Core Azure resource types - Azure Tutorial

Let's have a look at a few of the core Azure resource types, and we'll start off with virtual machines. Now, Azure virtual machines are only charged to you when they're allocated to you. The thing that allocates a virtual machine to you is having that virtual machine running. If you stop a virtual machine, it's no longer allocated to you. You have to make sure that if you've got a virtual machine that's running that you're utilizing it, and if you're not going to use it for a little while, all you have to do is stop it, and then that stops your billing on that. Now, there are many different configurations for virtual machines. What I mean by that is there are many different types of servers available, whether that's different operating systems or different configurations, like different number of CPUs, different amounts of memory and disk space and that type of thing. Virtual machines are designed to be highly available. And in fact, Microsoft guarantees an uptime of these of at least 98%. Now, there are some changes that you can make in configuration to increase that level of agreement on availability. And then they are flexibly priced, not only in what type of virtual machine that you choose, but also there are some options that you can use with virtual machines that allow you to save money in the way that you create and use licensing. We're gonna look at some of that a little bit later on. Another Azure resource type is virtual networking. And virtual networks is the primary component of virtual networking, obviously. There are a lot of different networking types of resources in Azure, but virtual networks themselves are designed to replicate the network topology that you might have running on-premises. And so that means that they have things like subnets and IP address allocation, all of those things that you would normally have in a network and you can have multiple virtual networks and connect them together. There are a couple of different ways you can do that. One is you can use a feature called Virtual Network Peering, but you can also use a resource called Azure VPN Gateway to connect networks together. Azure also has several different types of services that are available for storage. For example, you have Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, and Azure Disks. Blob Storage is used for storing unstructured data. The same types of things that you would typically store, for example, on a hard drive. Azure Files provides disk space in the Cloud that you can access using a UNC path. In other words, backslash backslash server name, which in this case is a URL, backslash the name of a share. and then Azure Disks are either spinning platter disk or solid state drives that you can add to virtual machines and they get stored in Azure Storage. Now the high level Azure resource type that all of your different storage things sit under is called a storage account. So the first thing you would want to do when you want to create an Azure Storage resource is create a storage account. We're gonna go into Blob Storage much more later on. And so let's just move on to hosting applications in Azure. And there are a lot of different managed services that you can use for hosting applications. These are PaaS services. So they're platform as a service. Probably the most common one or the most popular one is Azure App Service. And a lot of people describe Azure App Service as a service that allows you to host websites. And certainly that's true, but Azure App Service actually, probably a bit more accurate to say, it is a platform that allows you to host applications that are designed to listen to HTTP requests and then send HTTP responses. So websites obviously is one of those, but also there are many other types of applications that people will use HTTP as the protocol for those applications, and all of those can be hosted in Azure App Service. Another service that actually runs on Azure App Service is Azure Functions. And Functions is designed for creating microservices. So a microservice is where you have very small components that fit together to create a larger deployment. And the way they work is they're typically event driven. They take some kind of parameter or some kind of input. They do some work and then they provide some kind of output. So for example, you might have an Azure function that watches a OneDrive folder. And when somebody puts an image file in that OneDrive folder, that kicks off your Azure function, which takes that image file as the input, compresses it to a different file format, stores it in a different folder where it's storing compressed images, and then returns to the user the URL path to that compressed file folder. That's an example of one of the things you might do with Azure Functions.