Azure Fundamentals

Azure Subscriptions

• An account can have multiple subscriptions
• You can use subscriptions to define boundaries around Azure products/services
• Types of subscriptions boundaries:
  • Billing Boundary: Determines how an Azure account is billed, you can create multiple subscriptions for different types of billing requirements, Azure generates separate billing reports and invoices for each subscriptions
  • Access Control Boundary: Azure applied access-management policies at the subscription level, and you can create separate subscriptions to reflect different organisational structure. For example, having different subscription policies for different departments, allows you to manage and control access to the resources that users provision with specific subscriptions.

Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. You can organise subscriptions into containers called management groups and apply governance conditions to the management groups. All subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group, the same way that resource groups inherit settings from subscriptions and resource inherit from resource groups. Management groups give you enterprise-grade management at a large scale, no matter what type of subscriptions you might have. They can also be nested.

VM's

Virtual machine scale sets allow you to centrally manage, configure and update a large number of VMs in just minutes. The number of instances can scale according to demand (like an ASG). Virtual machine scale sets can also deploy a load balancer to ensure resources are being used efficiently.

Virtual machine availability sets allow for update/fault domains, ensure that the domain groups reboot/update in sets, or are in different fault domains, therefore connected to different power and networking resources (isolated). Minimises downtime/outages respectively.