The ability to recover from a cloud service outage. Cloud services disaster recovery should happen quickly through automation.

The ability to keep services up and running for long periods of time, while experiencing little to no downtime.

The ability to increase or decrease resources for a given workload. You can add resources to service a workload (scale out), or add additional capabilities to handle increases in demand (scale up).

The ability to automatically or dynamically increase or decrease resources as necessary.

The ability to react quickly. Cloud services can allocate and deallocate resources quickly.

The ability to remain up & running even if a component or service is no longer functioning.

The ability to predict what costs will be incurred for a particular cloud service or offering.

Choose a VM when you need more control over the computing environment than the other choices offer.

Azure Container Instances offers the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to manage any virtual machines.

Great solution for any scenario that can operate in isolated containers, including simple applications, task automation, and build jobs.

Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes offering that simplifies container-based application deployment and management.

Azure Functions allows you to implement your system's logic into readily available blocks of code. These code blocks are called "functions". Different functions can run anytime you need to respond to critical events.

A collection of Microsoft-managed cloud services that connect, monitor, and control billions of IoT assets. In simpler terms, an IoT solution is made up of one or more IoT devices that communicate with one or more back-end services hosted in the cloud.

Provides added security for user authentications by requiring two or more elements for authentication

Configure network security as an extension of an application's structure

Reuse your security policies at scale

Azure handles the complexity of explicit IP addresses and multiple rule sets

Filters network traffic to and from Azure resources connected to Azure Virtual Networks.

Consists of inbound and outbound rules

Supports as many rules as necessary, within subscription limits.

Azure DevOps provides developer services for support teams to plan work, collaborate on code development, and build and deploy applications. Developers can work in the cloud using Azure DevOps Services or on-premises using Azure DevOps Server.

Blob storage is designed for:

Serving images or documents directly to a browser.

Storing files for distributed access.

Streaming video and audio.

Writing to log files.

Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.

Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol or Network File System (NFS) protocol. 

Azure file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments.

Azure Files SMB file shares are accessible from Windows, Linux, and macOS clients.

Azure Files NFS file shares are accessible from Linux or macOS clients.

Microsoft’s managed network security service in Azure that protects Azure Virtual Network resources.

Uses a static public IP address to represent the virtual network resources behind it.

Microsoft Azure Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution. Azure Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response.

Used to provide threat protection for services in Azure and on-premises

Continuously monitors all services and performs automatic security assessments

Uses machine learning to detect and block malware

Stores application secrets in a centralized cloud location, to securely control access permissions, and access logging

Microsoft’s security solution that is used to identify, detects, and investigate advanced threats and compromised identities

Available as part of the Enterprise Mobility + Security 5 suite and as a standalone license.

Used to create, assign, and, manage policies that enforce different rules and effects over your resources.

Performs evaluations of resources and scans for those that are not compliant

Provides fine-grained access management for Azure resources. Used to segregate duties within your team, granting only the specific access that your users need to perform their jobs.

Used to prevent accidental deletion or modification of Azure resources. Locks are managed from within the Azure portal.

Used to define repeatable sets of Azure resources that implement and adhere to standards, patterns, and requirements.

A declarative way to manage the deployment of many different resource templates and other artifacts, like role assignments, policy assignments, Azure Resource Manager templates, and Resource groups.

Used to logically organize your Azure resources.

Consist of a name-value pairs

Help organize resources for billing

Allows you to collect, analyze, and act upon telemetry from both cloud and on-prem environments

Provides personalized guidance and support whenever issues with Azure services affect you

Provides information and details that outline how Microsoft implements and supports security, privacy, compliance, and transparency in all Microsoft cloud products and services.

The Service Trust Portal hosts the Compliance Manager service. It’s where Microsoft publishes audit reports and other compliance-related information.

A workflow-based risk assessment dashboard within the Trust Portal used to track, assign, and verify regulatory compliance activities.

Addresses the security and compliance needs of many federal agencies in the US, state and local governments, and their solution providers.

A physically separate instance of Azure that’s located in China, and operated by a separate organization, called 21Vianet.

Discrete markets that preserve data residency and compliance boundaries that typically contain two or more regions.

Allow customers with specific data-residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications in close proximity.

Categorized as Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa.

Physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each zone includes one or more datacenters, equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Acts as an isolation boundary, so if one availability zone goes down, the other continues working.

Containers for multiple resources that share the same life cycle.

Provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription.

Cloud-based on-demand computing service that provides computing resources such as disks, CPUs, memory, networking, and OS.

A set of identically-configured virtual machines that supports true auto-scale. Can be scaled manually, automatically, or a combination of the two.

Allows several types of Azure resources to securely communicate

Supports inbound and outbound scenarios and allows you to scale applications and create high availability solutions.

Load balances incoming internet traffic and internal traffic across Azure services.

Sends encrypted traffic over the public internet between an Azure Virtual Network and an on-prem network and provides a secure connection from an on-prem environment to Azure.

Provides for the management of traffic to web applications.

Provides a distributed network of servers that efficiently deliver web content in their local region.

An instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet. IaaS helps you avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other datacenter infrastructure.

includes servers, storage, and networking, as well as middleware, development tools, business intelligence (BI) services, database management systems, and more. PaaS is designed to support the complete web application lifecycle: building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating.

Provides a complete software solution that you purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider. You rent the use of an app for your organization, and your users connect to it over the Internet, usually with a web browser. 

Upfront expenditures on physical infrastructure that are deducted come tax time

Billed immediately for products or services that are purchased when needed. OpEX expenses deducted from tax bill in the same year.

The ability to reduce costs while improving efficiency as a result of operating at a larger scale versus operating at a smaller scale.

Resources do not belong to the organization that is utilizing them, but rather they are owned and operated by a third party such as the cloud service provider.

Public cloud models may make their resources available to multiple organizations.

The most common cloud-type deployment model.

A private cloud is owned and operated by the organization that uses the cloud resources.

Each organization creates its own cloud environment in its datacenter

Organization provides self-service access to compute resources to its user base and is responsible for maintaining and operating the services it provides

A hybrid cloud combines both Public and Private clouds in order to run applications where most appropriate.

Ensures cloud workloads are secure and well-managed

Authenticates & authorizes users so they can access Azure products.

An account can have one subscription or multiple subscriptions.

Used to estimate the cost of different Azure products

Allows you to estimate cost savings that you can realize by migrating your workloads to Azure

A set of tools that you use to monitor, allocate, and optimize your Azure costs

Basic Support

Developer Support

Standard Support

Professional Direct

Formal document that details the performance standards that apply to Azure products and services.

There are separate SLAs for many individual Azure products and services.

MTTR: Mean Time To Recovery is the average time it takes to restore a component or service after a failure occurs.

MTBF: Mean Time Between Failures is the length of time that you can reasonably expect a component to last between outages

RTO: Recovery Time Objective refers to the maximum acceptable time that an application or service can be unavailable after a failure.

RPO: Recovery Point Objective defines the maximum duration of data loss that is acceptable during a disaster.

An Azure feature available to certain Azure customers for evaluation purposes.

An Azure feature available to all Azure customers for evaluation purposes.

A globally-distributed database service that enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage

a relational database as a service (DaaS) based on the latest stable version of the Microsoft SQL Server database engine

a fully-managed service designed to enable seamless migrations from multiple database sources to Azure data platforms with minimal downtime.

An integrated analytics service that accelerates time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems. Azure Synapse brings together the best of SQL technologies used in enterprise data warehousing, Spark technologies used for big data, Pipelines for data integration and ETL/ELT, and deep integration with other Azure services such as Power BI, CosmosDB, and AzureML.

Azure HDInsight is a cloud distribution of Hadoop components. Azure HDInsight makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process massive amounts of data. You can use the most popular open-source frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive, LLAP, Kafka, Storm, R, and more. 

An on-demand analytics job service that simplifies big data. Instead of deploying, configuring, and tuning hardware, you write queries to transform your data and extract valuable insights.

An Apache Spark-based analytics platform that’s optimized specifically for Microsoft Azure. You can use Azure Databricks to read data from multiple data sources, including Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, and others.

A technique that allows computers to leverage existing data to forecast future behaviors or outcomes.

A collaborative, drag-and-drop visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy machine learning solutions without needing to write code.

A cloud service that helps you automate and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services.

A fully-managed, intelligent event routing service that uses a publish-subscribe model for uniform event consumption. Allows you to easily build applications with event-based architectures.

Allows you to quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost.

A management tool that you can use to identify services that you’re looking for. It can be used to get links for help on different topics and to deploy, manage, and delete Azure resources.

The most-used command-line tool. Can be used to connect to Azure subscriptions, and to deploy, manage, and delete Azure resources.

A cross-platform command-line program that you can use to connect to Azure and to execute administrative commands against Azure resources. Can be run on Windows, Linux, and even macOS.

A browser-based scripting environment that allows you to choose the shell experience that suits you best.

An Azure management tool that you can use to access, manage, and monitor your Azure accounts and resources from an iOS or Android phone or tablet. Also allows you to get notifications and alerts about important health issues and diagnose and fix many issues. Can be used to start, stop, restart, and connect to VMs.

Service endpoints that support sets of HTTP operations, or methods. Are used to provide create, retrieve, update, and delete access to the service's resources.

The tool to use when you want to get recommendations on improving your Azure environment and for when you want to find ways to save on costs.

Cloud services client library SDKs and rest APIs that you can use to build cognitive with intelligence into applications.