Time to brush up on Microsoft Azure, especially since I’m preparing for the AZ-900 certification. While searching for learning resources, I stumbled upon Adam Marczak’s YouTube videos. They were a lifesaver—explaining complex Azure concepts in a way that even beginners like me could grasp.
As I began exploring, I realized I need to see things from the consumer’s perspective. My biggest challenge now is migrating their legacy systems to the cloud while ensuring everything remains fast and reliable. What’s the blueprint?
Chapter 1: Choosing a Neighborhood (Regions)
Customer InnovateNow knew their main customer base was in Europe and Southeast Asia. To keep their website speedy (low latency), they couldn’t just pick any spot.
The Rule: The closer the servers are to the clients, the better the performance.
The Choice: They picked North Europe and Southeast Asia as their primary Regions. A Region is a large, defined geographic area containing multiple data centers—it’s like choosing the best neighborhood for your business.
- Special Cases: If they ever needed to host data for government contracts, they would look at specialized Government Regions (like US Gov Virginia).
use Azure Speed Test to check latency before committing to a region. Always check which services are available in your chosen neighborhood!
Chapter 2: Building Triple-Protected Warehouses (Availability Zones)
Just putting all their eggs in one Region wasn’t enough. What if a power grid failed?
The Solution: InnovateNow deployed their critical services into Availability Zones (AZs).
The Concept: Think of AZs as three separate, independent buildings (datacenters) within the same Region. Each has its own power, cooling, and network. If one building goes down, the other two keep running!
Deployment:
Zonal Services (like their main Virtual Machines) were pinned to a specific zone.
Zone-Redundant Services (like their Azure SQL Database) automatically spread their data across all three zones for maximum resilience.
Chapter 3: Setting Up a Disaster Backup Plan (Region Pairs)
Even three AZs won’t help if a massive disaster, like an earthquake, takes out the entire Region.
The Plan: Azure solved this with Region Pairs. Microsoft automatically links their North Europe resources to a partner region (often one over 300 miles away) for automated disaster recovery services.
The Benefit: If North Europe suffers a catastrophic failure, they know their data can be recovered from the paired region. This pairing is set by Microsoft and can’t be manually chosen—it’s a built-in safety net.
InnovateNow needed space to run its applications. Azure offered them three main ways to build and run their code.
Chapter 4: The Traditional Factory Floor (Virtual Machines – IaaS)
InnovateNow had a few legacy applications that needed total control over the operating system.
The Choice: They used Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). This is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
The Deal: Azure gives them the hardware (CPU, RAM, Disk) emulation, but InnovateNow is responsible for everything inside the machine: the Operating System (Windows or Ubuntu), the patches, the runtime, and the application. It’s high control, but high responsibility.
Scaling Limit: When traffic spiked, they could only do Vertical Scaling (turning off the VM and adding more CPU/Memory—like upgrading a car’s engine). They couldn’t automatically add more cars to handle the rush.
Chapter 5: The Speedy Delivery Truck (Containers)
They realized their modern application components didn’t need a full operating system for every instance.
The Choice: They switched to Containers.
The Concept: Containers are lightweight because they skip emulating the hardware and the OS; they just emulate the operating system layer, sharing the host machine’s kernel. They are fast, portable, and act like a “speedy delivery truck” carrying only the necessary code and dependencies.
Azure Instances: They used Azure Container Instances (ACI) for simple, single-job container deployments.
Chapter 6: The Robot Manager (Azure Kubernetes Service – AKS)
When they started running dozens of containers, managing them all became a nightmare.
The Hero: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) arrived.
The Job: AKS is the orchestration platform. It’s the robot manager that ensures:
The right number of containers are running.
Traffic is balanced between them.
New containers are deployed without downtime.
Scaling Power: AKS offers Auto Scaling, meaning if traffic spikes, the robot manager automatically spins up more containers and the necessary underlying machines to handle the load—it’s highly customizable and scalable (PaaS).
Part 3: Connecting and Securing the Digital Roads (Azure Networking)
The applications are running, but how do they talk to each other and the outside world securely?