AZ-900 Episode 07 - Cheat Sheet

Navigation

• 🧭 Episode List
• 💬 Episode Summary
• 📚 Study cheat sheet
• 🧠 Practice Test

• Skills Learned
  • Describe Data Centers
  • Describe Regions and Region Pairs
  • Describe Geographies
  • Describe Availability Zones
  • Describe the benefits and usage of core Azure architectural components (Regions & Availability Zones)
• Study Guide
  • Microsoft Learn: Datacenters and Regions
  • Microsoft Learn: Geographies
  • Microsoft Learn: Availability Zones
  • Microsoft Learn: Region Pairs
  • Regions & Availability Zones
• Expand your knowledge - extra resources
  • Microsoft Build: Inside Azure datacenter architecture with Mark Russinovich
    A very cool video on Azure datacenter architecture by Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich
  • Products available by region
  • 🌐 Azure Speed Test 2.0

Data Center

• Physical facility
• Hosting for group of networked servers
• Own power, cooling & networking infrastructure

Region

• Geographical area on the planet
• One but usually more datacenters connected with low-latency network (<2 milliseconds)
• Location for your services
• Some services are available only in certain regions
• Some services are global services, as such are not assigned/deployed in specific region
• Globally available with 50+ regions
• Special government regions (US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, etc.)
• Special partnered regions (China East, China North)

Availability Zone

• Regional feature
• Grouping of physically separate facilities
• Designed to protect from data center failures
• If zone goes down others continue working
• Two service categories
  • Zonal services (Virtual Machines, Disks, etc.)
  • Zone-redundant services (SQL, Storage, etc.)
• Not all regions are supported
• Supported region has three or more zones
• A zone is one or more data centers

Region Pair

• Each region is paired with another region making it a region pair
• Region pairs are static and cannot be chosen
• Each pair resides within the same geography*
  • Exception is Brazil South
• Physical isolation with at least 300 miles distance (when possible)
• Some services have platform-provided replication
• Planned updates across the pairs
• Data residency maintained for disaster recovery

Geographies

• Discrete market
• Typically contains two or more regions
• Ensures data residency, sovereignty, resiliency, and compliance requirements are met
• Fault tolerant to protect from region wide failures
• Broken up into areas
  • Americas,
  • Europe,
  • Asia Pacific,
  • Middle East and Africa
• Each region belongs only to one Geography