Module 4

Question 1

Azure spans the globe with more than how many facilities

Answer 1

100

Question 2

What is a Region in Azure and what does it contain.

Answer 2

• A region is a geographical area containing one or more data centers that are nearby and networked via low latency network.
• Azure assigns and controls the resources within a region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced.

Question 3

True or False, Everything Azure offers is available in every region

Answer 3

False, some things are only available in certain regions (i.e. VM Size or Storage Types)

Question 4

What types of things do not require a region

Answer 4

• Some Things are global services that do not require region selection (i.e. Azure Ad, Traffic Manager and Azure DNS).

Question 5

-Azure has more global regions than anyone else, giving the flexibility to get your App closer to your user wherever they are, as well as also providing what…

Answer 5

Better scalability, redundancy and better preserves data residency

Question 6

Azure has some special regions, what are these and why do they exist

Answer 6

US DOD Central
US Govt Virginia
US Govt IOWA and More
China East
China North and More

These exist for compliance and legal reasons

Question 7

How are the US Govt regions separated and how are they operated

Answer 7

• Physically and logically separated for US govt agencies and operated by screened US personnel

Question 8

How are the China Regions managed

Answer 8

Managed via Partnership with 21vianet, MS does not directly manage these.

Question 9

What are regions used to identify

Answer 9

Regions are used to identify the location of your resources

Question 10

Azure divides the world into geographies, how are these defined

Answer 10

• Azure divides the world into geographies, defined by country borders or geopolitical boundaries
• Azure Geography is a discrete market containing 2 or more regions preserving data residency boundaries.

Question 11

What do Geographies allow customers to achieve

Answer 11

• Geographies allow customers wit specific data residency and compliance needs to keep apps and data close
• Ensure data residency sovereignty, compliance and resiliency requirements are honoured within boundaries

Question 12

What level of fault tolerance are built into geographies and how is this achieved

Answer 12

Fault Tolerant to withstand complete region failure through a connection to a dedicated high capacity network infrastructure.

Question 13

What areas are geographies broken down into

Answer 13

• Americas
• Europe
• Aspac
• Middle East and Africa

Question 14

In what way do regions belong to geographies and what is applied

Answer 14

Each region belongs to a single geography and has specific service availability, compliance and data residency applied.

Question 15

You want to make your data and services redundant to protect in case of failure, when using On-Prem this requires hosting duplicate H/W environments.

How does Azure help with this

Answer 15

• Azure can help through availability zones

Question 16

What are Availability Zones made up of

Answer 16

Availability Zones are physically separate DCs within an Azure region

• Each Availability zone is made up of one of more DCs with independent power/cooling/networking
• If one zone goes down the other continues working.
• Availability Zones are connected via High Speed fibre networks

Question 17

Does every region support Availability zones

Answer 17

No, not every region support availability zones

Question 18

How do Availability zones allow running of mission critical apps

Answer 18

• Availability Zones allow running of mission critical apps building High availability bu co-locating compute, storage, data resources within a zone and reduplicating it in other zones

Question 19

What cost implications can be involved with using Availability zones?

Answer 19

• There could be a cost to duplicating services and transferring data between zones

Question 20

What types of resource are availability zones typically used for

Answer 20

• Availability Zones are primarily for VMs, managed disks, load balancing and SQL DBs

Question 21

What categories of services that fall into availability zones are there

Answer 21

Zonal Services

Zone Redundant Services

Question 22

What is meant by a Zonal Service within Availability Zones

Answer 22

• Zonal Services - Pin resource to specific zone (i.e. VMs, managed disks, IPs)

Question 23

What is meant by Zone Redundant Services within Availability Zones

Answer 23

• Zone Redundant Services - Platform replicates automatically across zones (i.e. zone redundant storage and SQL dbs)

Question 24

Availability zones are created using one or more data centers, there are a minimum of 3 zones in a region. However a large enough disaster could cause an outage to effect even two data centers. What Azure solution could be used to mitigate this risk

Answer 24

Region Pairs

Question 25

What is a region pair?

Answer 25

- Each Azure region is paired with another within the same geography (US, Europe, Asia etc)

Question 26

What is the minimum distance that a region pair must be from the other

Answer 26

At least 300 miles

Question 27

Region Pairs in Azure allows replication of resources (Such as VM Storage) across a geography, this is to minimize interruptions that may occur due to what...

Answer 27

- Allowing replication of resources (such as VM storage) across a geography minimizes interruptions that may occur due to natural disasters, civil unrest, power or network outage affecting both regions at once.

Question 28

If one region pair was affected by a natural disaster, what would happen

Answer 28

If a region pair was affected by a natural disaster, services would failover automatically to the other region pair

Question 29

What are some of the additional advantages of region pairs

Answer 29

- In extensive Azure outage - 1x region of every region pair is prioritized for restore - Planned Azure updates are rolled out to paired regions one at a time to minimize downtime and risk. - Data resides in same geography as pair (except Brazil South) for tax and law enforcement jurisdiction purposes - A broad set of distributed DC's allows Azure to provide a high guarantee of availability.

Question 30

What do SLAs capture

Answer 30

SLAs capture terms that define standards that apply to azure.

Question 31

There are SLAs to for specific Azure products and services. SLAs describe MS commitment to providing Azure customers with what

Answer 31

Specific performance standards

Question 32

- SLAs specify what happens if product or service fails to perform to the SLAs specification. However what sort of SLAs are provided for most Free/Shared Tiers

Answer 32

None

Question 33

What 3 Characteristics are there for SLAs for Azure Products and Services

Answer 33

**Performance Targets** **Uptime and Connectivity Gurantees** **Service Credits**

Question 34

What is meant by SLA Performance Targets

Answer 34

- SLA defines performance targets for product or service these are specific to each azure product of services (e.g. uptime guarantees of connectivity rates)

Question 35

What is meant by SLA Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees

Answer 35

- typical SLA commits to between 99.9% or 99.999% (i.e. 3 OR 5 nines) - *Example - Cosmos DB has SLA of 99.999% uptime with low latency commitments of 10 Miliseconds on DB Reads and Writes*

Question 36

What is meant by Service credits

Answer 36

SLAs also describe the response if an Azure Product or Service fails to perform to specification. Customer may have a discount applied to there bill as compensation.

Question 37

Define a composite SLA and what it can result in

Answer 37

Combining SLAs across different service offerings results in a composite SLA. This can result in a higher or lower uptime value depending on your application architecture

Question 38

How can you improve a composite SLA

Answer 38

You can improve composite SLA by creating independent failback paths

Question 39

You can create your own SLAs to meet your own performance targets to suit you specific Azure application. What is this known as

Answer 39

Application SLA

Question 40

What do you need to know to build and efficient, reliable solution

Answer 40

- Building an efficient, reliable solution requires knowing your workload requirements and selecting/provisioning azure products/services according to those requirements.

Question 41

What existing data in Azure will help create an achievable Application SLA

Answer 41

- Azure SLAs define performance targets for Azure products/services within your solution. This will help create achievable application SLAs

Question 42

What is meant by the term resiliency

Answer 42

**Resiliency - ability to recover from failure and continue to function** - Not avoiding failures but responding to them in a away that avoids downtime or data loss.

Question 43

What is the goal of resiliency

Answer 43

The goal of resiliency is to return to a fully functioning state following a failure

Question 44

What are two key components of resiliency

Answer 44

HA (High availability) and DR (Disaster Recovery) are 2 key components of resiliencey.

Question 45

When designing architecture and designing for resiliency what should you perform, and what is it's goal

Answer 45

- When designing architecture - design for resiliency, your should perform a FMA (Failure Mode Analysis) which goal is to identify possible points of failure and define how to respond to such failures.

Question 46

What does availability refer to (try not to use the word available)

Answer 46

- Availability refers to time system is functional and working, maximizing availability requires implementing measures to prevent possible service failures.

Question 47

Increasing availability is expensive and increases what...

Answer 47

Complexity

Question 48

As complexity grows with higher availability solutions more services depend on each other this makes it easy to overlook....

Answer 48

- As complexity grows more services depend on each other, making it easier to overlook possible failure points

Question 49

An SLA of 99.999% allows for approx how much down time a year

Answer 49

- SLA of 99.999% allows for approx 5mins of downtime a year.

Question 50

For 99.99% targets (4-nines) manually recovering from failures may not be enough, what might you need to investigate instead

Answer 50

Investigate Self diganosing and Self healing solutions

Question 51

Why should you consider the time window against which your SLA targets are measured

Answer 51

Consider time window against which SLA targets are measured, a smaller window will mean tighter tolerances, hourly or daily uptime measurements might not allow for achievable targets.