[AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Architecture: Region, Availability Zone & Geography

This blog post is the first blog of Topic 2: Core Cloud Services in the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification Series(AZ-900).

If you have not gone through the previous topic 1.4 Cloud Deployment Models read it at https://k21academy.com/az90015.

In this blog post, we’ll cover Topic 2.1 Azure Architecture which includes Region, Geography, Availability Zone, Region Pairs, Availablity Set, Fault Domain and Update Domain.

What Is A Region?

1. A region is a geographical area containing at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network.
2. When one deploys a resource in Azure, one needs to choose the region where you want your resources deployed.
3. Examples of regions are West US, Canada Central, West Europe, Australia East, and Japan West.

What Is Availability Zone?

1. Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region.
2. Each Availability Zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. It is set up to be an isolation boundary. 
3. Azure creates a duplicate of your data and resources so that the information is safe, in case of failure. If one zone goes down, the other continues working.
4. Resources are highly available through Availability Zones.
5. Not every region has support for Availability Zones. The examples of Availability Zones are Central US, East US 2, West US 2, West Europe, France Central, North Europe & Southeast Asia

What Is A Regional Pair?

1. Each Azure region is paired with another region within the same geographical area, which is at least 300 miles away.
2. It allows replication of resources (such as VMs) which helps in reducing the interruptions due to natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages.
3. Azure updates are rolled out to paired regions one region at a time to minimize downtime and risk of application outages.
4. Examples of region pairs are West US paired with East US, South-East Asia paired with East Asia.

What Is Geography?

1. Azure divides the world into geographies that are defined by geopolitical/country boundaries typically containing two or more regions that preserve data residency and compliance boundaries.
2. Geographies allow customers with specific data residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close or within geographical boundaries. 
3. Geographies are fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure through their connection to dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure.

What Is Availability Set?

1. An Availability Set is a logical grouping capability for isolating VM resources from each other when they’re deployed.
2. By deploying your VMs across multiple hardware nodes Azure ensures that if hardware or software failure happens within Azure, only a sub-set of your virtual machines is impacted and your overall solution is safe and in working condition.
3. It provides redundancy for your virtual machines.
4. Availability set spreads your virtual machines across multiple fault domains and update domains.

An Update Domain and Fault Domain is assigned to each VM in Availability Set by Azure platform.

What Is Fault Domain?

1. Fault domains are the group of virtual machines that share a common power source and network switch.
2. Each and every fault domain contains some racks and each rack contains a virtual machine.
3. Each of these Fault domain shares a power supply and a network switch.
4. All the resources in the fault domain become unavailable when there is a failure in the fault domain.
5. You should place your VMs in such a way that each fault domain gets one web server, one database server and like that.

What Is Update Domain?

• 1. Virtual machines get update domains automatically once they are put inside the availability set.
  2. All virtual machines within that update domain will reboot together.
  3. They are used for patching of the virtual machines.
  4. Only one update domain can be updated at the time.

Sample Questions

Here are a few sample questions from the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification Exam[AZ-900] that you should be able to solve after reading this blog.

Q1.HOTSPOT: For each of the following statements, select Yes if the statement is true. Otherwise, select No. 

Note: Each correct selection is worth one point.

Correct Answer:

Explanation:

1. Not every region has multiple Availability Zone. Some regions may have only one Availability Zone.
2. One can run both Linux and Windows virtual machines created in availability zone.
3. Availability zones are used to replicate data and application in the same region.

Q2. This question requires that you evaluate the underlined text to determine if it is correct.

“An Azure region contains one or more data centers that are connected by using a low-latency network.”

Instructions: Review the underlined text. If it makes the statement correct, select “No change is needed”. If the statement is incorrect, select the answer choice that makes the statement correct. 

1. No change is needed 
2. Is found in each country where Microsoft has a subsidiary office 
3. Can be found in every country in Europe and the Americas only 
4. Contains one or more data centers that are connected by using a high-latency network 

Correct Answer: A 

Related/References

1. [AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Certification Fundamental Exam: Everything You Must Know
2. Learn how to create a Free Microsoft Azure Trial Account
3. [AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Topic 1.1 Overview & Benefits
4. [AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Topic 1.2  CapEx vs OpEx Model
5. Topic 1.3 [Video]Cloud Service Model: SaaS | PaaS | IaaS
6. Topic 1.4 Cloud Deployment Models: Public, Private & Hybrid 

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