3 Pillars of the Azure Cloud
Description
Overview
There are some workloads that are well suited for the flexibility that virtual machines provide. Virtual machines enable you to choose the operating system, tools, languages, and configuration management tools. If you’re going to use virtual machines, then you’re going to also be using Azure Storage, because VMs rely on it for disk storage. Azure Storage doesn’t stop at disk storage, it also provides NoSQL, Blob, File and Queue options.
Once you have some virtual machines, inevitably you’ll need to handle the network access and load balancing. Azure provides options of creating virtual networks and subnets. It also has support for VPN access allowing for hybrid cloud solutions. There are options for load balancing, web application firewalls, advanced traffic routing and more.
Compute, Networking and Storage, are the pillars of cloud computing platforms, and Azure is no different. Azure’s infrastructure as a service utilizes these three pillars, and the platform as a service offerings are built on top. Understanding these pillars will help you to truly understand not just the IaaS capabilities of Azure, but also the PaaS capabilities.
Whether you’re a developer, IT pro or solutions architect, understanding these three pillars is going to help you build and deploy applications. So, if you’re new to Azure, or looking to get a better understanding of the pillars that the higher level abstractions are built on, then click on the first course to get started!
Updates
- April 27, 2018 - Updated quizzes
- April 9, 2018 - Added Learning Path Exam
Certificate
Learning Path Steps
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Knowledge Check: Introduction to Azure Virtual Networking
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Learn how to configure and start your first Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine (VM) from the Azure portal. Once running, you will connect to the VM via the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Basic VM controls are also explored, such as start, stop, restart and del...
Knowledge Check: Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines
The Azure Storage suite of services form the core foundation of much of the rest of the Azure services ecosystem. Blobs are low-level data primitives that can store any data type and size. Tables provide inexpensive, scalable NoSQL storage of key/value data...
Knowledge Check: Introduction to Azure Storage
Exam: Three Pillars of the Azure Cloud
About the Author
Ben Lambert is the Director of Engineering and was previously the lead author for DevOps and Microsoft Azure training content at Cloud Academy. His courses and learning paths covered Cloud Ecosystem technologies such as DC/OS, configuration management tools, and containers. As a software engineer, Ben’s experience includes building highly available web and mobile apps.
When he’s not building the first platform to run and measure enterprise transformation initiatives at Cloud Academy, he’s hiking, camping, or creating video games.