Introduction to Azure Components
Azure is one of the key players when it comes to cloud computing. It provides n number of services that help the organization to implement its use cases. From migrating on-premise data to the cloud to processing the data and generating the desired output, it handles every possible scenario. Categorizing these services helps their implementation in a better way. These categories are called Azure Components.
Components of Azure
The services offered by Azure are categorized in different components, below are the key components of Azure.
1. Compute
As the name suggests it offers services such as application development, hosting, deployment, etc. In Azure Few of commonly used compute options are:
- Virtual Machines(VM’s): It is Iaas services which allow creating virtual machine according to the hardware requirement and operating system requirement. VM can be accessed publically or only allowed in VNet. VM’s can be created using Azure CLI, PowerShell and Azure portal.
- VM Scale Set: This offers to configure and create thousands of VM’s with similar configuration within minutes.
- Azure App Service: This service offers a host of web applications, Rest API, or mobile backend service. This service powers applications with azure features such as scalability, security, etc.
- Azure Functions: This service offers a solution to run a small functionality by deploying a piece of code. This is used for code reusability i.e. deploy once and use multiple times. Azure functions work irrespective of application, to perform a particular task.
- Azure Batch Service: Azure batch service are batch jobs run to perform large scale computation task. These jobs manage a pool of resources (i.e. virtual machines) and install the application required and run jobs on nodes. So, batch jobs are basically used as a platform to build application required large scale computation.
2. Storage
Azure storage account is a key player when it comes to data storage on the cloud. It provides a pay-as-you-go facility to only pay the cost of the resources which are used for data. Its capacity can be expanded limitlessly. Storage accounts used to store data in the form of blob, tables, files or queues.
- Blob storage: It can be used to store unstructured data such as pictures, raw data or semi-structured data such as CSV or XML files. Their files are stored in a directory like structure called a container.
- Azure tables: As the name suggests stored data in the form of tables. These tables are NoSQL tables i.e. follow schema-less kind of structure. These tables can be created very easily and can be accessed in code with the help of the provided URL. It stored data in key, value-form in the backend.
- Azure File Storage: Mainly used when the legacy system’s file server needs to be migrated. It stores data on a file share that can be mounted as a local directory on azure VM’s and can be accessed by an on-premise application using Rest-API.
- Azure Queues: Name suggests used to queue-up messages, transfer them within the application. The process can interact with queues, pick-up messages, perform the required operation and probably save results either on storage or database.
3. Database
This component offers data management services which include SQL as well as NoSQL tools. SQL Server, Azure Database for MySQL, etc are supported as a relational database whereas databases like Cassandra can be used as NoSQL databases. Also, there is Cosmos DB (document DB) built for fast and enhanced performance.
4. Security And Authentication
This component is responsible for all the security issues like identifying and responding to security threats, managing user access, authentication, authorization, encryption of keys, etc. Azure Active Directory(AAD), Azure Key Vault, etc are commonly used services used.
- Azure Active Directory(AAD): This is a cloud-based access management service.
- Azure Key Vault: This is a hosted cloud management service used to encrypt and securely store keys, passwords, connection strings, certificates or any other secrets.
5. Networking
This component offers services such as the creation of a virtual private network VPN. Virtual machines created inside a VPN are only accessible to other services having access to VPN. This can be used to create a connection between on-premise and machines in the Azure data center. Also, traffic management between data centers is managed using Azure traffic manager. The traffic manager guides the process to access data from the nearest datacenter to avoid traffic.
6. Monitoring
Azure monitoring services help applications to enhance their performance by collecting and analyzing logs from either cloud or on-premise applications. It is used to identify an improvement scope in performance while looking at the stats generated by the Azure Monitoring service. All the data collected from applications are stored into two types Metrics and Logs.
- Metrics: These are numbers used to analyze the application and can describe the application’s performance at any point in time based on current stats.
- Logs: Logs are basically records containing events that happened and data generated during the events. So based on both events and applications behavior application performance can be analyzed.
7. Web Services
Web Application service used to deploy web applications developed on the local machines. These applications can be developed in java, .net. PHP, NodeJS etc. It offers features such as scalability, high availability etch. Also, it supports both Windows and Linux systems. User needs to focus on the development part, execution and maintenance are taken care of by Azure itself. By default, web services are public and can be accessed across the azure.
8. Mobile Services
This component offers backend service to applications running on phones. This is suitable for the application having a large number of daily hits o storing a large amount of data. It provides service called notification hubs that can be utilized to send notifications to phones. Notification dash can connect to a various notification service provider like apple, google, windows. SDKs can be used to connect to the notification hub. Also, it can be used to send a notification to a user, group of users or mass notification. In this way, it makes developer life easier.
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