Studying for my Implementing Azure Infrastructure Solutions as part of my ongoing accreditation requirements. Normally I jot down everything in OneNote - but I figured it might be of use for the wider world - and Steemit seems like a good place to do it. I've mainly included this for anybody new(ish) to Azure... hopefully I get to go a bit deeper later in my notes.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

On demand self service
Broad network access
Resource Pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measure service

note to self - what makes on-premises "clouds" difficult is the on-demand self service and measuring

Advantages

Managed data center
Reduce capex
Lower operation costs
Server consolidation
Flexibility and speed

Public, Hybrid and Private

Public - purchasing compute/storage/network with zero control over underlying infrastructure
Private - use your own private infrastructure and overlay the cloud on that
Hybrid - a mix of both public, private and traditional data center connectivity

Cloud Services

IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service : Still manage compute, network and storage as discreet units, easiest to approach, most closely maps to bare-metal
PaaS - Platform as a Service : Cloud provider delivers component services like websites, queues and databases which can be combined to deliver a solution. Abstracts the underlying compute to varying degrees
SaaS - Software as a Service : Complete end to end solution to deliver business value without any control of the underlying technology, Saleforce, Dynamics, Gmail O365.
IDaaS - Identity as a Service : Niche group providing underlying identity services. Likely to grow given privacy and data protection concerns
DRaaS - Disaster Recovery as a Service : Cloud backup/storage models for on-premises workloads

Azure Data Centers

Data centers are spread globally and broken into geographies to preserve data residency and compliance boundaries. Within a geography, there are multiple regions for latency and continuity requirements. Each region is paired with another region in the same geography to benefit from isolation and availability policies.

Azure Service Model

Enterprise agreement
Managed by an enterprise administrator who is responsible for delegating control to account administrators.
- Account (For billing and reporting)
  Managed via the account portal by an account administrator. They can create subscriptions and delegate a service administrator and co-administrator to manage the subscriptions.
  - Subscription (For billing and administration)
    Managed via the account portal by a service administrator and co-administrators. The difference between the service administrator and the co-administrator is that the co-administrator has reduced security rights.
    - Resource groups (For grouping and managing resources)
      Managed via delegated Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to users or groups within the Active Directory Tenant that is attached to the Azure subscription.
      - Resources (The actual implementation components)

Pricing and purchasing

Pay as you go (PAYG) - refers to paying as you consume. You pay for exactly what you consume. Pay via credit card, debit card or (if approved) invoice.
Purchase through a reseller, take advantage of existing relationships
Sign an enterprise agreement. Requires an upfront commitment and is billed annually. Can have overages. A use it or lose it - but does come with a lower cost.

There are two ways of reducing costs. A prepurchase plan of virtual machines (VM's) - known as Reserved Instances (RI's) and by taking advantage of the Hybrid Use Benefit (HUB) to allow you to transition software from on-premises hardware to cloud.

MSDN, Partners and BizSpark also receive monthly credits for Azure usage as part of the program.

Support

Premier - top level support extends to all Microsoft products with tight SLA response time (15 minutes). A technical account manager (TAM) and advisory services.
Professional Direct - Lower SLA for response time (1 hour), and pooled account management that can provide escalation management.
Standard - Basic support access lower SLA response (2 hours). No escalation support or pooled management, customer needs to escalate themselves
Developer - Designed for non-production support. SLA of eight hours, and access to technical support during business hours.

Finding Azure Related Resources

Azure Services

Compute
- Virtual Machines
- Service Fabric
- Containers
- Container Services
- App Service / App Service environment
- Cloud Services
- Functions
Network
Data and Storage
Web & Mobile
Intelligence
Analytics
Internet of Things
Media & Azure content delivery
Hybrid Integration
Identity & Access Management
Developer Services
Management

Azure Deployment Models

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Classic - this is being migrated and will soon disappear

Azure Management Tools

Azure Portal at https://portal.azure.com
Windows Powershell
Azure CLI (cross platform scripting)
Azure shell (command shell available from web portal)
Visual Studio

Azure Infrastructure: Exam 70-533 - Azure Overview