Capex, Opex and Cloud Computing (MS)

• CapEx
• Upfront cost
• Money spent on physical infrastructure up front. 
• Deduct this expense from your tax bill same year. 
• Server costs
• Storage costs
• Network costs
• Backup and archive costs
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Datacentre infra costs
• Costs on tech personnel
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• OpEx
• Spending money on services or produts now and being billed for them now.
• Leasing s/w and customized features
• Scaling charges based on usage / demand instead of fixed h/w or capacity
• Billing at the user or organization level
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Cloud Compliance Offerings (MS)

• Handling sensitive data
• Services are compliant
• Accreditation or compliance requirements

Some of the compliance offerings are:

• Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS)
• Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Certification
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU)
• EU Model clauses
• HIPAA
• ISO-IEC
• MTCS - multi tier cloud security
• SOC - Service Orgnization controls (1, 2, and 3)
• NIST and Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)
• UK Govt. G-Cloud.
• Others

VM vs. Containers vs. Serverless

The serverless model differs from VMs and containers in that you only pay for the processing time used by each function as it executes. VMs and containers are charged while they're running - even if the applications on them are idle. This architecture doesn't work for every app - but when the app logic can be separated to independent units, you can test them separately, update them separately, and launch them in microseconds, making this approach the fastest option for deployment. (Microsoft).

Containerisation - Docker

MS Azure - Fundamentals (Udemy)

Resources and Resource Group

When creating a resource, Azure prompts for a Region for a resource. The region is the location where you want to host the product/ service. Where you host it matters. See the figure below. If all your customers are located in Aus and are going to access the service (which is located in the West USA), then there will be latency. 

• There are services in place in azure (Content network delivery service) that allow distributing and data and traffic across multiple regions. 
• Products by region - list of all products/services per region. 
• Not every service is available in every region. 
• Commonly used services - are available in all regions. But for others, you need to ensure they are available. (e.g. Azure cognitive search is not available in the Canada region).
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Azure Subscriptions

All Azure resources get billed against a particular Subscription

• An Azure subscription is a logical container used to provision resources in Azure. It holds the details of all your resources like virtual machines (VMs), databases, and more. When you create an Azure resource like a VM, you identify the subscription it belongs to

• You may have several departments in your organization that could have differing needs for the resources. Thru subscriptions, you can keep track of the billing for each. 

Azure Subscription Types

The Virtual Machine Service

• You don't need to manage the underlying physical server.
• No need for capital for physical server
• Pay for only running cost of the server provided by Azure
• You can pay as you go, terminate the virtual server when you don't need
• Host different types of workloads on the server
• You can deploy both Windows as well as Linux based servers. 

Resources deployed along with a Virtual Machine (VM)

• VM sits on a virtual disk, and is provided a private and public IP. The traffic is routed thru a virtual NIC. 
• All of this resides in a Virtual Network
• NSG- network security group is a kind of security firewall (decides what kind of traffic flow into and out of the virtual machine).