Microsoft azure az900 part-5

Benefits of using Azure to store data

The Azure data storage options are cloud-based, secure, and scalable. Its features address the key challenges of cloud storage and provide you with a reliable and durable storage solution.

Benefits of using Azure to store data

Automated backup and recovery:

Replication across the globe:

Support for data analytics

Encryption capabilities

Multiple data types

Data storage in virtual disks:

Storage tiers: 

Types of data

There are three primary types of data that Azure Storage is designed to hold.

Structured data. 

Semi-structured data.

Unstructured data.

How Azure data storage can meet your business storage needs

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Azure SQL Database

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Blob storage

Azure Data Lake Storage

Azure Files

Azure Queue

Disk Storage

Storage tiers

Azure offers three storage tiers for blob object storage:

1. Hot storage tier: optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently.

2. Cool storage tier: optimized for data that are infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days.

3. Archive storage tier: for data that are rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days with flexible latency requirements.

Encryption and replication

Azure provides security and high availability to your data through encryption and replication features.

Encryption for storage services

The following encryption types are available for your resources:

1. Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) for data at rest helps you secure your data to meet the organization's security and regulatory compliance. It encrypts the data before storing it and decrypts the data before returning it. The encryption and decryption are transparent to the user.

2. Client-side encryption is where the data is already encrypted by the client libraries. Azure stores the data in the encrypted state at rest, which is then decrypted during retrieval.

In this module, you explored the benefits of using Azure to store your data. Azure provides the following features:

• Storage of both structured and unstructured data
• High security that supports global compliance standards
• Load balancing, high availability, and redundancy capabilities
• The ability to send large volumes of data directly to the browser using features such as Azure Blob storage

Ultimately, the capabilities of Azure data storage make it an ideal platform for hosting any large global application or portal.

 Loosely Coupled Architectures

An architectural pattern that can be used to build loosely coupled systems is N-tier.

An N-tier architecture divides an application into two or more logical tiers. Architecturally, a higher tier can access services from a lower tier, but a lower tier should never access a higher tier.

What's a virtual network?

A virtual network is a logically isolated network on Azure. Azure virtual networks will be familiar to you if you've set up networks on Hyper-V, VMware, or even on other public clouds. A virtual network allows Azure resources to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. A virtual network is scoped to a single region; however, multiple virtual networks from different regions can be connected together using virtual network peering.

Virtual networks can be segmented into one or more subnets. Subnets help you organize and secure your resources in discrete sections. The web, application, and data tiers each have a single VM. All three VMs are in the same virtual network but are in separate subnets.

Users interact with the web tier directly, so that VM has a public IP address along with a private IP address. Users don't interact with the application or data tiers, so these VMs each have a private IP address only.

You can also keep your service or data tiers in your on-premises network, placing your web tier into the cloud, but keeping tight control over other aspects of your application. A VPN gateway (or virtual network gateway), enables this scenario. It can provide a secure connection between an Azure Virtual Network and an on-premises location over the internet.

Azure manages the physical hardware for you. You configure virtual networks and gateways through software, which enables you to treat a virtual network just like your own network. You choose which networks your virtual network can reach, whether that's the public internet or other networks in the private IP address space.

What's a network security group?

A network security group, or NSG, allows or denies inbound network traffic to your Azure resources. Think of a network security group as a cloud-level firewall for your network.

For example, notice that the VM in the web tier allows inbound traffic on ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP). This VM's network security group allows inbound traffic over these ports from all sources. You can configure a network security group to accept traffic only from known sources, such as IP addresses that you trust.

What's an Azure region?

A region is one or more Azure data centers within a specific geographic location. 

Scale with Azure Load Balancer

Resiliency refers to a system's ability to stay operational during abnormal conditions.

A load balancer distributes traffic evenly among each system in a pool. A load balancer can help you achieve both high availability and resiliency.

DNS, or Domain Name System, is a way to map user-friendly names to their IP addresses. You can think of DNS as the phonebook of the internet.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that can efficiently deliver web content to users. It is a way to get content to users in their local region to minimize latency.

If all your traffic is HTTP, a potentially better option is to use Azure Application Gateway. Application Gateway is a load balancer designed for web applications. It uses Azure Load Balancer at the transport level (TCP) and applies sophisticated URL-based routing rules to support several advanced scenarios.

Reduce latency with Azure Traffic Manager

Latency refers to the time it takes for data to travel over the network. Latency is typically measured in milliseconds.

One answer is Azure Traffic Manager. Traffic Manager uses the DNS server that's closest to the user to direct user traffic to a globally distributed endpoint.