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Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently and scale as your business needs change.

Public cloud

Public clouds are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service providers, which deliver their computing resources like servers and storage over the Internet. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud. With a public cloud, all hardware, software and other supporting infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider. You access these services and manage your account using a web browser.

Private cloud

A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organisation. A private cloud can be physically located on the company’s on-site datacenter. Some companies also pay third-party service providers to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. By allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud gives your business greater flexibility, more deployment options and helps optimise your existing infrastructure, security and compliance.

Types of cloud services: IaaS, PaaS, serverless and SaaS

Most cloud computing services fall into four broad categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), serverless and software as a service (SaaS). These are sometimes called the cloud computing stack because they build on top of one another. Knowing what they are and how they are different makes it easier to accomplish your business goals.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network and databases needed for development.

Serverless computing

Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.

Software as a service (SaaS)

Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet or PC.

Uses of cloud computing

You are probably using cloud computing right now, even if you don’t realise it. If you use an online service to send email, edit documents, watch movies or TV, listen to music, play games or store pictures and other files, it is likely that cloud computing is making it all possible behind the scenes. The first cloud computing services are barely a decade old, but already a variety of organisations—from tiny startups to global corporations, government agencies to non-profits—are embracing the technology for all sorts of reasons.

Here are a few examples of what is possible today with cloud services from a cloud provider:

• Create cloud-native applications

  Quickly build, deploy and scale applications—web, mobile and API. Take advantage of cloud-native technologies and approaches, such as containers, Kubernetes, microservices architecture, API-driven communication and DevOps.

• Test and build applications

  Reduce application development cost and time by using cloud infrastructures that can easily be scaled up or down.

• Store, back up and recover data

  Protect your data more cost-efficiently—and at massive scale—by transferring your data over the Internet to an offsite cloud storage system that is accessible from any location and any device.

• Analyse data

  Unify your data across teams, divisions and locations in the cloud. Then use cloud services, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, to uncover insights for more informed decisions.

• Stream audio and video

  Connect with your audience anywhere, anytime, on any device with high-definition video and audio with global distribution.

• Embed intelligence

  Use intelligent models to help engage customers and provide valuable insights from the data captured.

• Deliver software on demand

  Also known as software as a service (SaaS), on-demand software lets you offer the latest software versions and updates around to customers—anytime they need, anywhere they are.

Types of cloud services: IaaS, PaaS, serverless and SaaS

Most cloud computing services fall into four broad categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), serverless and software as a service (SaaS). These are sometimes called the cloud computing stack because they build on top of one another. Knowing what they are and how they are different makes it easier to accomplish your business goals.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network and databases needed for development.

Serverless computing

Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.

Software as a service (SaaS)

Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet or PC.

Economies of scale is the ability to do things more efficiently or at a lower-cost per unit when operating at a larger scale (e.g. the ability to acquire hardware at a lower cost than if a single user or smaller business were purchasing it, cloud providers can also make deals with local governments and utilities to get tax savings, lower pricing on power, cooling, and high-speed network connectivity between sites).

Check Microsoft PDF file

The Economics of the Cloud: https://news.microsoft.com/download/archived/presskits/cloud/docs/The-Economics-of-the-Cloud.pdf

What are Availability Zones in Azure?

Availability Zones is a high-availability offering that protects your applications and data from datacenter failures. Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. To ensure resiliency, there’s a minimum of three separate zones in all enabled regions. The physical separation of Availability Zones within a region protects applications and data from datacenter failures. Zone-redundant services replicate your applications and data across Availability Zones to protect from single-points-of-failure. With Availability Zones, Azure offers the industry best 99.99% VM uptime SLA. The full Azure SLA explains the guaranteed availability of Azure as a whole.

An Availability Zone in an Azure region is a combination of a fault domain and an update domain. For example, if you create three or more VMs across three zones in an Azure region, your VMs are effectively distributed across three fault domains and three update domains. The Azure platform recognizes this distribution across update domains to make sure that VMs in different zones are not updated at the same time.

Build high-availability into your application architecture by co-locating your compute, storage, networking, and data resources within a zone and replicating in other zones. Azure services that support Availability Zones fall into two categories:

• Zonal services – you pin the resource to a specific zone (for example, virtual machines, managed disks, Standard IP addresses), or

• Zone-redundant services – platform replicates automatically across zones (for example, zone-redundant storage, SQL Database).

To achieve comprehensive business continuity on Azure, build your application architecture using the combination of Availability Zones with Azure region pairs. You can synchronously replicate your applications and data using Availability Zones within an Azure region for high-availability and asynchronously replicate across Azure regions for disaster recovery protection.

Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work, either Bash or PowerShell.

You can access the Cloud Shell in three ways:

• Direct link: Open a browser to https://shell.azure.com.

• Azure portal: Select the Cloud Shell icon on the Azure portal:

  
  

The key tools in Azure to help you achieve your privacy goals that include:

• The Azure Data Subject Requests for the GDPR portal, which provides step-by-step guidance on how to comply with GDPR requirements to find and act on personal data that resides in Azure. This capability to execute data subject requests is available through the Azure portal on our public and sovereign clouds, as well as through pre-existing APIs and UIs across the breadth of our online services.

• Azure Policy, which is deeply integrated into Azure Resource Manager, helps your organization enforce policy across resources. With Azure Policy you can define policies at an organizational level to manage resources and prevent developers from accidentally allocating resources in violation of those policies. You can use Azure Policy in a wide range of compliance scenarios, such as ensuring that your data is encrypted or remains in a specific region to comply with the GDPR.

• Compliance Manager, which is a free workflow-based risk assessment tool, can help you manage regulatory compliance within the shared responsibility model of the cloud. It delivers a dashboard view of standards, regulations, and assessments that contain Microsoft control implementation details and test results as well as customer-managed controls. This enables you to track, assign, and verify your organization's regulatory compliance activities.

• Azure Information Protection, which offers file-share scanning for on-premises servers to discover sensitive data, can enable you to label, classify, and protect it thereby improving organizational data governance.

• Azure Security Center, which provides unified security management and advanced threat protection. Integration with Azure Policy enables you to apply security policies across hybrid cloud workloads to enable encryption, limit organizational exposure to threats, and respond to attacks.

• Azure Security and Compliance GDPR Blueprint, which can help you build and launch cloud applications that meet GDPR requirements. You can leverage our common reference architectures, deployment guidance, GDPR article implementation mappings, customer responsibility matrices, and threat models to simplify the adoption of Azure in support of your GDPR compliance initiatives.

Microsoft offers a wide range of products, including server products used to help operate enterprises worldwide, devices you use in your home, software that students use at school, and services developers use to create and host what’s next. References to Microsoft products in this statement include Microsoft services, websites, apps, software, servers, and devices.

Please read the product-specific details in this privacy statement, which provide additional relevant information. This statement applies to the interactions Microsoft has with you and the Microsoft products listed below, as well as other Microsoft products that display this statement.

Compliance Manager is a workflow-based risk assessment tool that helps you track, assign, and verify your organization's regulatory compliance activities related to Microsoft Cloud services, such as Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure. Use Compliance Manager to manage regulatory compliance within the shared responsibility model of the cloud.

Azure customers can create and manage support requests in the Azure portal.

Support request experience to focus on three main goals:

• Streamlined: Make support and troubleshooting easy to find and simplify how you submit a support request.

• Integrated: You can easily open a support request when you're troubleshooting an issue with an Azure resource, without switching context.

• Efficient: Gather the key information your support agent needs to efficiently resolve your issue.

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A sub-region is the lowest level geo-location which you may select to deploy your applications and associated data. For data transfers (except CDN), the following regions correspond to Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3 and DE Zone 1.

• Zone 1—Canada Central, Canada East, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, France South, Switzerland North, Switzerland West, UK South, UK West, Central US, East US, East US 2, US Gov Arizona, US Gov Iowa, US Gov Texas, US Gov Virginia, North Central US, South Central US, West US, West US 2, West Central US

• Zone 2—East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia Central, Australia Central 2, Australia East, Australia Southeast, Central India, Japan East, Japan West, Korea Central, Korea, South India, West India

• Zone 3—Brazil South, South Africa North, South Africa West, UAE Central, UAE North

• DE Zone 1—Germany Central, Germany Northeast

Following Availability Zone data transfer is charged:

• Data transfer, ingress and egress, from a VNet resource deployed in an Availability Zone to another resource in different Availability Zone in the same VNET

Following Availability Zone data transfer is NOT charged:

• Data transfer between VNet resources located in same Availability Zone

• Data transfer between a VNet resource and a Public IP address in the same Azure Region

• Data transfer between VNet resources located in peered VNets across Availability Zones. This data transfer will be charges as per VNet peering rates.

Powershell Command:

Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name ExampleResourceGroup

Azure CLI

az group delete --name ExampleResourceGroup

Delete resource:

Remove-AzResource ` -ResourceGroupName ExampleResourceGroup ` -ResourceName ExampleVM ` -ResourceType Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines

Delete resource - Azure CLI

az resource delete \ --resource-group ExampleResourceGroup \ --name ExampleVM \ --resource-type "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines"

Azure Virtual Machines are image service instances that provide on-demand and scalable computing resources with usage-based pricing.

More broadly, a virtual machine behaves like a server: it is a computer within a computer that provides the user the same experience they would have on the host operating system itself. In general, virtual machines are sandboxed from the rest of the system, meaning that the software inside a virtual machine cannot escape or tamper with the underlying server itself.

Each virtual machine provides its own virtual hardware including CPUs, memory, hard drives, network interfaces and other devices.

Extensions are small applications that provide post-deployment configuration and automation on Azure VMs. The Azure platform hosts many extensions covering VM configuration, monitoring, security, and utility applications. Publishers take an application, wrap it into an extension, and simplify the installation. All you need to do is provide mandatory parameters.

Microsoft Antimalware for Azure is a free real-time protection that helps identify and remove viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. It generates alerts when known malicious or unwanted software tries to install itself or run on your Azure systems.

The solution is built on the same antimalware platform as Microsoft Security Essentials [MSE], Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection, Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection, Windows Intune, and Windows Defender. Microsoft Antimalware for Azure is a single-agent solution for applications and tenant environments, designed to run in the background without human intervention. Protection may be deployed based on the needs of application workloads, with either basic secure-by-default or advanced custom configuration, including antimalware monitoring.

When you deploy and enable Microsoft Antimalware for Azure for your applications, the following core features are available:

• Real-time protection - monitors activity in Cloud Services and on Virtual Machines to detect and block malware execution.

• Scheduled scanning - Scans periodically to detect malware, including actively running programs.

• Malware remediation - automatically takes action on detected malware, such as deleting or quarantining malicious files and cleaning up malicious registry entries.

• Signature updates - automatically installs the latest protection signatures (virus definitions) to ensure protection is up-to-date on a pre-determined frequency.

• Antimalware Engine updates – automatically updates the Microsoft Antimalware engine.

• Antimalware Platform updates – automatically updates the Microsoft Antimalware platform.

• Active protection - reports telemetry metadata about detected threats and suspicious resources to Microsoft Azure to ensure rapid response to the evolving threat landscape, as well as enabling real-time synchronous signature delivery through the Microsoft Active Protection System (MAPS).

• Samples reporting - provides and reports samples to the Microsoft Antimalware service to help refine the service and enable troubleshooting.

• Exclusions – allows application and service administrators to configure exclusions for files, processes, and drives.

• Antimalware event collection - records the antimalware service health, suspicious activities, and remediation actions taken in the operating system event log and collects them into the customer’s Azure Storage account.

You can use Update Management in Azure Automation to manage operating system updates for your Windows and Linux virtual machines in Azure, in on-premises environments, and in other cloud environments. You can quickly assess the status of available updates on all agent machines and manage the process of installing required updates for servers.