Azure Must Know Features

Azure Must know Features:

In this segment we will explore all features and Services, provided by Azure. Below are some Azure Services described in nutshell.

• Azure Active Directory & Security
• Azure Networking
• Azure Virtual Machine
• Azure Functions
• Azure API management
• Azure Monitor
• Azure SQL
• Azure Cosmos DB
• Azure Storage
• Azure Service Bus
• Azure Site recovery

 We will discuss these features one by one in very brief manner. 

Azure Active Directory and Security

Azure Active Directory also called Tenant, is to store corporate user credentials, user Policies, Permissions in global location. It is also used to provide domain name to first time Azure Subscription Setup. This name must be unique in Azure and is prefixed with *.onmicrosoft.com, where * = unique name provided by creator.

Azure Active Directory is also used to link and authenticate software as service (SaaS) like Bing, Office 365, Dynamics CRM.

AAD can also be synchronized with on-Premises Active Directory, so that users inside an internal corporate network can use same credentials to access Azure Cloud Resources. The tool which is used for this synchronization is said to be Azure AD connect.

Services which AAD provides are mentioned as below:

• Azure AD Connect
• Custom Domain name
• RBAC & Key vault
• AAD for Domain Services
• Managed Services identity
• Storage Access Signature
• AAD Conditional access policies
• AAD Domain Services
• MFA & SSO
• Certificate Authentication, SSL/TLS, CA

Azure Networking

Azure Networking feature is used to create a network platform in Azure, in order to build and IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS infrastructure. Below are some Products and features which Azure provides in Azure Networking.

• Azure DNS
• Azure Virtual Network and VNET peering
• Azure Availability Zones
• Azure Load balancer
• Azure Application Gateway
• Azure Content Delivery Network
• Web Application Firewall
• Azure DDoS Protection
• Azure Express Routes
• Azure VPN feature
• Azure Network Performance Monitor
• Azure Log Analytics
• Azure monitor
• Azure Network Watcher

Azure Virtual Machine

It is the Azure IaaS Service, which is highly scalable and enterprise ready compute platform. While Choosing Azure VM, below are some features that needs to be considered:

• OS Disks, data Disks, Managed Disk
• Availability Sets
• Configuration
• Identity
• Disaster recovery and backup.
• Update management
• Configuration Alert and Monitoring

Below are some tools available in Azure for planning, configuring, deploying, Securing and Maintaining VM on Azure.

• Azure Migrate
• Azure Site Recovery
• Azure backup
• Azure Automation

Azure App Service

Azure APP Service is a PaaS service of Azure, which comes in five flavors:

• Azure Web Apps / WebJobs
• Azure APP Service web App for containers
• Azure Mobile Apps
• Azure API Apps
• Azure App Service Environment ( ASE)

Azure App Service work for both Windows and Linux OS and supports large number of coding languages like  .NET , Java , Ruby , Node.js .

All Flavors of Azure APP service support built-in auto-scaling, Load Balancing , AAD integration , GIT , DevOps, GitHub.

Azure App Service provides following products and features:

• Cloning
• Application Insights
• Backups
• Custom domains
• Managed Identity
• SSL/TLS App Service Certificates
• KUDU/SCM
• Cross-Origin Resources Sharing ( CORS)

Azure Functions:

It is as Serverless offering from Azure , means when an application is not in use , it is not allocated to any server /compute resource.

There are two plan, under which you can take Azure Function

Consumption Plan and App Service Plan.

In Consumption Plan After every 20 mints of nonuse, resources will be deallocated and placed back in to pool of compute resources, and application gets shutdown. 

In Consumption plan following Limitation is applied:

• The combined consumption is limited to 1.5 GB of Memory per function APP
• Scaling is handled by a scale controller and no provision of auto-Scaling