CORE ARCHITECTURAL COMPONENTS OF AZURE By OMONIYI, S. A. PRECIOUS
Tags: physicalinfrastructure, managementinfrastructure
Published: 2024-06-07 09:04:32

**INTRODUCTION**
The core architectural components of Azure may be broken down into two main groupings as below; 
1. The Physical Infrastructure 
2. The Management Infrastructure.

**1. THE PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE**
The physical infrastructure for Azure starts with datacenters. Conceptually, the datacenters are the same as large corporate datacenters. They’re facilities with resources arranged in racks, with dedicated power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.
As a global cloud provider, Azure has datacenters around the world. However, these individual datacenters aren’t directly accessible. Datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions or Azure Availability Zones that are designed to help you achieve resiliency and reliability for your business-critical workloads.

**REGIONS**: A region is a geographical area on the planet that contains at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network. Azure intelligently assigns and controls the resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced. When a resource is deployed in Azure, you'll often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed.

**AVAILABILITY ZONES**: Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. An availability zone is set up to be an isolation boundary. If one zone goes down, the other continues working. Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.

**2. THE MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE**
The management infrastructure explains how the Azure Infrastructures are being managed, This includes Azure resources and resource groups, subscriptions, and accounts. Understanding the hierarchical organization will help in projects and products planning with within Azure.

**RESOURCES**:A resource is the basic building block of Azure. Anything you create, provision, deploy, etc. is a resource. Virtual Machines (VMs), virtual networks, databases, cognitive services, etc. are all considered resources within Azure.

**RESOURCE GRUOPS**:Resource groups are simply groupings of resources. When you create a resource, you’re required to place it into a resource group. While a resource group can contain many resources, a single resource can only be in one resource group at a time. Some resources may be moved between resource groups, but when you move a resource to a new group, it will no longer be associated with the former group. Additionally, resource groups can't be nested, meaning you can’t put resource group B inside of resource group A.

Resource groups provide a convenient way to group resources together. When you apply an action to a resource group, that action will apply to all the resources within the resource group. If you delete a resource group, all the resources will be deleted. If you grant or deny access to a resource group, you’ve granted or denied access to all the resources within the resource group.

**AZURE SUBSCRIPTIONS**:In Azure, subscriptions are a unit of management, billing, and scale. Similar to how resource groups are a way to logically organize resources, subscriptions allow you to logically organize your resource groups and facilitate billing. U
sing Azure requires an Azure subscription. A subscription provides you with authenticated and authorized access to Azure products and services. It also allows you to provision resources. An Azure subscription links to an Azure account, which is an identity in Microsoft Entra ID or in a directory that Microsoft Entra ID trusts.

**AZURE RESOURCE MANAGER**:Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
The deployment and management service for Azure
Key Points
● Provides a uniﬁed way to manage Azure resources ● Allows users to create, update, and delete resources as a group ● Uses templates to automate deployment