Hi, my name is Steven Burnley, and in these lessons you'll learn the architecture of the Azure cloud, how to create and manage user accounts and delegate permissions, and how to create basic resources. In this lesson, we're going to specifically talk about the architecture of the Azure cloud and tour one of the Azure data centers. In addition to that, we'll talk about the common services that users would create when using cloud subscriptions. We'll talk about the several ways that you could sign up for Azure, and the types of billing associated with Azure subscriptions. And finally, we'll sign into Microsoft Azure and start our basic navigation using the search menu and the navigation bar. Microsoft Azure is a cloud offering from Microsoft. The goal of cloud computing is to give organizations the ability to create resources that are no longer on premises within the company's physical location. The term cloud implies that the resources that you create will no longer be owned directly by your company, and instead you will rent or lease these services on a monthly basis, from a cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure. The cloud that Microsoft Azure has created, is a network of many data centers located throughout the world. You can see in this global diagram, many of the locations of Azure data centers and the paths of the networks that connect those data centers together. This is the cloud. The goal of Microsoft is to provide an environment that is reliable, high performance, and highly-secure, but also scalable so that as an organization, you only pay for the resources that you need and you can locate those resources anywhere in the world. These data centers are built and managed by Microsoft. Microsoft has hundreds of data centers located throughout the world. Here's an example of what a data center would look like. It includes redundant power capabilities. It includes very sophisticated server rooms, with appropriate cooling and electricity provided. In addition to these server rooms, there's also a very robust network that is managed by Microsoft and includes satellites and space technology. Microsoft has created a redundant global network to create their data centers together. You also see that Microsoft is taking care of day-to-day operations, including managing the hardware and operating systems for many of those servers in the server environment. This would be very difficult for organizations to create on their own. And regardless of the size of your company, you can take advantage of this incredible technological foundation and simply pay as you go for the resources you need. This last diagram or picture is pretty interesting. You can see an underwater data center for Microsoft. They place data centers underwater to reduce cooling expenses and make sure that the server environments are as environmentally-conscious as possible. This all results in cost savings for you. So the benefits of using the cloud are reliability, security, and global distribution of your resources. You can also operate the cloud in a hybrid environment that allows you to continue to use resources on your local network, and simply integrate those with these global resources that you might be creating inside the cloud. Before you can create a subscription to the cloud, you first have to imagine where you would want your resources to be located. You can see from this diagram that there are data centers located throughout the world and it's always a good idea to store your resources located near where the users will be using them. Subscriptions are required. The business case for moving to the cloud is to reduce the amount of investments that companies have to make when they want to expand their IT operations. The OPEX pricing model concept is related to only paying for what you use or the concept of using operational expenditures on a monthly basis rather than large capital expenditures to purchase large technology resources to support your company's IT needs. In addition to this, you may want to reduce the waste of resources, so by paying what you use also results in less electricity costs associated with your IT environment, and that adds to sustainability, saving you, again, significant financial resources. It's also a big advantage when you're hosting resources in the cloud to be able to scale or increase the number of users that can use a particular resource. The cloud is a vast global network with virtually unlimited resources and this allows your organization to scale up to the appropriate service level that your customers expect. When you manage your own data center, you're responsible for all of these security optimization so there are also major advantages to hosting your applications and other resources in a cloud such as Microsoft Azure to rely on a large vendor like Microsoft to help protect your resources, and make sure that you are compliant with current industry standards. You can also imagine from the very large footprint of the cloud that it can increase the availability of your application if you take advantage of application redundancy and replication. Also, by having all of your resources in one place such as the Azure cloud, you can take advantage of optimization algorithms that are run by Microsoft and give you advice on how to optimize your spending and performance of your cloud resources. There are several ways to get a Microsoft Azure subscription. One of those options is to purchase your subscription directly from Microsoft. You can get started right away with a credit card or you can contact a Microsoft sales representative to get more details about their cloud resources. In addition to purchasing directly from Microsoft, you also have the option to engage a Microsoft partner. Microsoft partners are located around the world and they have certified competent resources that can help you with your organization's migration to the cloud. You can see here if we click create an account to purchase directly from Microsoft, we would be creating what is called a Microsoft pay-as-you-go subscription. This is the most common type of Microsoft's Azure subscription. The pay-as-you-go allows you to establish a Microsoft account for free with a credit card, and then you will be billed on a monthly basis just for the services that you use. You can also see that there are many free resources provided as part of your Azure subscription that can help you get started and give you an opportunity to try these services before you buy them. Let's sign into our first Azure subscription. You can see that you do have to have a Microsoft account in order to sign into Azure. It is not recommended to remember an administrator login on a workstation. It is better to ask administrators to reenter their credentials every time they sign into the portal. It would also be recommended to take advantage of advanced features such as multi-factor authentication requiring administrators to perhaps enter in codes sent to their cell phones for example. Once we've logged into our Microsoft Azure subscription, we see what is called the portal home screen. We can return to the portal at any time by typing in the URL that you see here at the top of the screen, portal.azure.com. At the portal, we have two basic ways to begin to navigate to resources. This all depends on your personal style. One option is to click in the search box at the top of the screen and type in something like virtual machines. You can see with a partial entry, Azure is finding the most common resources with those names and providing me with quick access to managing virtual machines. If you prefer to pick from a menu, on the left hand side of the screen, these three lines represent what we call the hamburger menu. If you click on the hamburger menu, you can see a list displayed of the most commonly used Azure resources to give you a consistent quick way to find them, including, like we were showing, virtual machines. So in this lesson, we learned about the global architecture of the Azure cloud, we looked at some of the business case suggestions for why we might want to move resources to the cloud, and then we signed into our Azure subscription and took our basic navigation tour. Stay tuned for the next lesson where we will learn to manage the Azure Active Directory to create additional users and delegate some permissions. Thanks for watching.
