAM QUESTIONS
- 45. EXTRA : POTENTIAL EXAM QUESTIONS
- 46. IN THE NEXT WEBINAR: EXPLORE AZURE SERVICES Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform that provides over 100 services Contact Information: Phillip Scanlon pscanlon@ccganalytics.com
Editor's Notes
- Hello and welcome to Fundamentals of Azure. My name is Phillip Scanlon and I will be walking you through Part 1: Azure Cloud Concepts of our three part series.
- We have a lot to cover and may not get to live questions at the end. Please send your questions to Sami and I will get back to you after the webinar. Provided is my contact information and reach out any time. I do provide half day and full day workshops for this course. The workshops are more hands on and we do more live demos within the product. Something to note if interested.
- These topics are specific to the exam and I will not be covering topics that are outside the scope of the exam. If you are attending this webinar, you likely have a goal to pass the AZ-900 exam. We will spend a few slides discussing why this certification is important and how you can prepare. This exam is a great spring board for obtaining future certifications. It really gives you the confidence to pursue the more technical Azure certifications if that is your goal. Earning this certification demonstrates foundational-level knowledge of cloud services and those services within Microsoft Azure. You do not need a technical background for this exam, but it is beneficial. Those involved in selling or purchasing cloud based solutions and services benefit greatly. Those with a technical background can validate their foundational-level knowledge around cloud services.
- I have been with CCG for over three years. When I graduated with my M.S in Business Intelligence, I was uncertain what path within BI or analytics I wanted to pursue. It took me some time, but I landed on cloud. The arrival of gamification and certifications has really helped individuals like myself better understand what is required of me when pursuing certain job roles within the industry. Many employers are starting to use this type of chart or path as justification whether you are ready for a specific job role or not. This is the new role-based Microsoft Certification Path available through Microsoft. Microsoft has certification paths for many technical job roles. Each of these certifications consists of passing a series of exams to earn certification. Microsoft certifications are organized into three levels: Fundamental, Associate, and Expert. These paths help you keep pace with today's technical roles and requirements or skill up, prove your expertise to employers get the recognition and opportunities you've earned. Not sure what path is best for you? That is fine, studying for my Az-900 exam helped me decide what path I wanted to pursue. Maybe it will be the same for you. But, here is what some of these role involve: Microsoft developers design, build, test, and maintain cloud solutions. Microsoft administrators implement, monitor, and maintain Microsoft solutions. Microsoft solutions architects have expertise in compute, network, storage, security.
- Here is the exam layout. There will be 40–60 questions, I had 45 on mine, and there is approximately 85 minutes to complete the exam. There are different formats of questions like a case study, short answer, repeated answer choices, build list, multiple choice, drag and drop etc. in your exam. You need a passing score of 700. In part one of this three part series, we will focus on understanding cloud concepts which is 15-20% of the exam and we will also cover pricing and support slides as well (20-25%). Part II will be covered next Tuesday May 19 from 12-1 and Part III will be covered on Tuesday 5/26 (May 26) from 12-1.
- I used 2 resources and spent around $16 combined for those resources. The exam itself is $99. This is the same study plan I used for the AZ-900 exam: Two weeks learning from Microsoft Learn Platform (about 10 hours total). I highly recommend because although there is more reading involved than videos like Whizlabs provides, you can access a sandbox environment and get some hands on experience. Two weeks of exam preparation using Whizlabs. 7 sections tests (5 questions each), 5 practice tests (55 questions each), and a free practice test of 15 questions. They also have an online video course if you want to watch videos instead of reading through the Learn Platform course. One additional week of review prior to the exam. I determined I was ready for the exam when I consistently received 85% and up on the practice tests.
- Before we continue to cloud concepts, here are some cloud statistics that prove your interest is worth pursuing. Credit for Statistics: https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/cloud-computing-statistics/#gref
- Introduction to Cloud Computing and Concepts Cloud computing is renting resources, like storage space or CPU cycles, on another company's computers. You only pay for what you use. The company providing these services is referred to as a cloud provider. Example providers are Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The cloud provider is responsible for the physical hardware required to execute your work and for keeping it up-to-date. Inside look at an Azure data center. Also, I captured a google maps satellite image of the East US 2 Azure datacenter and look at the scale.
- The term compute refers to the hosting model for the computing resources that your application runs on, Of the many services available in Azure platform, compute services are those services which dictate and determine the execution of an application. Understanding this concept is vital for Azure proficiency. Lets break down that term application a little bit further. A cloud application is an Internet-based program where some, or all, of the processing logic and data storage is processed in the cloud. The user interacts with the application via a web browser or a mobile application, and the data processing is managed by a combination of the local device and a cloud computing solution. From the user’s perspective, the cloud application behaves like a standard website, but the computing and data processing are handled by the cloud via an API (application program interface) or a hybrid of both. Typical computing services include: Networking is securing connections between the cloud provider and your company, whereas Analytics is visualizing collection of data and performance data. The two most common are compute power and storage. So lets explore further. Storage - files and databases Most devices and applications read and/or write data. Here are some examples: Buying a movie ticket online Looking up the price of an online item Taking a picture Sending an email Leaving a voicemail For example, if you wanted to store text or a movie clip, you could use a file on disk. If you had a set of relationships such as an address book, you could take a more structured approach like using a database. The advantage to using cloud-based data storage is you can scale to meet your needs. If you find that you need more space to store your movie clips, you can pay a little more and add to your available space. In some cases, the storage can even expand and contract automatically - so you pay for exactly what you need at any given point in time. Compute power - For example, say that two processors have the same power. Then if a particular algorithm can be implemented on one processor then that algorithm can be implemented on the other processor, and both processors will produce the same result. Example are Linux servers and web applications (Google Apps and Office 365). When you build solutions using cloud computing, you can choose how you want work to be done based on your resources and needs. For example, if you want to have more control and responsibility over maintenance, you could create a virtual machine (VM). The difference is that you don't have to buy any of the hardware or install the OS. The cloud provider runs your virtual machine on a physical server in one of their datacenters - often sharing that server with other VMs (isolated and secure). With the cloud, you can have a VM ready to go in minutes at less cost than a physical computer. VMs aren't the only computing choice - there are two other popular options: containers and serverless computing which we will discuss in further detail later. But, Containers provide a consistent, isolated environment for applications. They're similar to VMs except they don't require a guest operating system. Serverless computing lets you run application code without creating, configuring, or maintaining a server, ideal for automated tasks.
- So what are considered the primary benefits of cloud computing. Cost-effective Cloud computing provides a pay-as-you-go or consumption-based pricing model. Benefits include: No upfront infrastructure costs The ability to pay for additional resources only when they are needed Better cost prediction Scalable Vertical scaling ("scaling up“) Adding more CPUs Adding more memory Horizontal scaling ("scaling out“) Adding more than one server processing incoming requests. Secure Cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, controls, and expert technical skills that can provide better security than most organizations can achieve. Global Cloud providers have fully redundant datacenters located in various regions all over the globe. Replicate your services into multiple regions for redundancy and locality, or select a specific region to ensure you meet data-residency and compliance laws for your customers. Reliable Cloud computing offers data backup, disaster recovery, and data replication services to make sure your data is always safe. Redundancy is often built into cloud services architecture so if one component fails, a backup component takes its place (fault tolerance). Current Cloud usage automatically eliminates the burdens of maintaining software patches, hardware setup, upgrades, and other IT management tasks. Elastic Compensate for workload changes by automatically adding or removing resources. Use case: Your website is featured in a news article, leading to a spike in traffic overnight. Since the cloud is elastic, it automatically allocates more computing resources to handle the increased traffic. When the traffic begins to normalize, the cloud automatically de-allocates the additional resources to minimize cost.
- In the past, companies needed to acquire physical premises and infrastructure to start their business. There was a substantial up-front cost in hardware and infrastructure to start or grow a business. Cloud computing provides services to customers without significant upfront costs or equipment setup time.
- Costs: Exam - Whole systems and servers, printers and scanners, or air conditioners and generators. Maintenance of such items is also considered CapEx, as it extends their lifetime and usefulness. Server costs - all hardware components and the cost of supporting them. Network costs - all on-premises hardware components, including cabling, switches, access points, and routers. Backup and archive costs - Cost to back up, copy, or archive data. Organization continuity and disaster recovery costs - how to recover from a disaster and continue operating Datacenter infrastructure costs - costs for electricity, floor space, cooling, and building maintenance. Technical personnel - Not a capital expenditure, but the personnel required to work on your infrastructure are specific to on-premises datacenter.
- This includes printer cartridges and paper, electricity, and even yearly services like website hosting or domain registrations.
- When I say Cloud deployment I am referring to the enablement of SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) or IaaS (infrastructure as a service) solutions that may be accessed on demand by end users or consumers. What are the most popular cloud deployment models? There are four types of them: public, private, hybrid and community clouds. Additionally, there are also distributed clouds, multiclouds, poly clouds and other models, but they are not so widespread. The focus of the exam will be on only three, public, private, and hybrid.
- This is the most common deployment model. A common use case scenario is deploying a web application or a blog site on hardware and resources that are owned by a cloud provider. Not a fit: There may be government policies, industry standards, or legal requirements which public clouds cannot meet You don't own the hardware or services and cannot manage them as you may want to Unique business requirements, such as having to maintain a legacy application might be hard to meet
- In a private cloud, you create a cloud environment in your own datacenter and provide self-service access to compute resources to users in your organization. You remain completely responsible for the purchase and maintenance of the hardware and software services you provide. A use case scenario for a private cloud would be when an organization has data that cannot be put in the public cloud, perhaps for legal reasons.
- A hybrid cloud combines public and private clouds, allowing you to run your applications in the most appropriate location. For example, you could host a website in the public cloud and link it to a highly secure database hosted in your private cloud (or on-premises datacenter). You can take advantage of economies of scale from public cloud providers for services and resources where it's cheaper, and then supplement with your own equipment when it's not You can use your own equipment to meet security, compliance, or legacy scenarios where you need to completely control the environment Use Cases: This is helpful when you have some things that cannot be put in the cloud, maybe for legal reasons. For example, you may have some specific pieces of data that cannot be exposed publicly (such as medical data) which needs to be held in your private datacenter.
- Lets discuss cloud services and lets compare them. IaaS – Most flexible. Typical usage is Migrating workloads, test and development, storage, backup, recovery PaaS - building, testing, and deploying software applications. Typical is development framework and analytics and BI. SaaS - software that is centrally hosted and managed for the end customer. Examples Office 365, Skype, and Dynamics CRM Online
- Exam: Compute - https://www.whizlabs.com/learn/course/microsoft-azure-az-900/quiz/15007
- Azure uses a technology called virtualization, and virtualization separates the tight coupling between a computers hardware and its operating system, using an abstraction layer called a hypervisor. Tight coupling can be defined as a type of coupling that describes a system in which hardware and software are not only linked together, but are also dependent upon each other. The hypervisor emulates all the functions of a real computer and its CPU in a Virtual Machine. It can run multiple VMs at the same time, optimize the capacity of the obstructed hardware, and each VM can run any compatible operating system such as windows or linux. This technology is repeated on a much larger scale at Microsoft data centers throughout the world.
- Each data center has mini racks filled with servers, and each server includes a hypervisor to run multiple VMs. A network switch provides connectivity to all of those servers. One server in each rack runs software called a Fabric Controller. Each fabric controller is connected to another piece of software known as an orchestrator. This is responsible for managing everything that happens in Azure, including responding to user requests. Users make requests using the Orchestrators Web API. The web api can be called by many tools, including the user interface of the Azure portal. So when a user makes a request to create a VM, the orchestrator packages everything that’s needed, picks the best server rack, and then sends the package and request to the fabric controller. Once the fabric controller has created the VM, the user can connect to it.
- Regions (Microsoft has 55 total): Microsoft Azure is made up of datacenters located around the globe. A region is a geographical area on the planet containing at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network. Azure intelligently assigns and controls the resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced. Geographies: Geographies are broken up into the following areas: Americas Europe Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa Azure divides the world into geographies that are defined by geopolitical boundaries or country borders. Geographies allow customers with specific data residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close. Geographies ensure that data residency, sovereignty, compliance, and resiliency requirements are honored within geographical boundaries. Data residency refers to the physical or geographic location of an organization's data or information. It defines the legal or regulatory requirements imposed on data based on the country or region in which it resides.
- Availability Zone You want to ensure your services and data are redundant so you can protect your information in case of failure. Each Azure region has a minimum of three availability zones, allowing you to run two isolated copies of your applications.
- Allows for the replication of resources (VM storage) across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions due to unexpected/unfortunate events. If a region in a pair was affected by a natural disaster, for instance, services would automatically fail over to other region in its region pair.
- Lets discuss Disaster Recovery – hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, etc – the solutions available for this include Azure Backup or Azure Site Recovery
- What is it? Disaster recovery as a service Protects Hyper-V VMs, VMware VMs, physical servers So lets recamp, Azure Backup allows for granular backups and restores specific data. Azure Site Recovery allows for the protection of an entire production site with automation and orchestration to make the failover and failback processes seamless.
- There are three key characteristics of SLAs for Azure products and services: Performance Targets Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees Service credits
- Everything else being equal, higher availability is better. But as you strive for more nines, the cost and complexity grow. An uptime of 99.99% translates to about five minutes of total downtime per month. Is it worth the additional complexity and cost to reach five nines? The answer depends on the business requirements.
- Column one shows monthly uptime percentage SLA targets for a single instance Azure Virtual Machine. Column two shows the corresponding service credit amount you receive if the actual uptime is less than the specified SLA target for that month. Composite SLAs – App Service Web Apps =99.5% and SQL Database = 99.9% so 99.5x99.9=99.4%
- When planning a solution in the cloud, there's always the challenge of balancing cost against performance. The goal is to eliminate surprises on the next bill. You need to be able to confidently answer several questions: What will this solution cost this fiscal year? Is there an alternate configuration you could use to save money? Can you estimate how a change would impact your cost and performance without putting it into a production system?
- You select the Azure products and services that fit your requirements, and your account is billed according to Azure's pay-for-what-you-use model. This is a helpful slide for definitions. You will likely see all of these on the exam.
- Services: Azure usage rates and billing periods can differ between Enterprise, Web Direct, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers. The Azure team develops and offers first-party products and services, while products and services from third-party vendors are available in the Azure Marketplace . The Microsoft Azure Marketplace is an online store that offers applications and services either built on or designed to integrate with Microsoft's Azure public cloud. Different billing structures apply to each of these categories. Location: Azure has datacenters all over the world. Test question, usage costs vary between locations that offer particular Azure products, services, and resources based on popularity, demand, and local infrastructure costs. Next Slide for Resource Type and Billing Zones…
- Resource Type: Costs are resource-specific, so the usage that a meter tracks and the number of meters associated with a resource depend on the resource type. Each meter tracks a particular kind of usage. For example, a meter might track bandwidth usage (ingress or egress network traffic in bits-per-second), the number of operations, size (storage capacity in bytes), or similar items. At the end of each monthly billing cycle, the usage values will be charged to your payment method and the meters are reset. You can check the billing page in the Azure portal at any time to get a quick summary of your current usage and see any invoices from past billing cycles. The key takeaway is that resources are always charged based on usage. For those wondering about IO there in the bullets or have seen it before: In computing, input/output or I/O is the communication between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world, possibly a human or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system and outputs are the signals or data sent from it.
- In most zones, the first outbound 5 GB per month is free. After that, you are billed a fixed price per GB. Note: Billing zones are not the same as an Availability Zone. In Azure, the term zone is for billing purposes only, and the full term Availability Zone refers to the failure protection that Azure provides for datacenters.
- The Azure pricing calculator outputs the costs per service and total cost for the full estimate. The options that you can configure in the pricing calculator vary between products, but basic configuration options are shown here:
- Free offering that analyzes organizational Azure usage and provides recommendations on how the org can save money, improve performance, be more secure, and improve reliability of the solutions you already have running in Azure. Advisor makes cost recommendations in the following areas: Reduce costs by eliminating unprovisioned Azure ExpressRoute circuits. Azure ExpressRoute is used to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure on your premises Advisor recommends deleting the circuit if you aren't planning to provision the circuit with your connectivity provider. Buy reserved instances to save money over pay-as-you-go. Advisor will review your virtual machine usage over the last 30 days and determine if you could save money in the future by purchasing reserved instances. Right-size or shutdown underutilized virtual machines. Virtual machines whose average CPU utilization is 5 percent or less and network usage is 7 MB or less for four or more days are considered underutilized virtual machines. By identifying these virtual machines, you can decide to resize them to a smaller instance type, reducing your costs. You have heard me say CPU a few times, if you are not familiar, a CPU (pronounced as separate letters) is the abbreviation for central processing unit. Sometimes referred to simply as the central processor, but more commonly called a processor, the CPU is the brains of the computer where most calculations take place.
- Azure Cost Management is another free, built-in Azure tool that can be used to gain greater insights into where your cloud money is going. See historical breakdowns of what services you are spending your money on and how it is tracking against budgets that you have set. Set budgets, schedule reports, and analyze your cost areas. You can even set up alerts. Budget alerts notify you when spending, based on usage or cost, reaches or exceeds the amount defined in the alert condition of the budget. Credit alerts notify you when your Azure credit monetary commitments are consumed. Department spending quota alerts notify you when department spending reaches a fixed threshold of the quota.
- Save money for your company. Reserved Instances: If you have virtual machine workloads that are static and predictable, using reserved instances is a fantastic way to potentially save up to 70 to 80 percent off the pay-as-you-go cost. Right size underutilized VMs: Over-sized virtual machines are a common unnecessary expense on Azure, and one that can be easily fixed. You can change the size of a VM through the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, or the Azure CLI. Deallocate VMs in off hours: Azure now has an automation solution fully available for you to leverage in your environment. You can also use the auto-shutdown feature on a virtual machine to schedule automated shutdowns. Migrate to Paas or Saas: Important to note, as you move workloads to the cloud, a natural evolution is to start with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services and then move them to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services, as appropriate, in an iterative process.
- Here are some questions from Whizlabs. A and B. There are other aspects affecting cost as well such as region, operating system, the type (like OS only), tier (ex Standard), and instance size (CPU, Ram, Gb temporary storage, etc).
- B. Covers only the compute part of your VM usage. The reservation instance is applied automatically to the number of running virtual machines that match the reservation scope and attributes.
- B. You can completely remove the need to buy any sort of physical infrastructure. So no Capital Expense when moving to the cloud.
- B. Provides a cost breakdown by resource.
- C. See cost savings you can achieve by moving workloads to Azure.
- If you understand this slide, you can do pretty well on this exam. There will be many questions like is a virtual machine IaaS or PaaS or does DNS fall under PaaS or IaaS. Can you go through this slide and explain what each service does and into what category it falls? Just something to note. We will explore these in the next webinar. I hope this webinar has been helpful and has encouraged you to continue pursuing this certification. Feel free to email me anytime with questions and I will be happy to respond. Have a wonderful day everyone! Over to Sami to discuss next steps.