Organization & Management

Regions and Availability Zones

  • Region - a group of data centers in a single geographic location. For example, "Central US", "South India", etc. Provides high availability and fault tolerance. Deployments are closer (geographically) to your end users. Defends against regional outages.

  • Availability Zone - one of several unique locations in a region. There might be one or more individual data centers per zone. Each zone is self-contained (power, cooling, networking, etc). Availability zone deployments are mainly for fault tolerance, protecting against a single point of failure.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Centralized management layer - no matter how you connect to Azure, all requests go through ARM to provide access control

  • Web portal

  • Command-line interface (CLI)

  • Application Access

  • Access Control (authentication)

Tenancy

  • Everything starts with a single Azure Tenant. Single organization instance of Azure AD.

  • Each Tenant can have one or more Management Groups. Management group serves as a grouping component (optional), central management of multiple subscriptions.

  • Each Management Group can have one or more Subscriptions. Subscription is a primary billing and access isolation boundary, each subscription has its own billing agreement.

  • Each Subscription can have one or more Resource Groups. All Azure resources are created in Resource Groups, serve as a container for resources with same purpose/lifecycle.

  • Each Resource Group can contain one or more Resources (VMs, DBs, Functions, etc).

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