Understand Azure Regions, Zones, and Resources

0:00Welcome to the AZ-104 introductory skill that we have here. This is understanding what the Azure layout really is. In order to start working with Azure, you have to understand how all of these pieces fit together in the first place. You have to understand where the data centers are. How is resiliency and redundancy baked into these data centers? This plays a major impact on where you choose to deploy your resources. How does billing really work, and where do our identities come from when we want to log in to Azure?

0:34That's what we're introducing in this set of videos as we start to introduce the Microsoft Azure cloud. So by the end of this set of videos, you'll understand what all the different as a services are that Microsoft brings to the table. You'll understand the difference between a Azure region and an Azure availability zone and how those all piece together. It might impact your decision on what to deploy. You'll understand how to set up an account and create your first subscription, and really, what does that subscription mean at the end of the day.

1:07We'll take a look at where the billing comes into play, and we'll also peek a little bit into Azure Active Directory, although there will be a lot more Azure Active Directory coming up throughout this entire playlist. So without further ado, let's get started working with Microsoft Azure. Let's go.

0:00So this is it, this is the end goal for you in this set of videos, is to make it to this page. And in fact, in this video, we're gonna tackle exactly that. This is known as the Azure Portal. Let me go ahead and write it here on the screen. This is known as the portal. Now, this stands in a lot of contrast to what you might see if you're coming from the AWS world, where they call that the console. So if you are coming from the AWS world and you're trying to make this transition and understand Azure, if you're reading documentation or things like that, know this right now, that the portal is the synonym to the console.

0:38Now, let me go ahead and help you get to this point, though, because if you're trying to make your way to where I am, portal.azure.com, you might be hit with a page that says, well, it's time for you to log in. So I've gone ahead and signed out, effectively deleting the token that's in my browser that lets me log in. And when I go to portal.azure.com now, you see it redirects me to login.microsoft.com. This works great if you've already got a Microsoft Azure account.

1:09And put another way, if you have an account that's in an Azure Active Directory already, maybe because you use Microsoft 365 or Office 365, you can log in with that account and you'll find yourself in the Azure Portal. But if you're starting out from scratch, which there's an okay chance of that, we'll just go to regular old azure.com and create our Azure account for free. Now, that's a pretty cool thing, if you ask me, that it's free to create an Azure account, and there's even a bunch of free resources that'll help you get started.

1:42See, if you scroll down just a hair, you can see, take advantage of free products that you can try out, things like free virtual machines, both Windows and Linux, free Azure SQL databases, storage accounts, app services, Cosmos DB, functions, event grids. Now, there's some gotchas to this. For instance, it's only a free amount of usage for each one of these, but nonetheless, it does help you get started using these resources and understand what they do.

2:14Now, you may be thinking to yourself, well, I don't know what Blob Storage does or Cosmos DB does or an app service. Well, that's why you're here, we're gonna talk about all of these things as they come up. I just wanted to put your mind at ease a little bit that at least while you're learning, there should be enough free resources and usage available to you to spin up these things and test them out as we progress along. Now, these are also known as core resources, these are the things that really make Azure Azure, they're the staples that always are available, but Microsoft is also making a huge play into the data, machine learning, and analytics world.

2:54So you'll start to see things like AI services and machine learning studios pop up. Now, we might talk about those in this playlist, it's a good idea to mention that they exist and a little bit about how they work, but there are, Microsoft does a really good job of breaking out specialties into their own exam, like the AI-900 exam, a playlist that we have here at CBT Nuggets. Things like the DevOps side of things. Azure DevOps is a separate resource, a separate tool, all about CI/CD pipelines, which you learn about in the AZ-400 exam, again, here at CBT Nuggets.

3:32Then right above that, you see logic apps and function apps, we'll definitely talk about those in the 104, but they're heavily used in the 204 because they are focused in on platform as a service offerings. Now, if you don't really understand platform as a service offerings, don't worry, we're gonna talk about that in the next video. So anyways, from here, where do we go to get started? Well, scroll on down until you see something like this where you're gonna get a $200 credit for your first month. Click this big green Start Free button, give it a click.

4:04Now, here, when you're going through getting started with azure.com, it's gonna ask you if you already have a Microsoft account if you wanna use that account to set up your Azure Portal. If you don't, you can click Use Another Account and go through the process of creating a Microsoft account. You can even sign in with GitHub if that's what you wanna do. So temporarily, I'm gonna put in a new account right here that doesn't have portal access just yet. See, it tells me like, we haven't actually signed in with this one yet, so I'm just gonna click create a new account real quick so we can get to it.

4:41The cool thing about this is that you can actually sign up even using your current Gmail accounts if that's what you wanna do. So if I just make up a Gmail account real quick to kind of go through the process, we're now gonna create a password, and it sends a verification code to the email. So it's making me go through this verification. It's actually kind of tricky to get it set up. The animal has to face in the direction that the fingers are pointing. There we go. Look at that, you're already playing games to get started.

5:11Isn't that fun? Then eventually, when it gets past that screen of finding out that I'm a robot or not, we get the basic profile set up. So typing in my basic info, I'll go ahead and type in my phone right now, text myself to verify that, and then move on to the next page. Go ahead and do the same. With the phone number verified, we have some additional contact info, which is gonna be your address to reach you at, and then you can move on to the next part, which is the payment information.

5:41So let's go ahead and finish this up. Again, for my own privacy, I'm not gonna enter this on the screen. Now, after that, I went ahead and entered the payment information. Again, I hope it makes perfect sense why I didn't share that info on the screen. The final step here is to take a look at tech support. Now, you can say the default option right here, which is I don't need tech support, I'm already covered through something else like Microsoft Premier support. If you're an enterprise, it is likely that that's a chance, but if you don't want to do that, if you do want to actually pay for tech support, you can do the developer support for $29 a month.

6:18This is great for really small teams who are looking to get started. The big thing is the availability, weekdays from nine to five. Notice it doesn't say what time zone, I'm gonna guess the West Coast 'cause that's where Microsoft is. And the response times are typically under eight hours. Now, if you actually have production workloads and an initial response of within one hour to one business day is necessary, then you're gonna bump this up to standard. And then Professional Direct for $1,000 a month is where you have mission-critical business workloads that you need immediate response and eyes on whenever that's the case.

6:53So the final thing to do here is click Sign Up, and it's confirming your information, getting you started in the Azure Portal. So when you finally land here on the Azure Portal, they wanna tell you to take a tour, which is good to do, but that's also kind of my job. I'm gonna show you around and show you the things that I've learned to navigate and change throughout my years. Let's click Maybe Later for right now and I'll show you kind of what the things are. Immediately, I see this and it's kind of blinding to me, and I wanna change my color theme right off the bat.

7:25That's just me personally and what I'm thinking. So right here, center stage, there's that little gear, that's the one I wanna click on to bring up the appearance and themes. So right here on the left-hand side, we are going to jump down to Appearance and Startup Views, and for my own good, I'm gonna change this to dark mode and click Apply. Ah, better already. But notice some of the other things that you can personalize and just make better for your own usage. What's your default language or your default region?

7:55More on regions coming up. Some personal contact information. And then anything you need to know about getting notifications right here on the screen, as well as what the dialogue is for signing out. We also see things like directories and subscriptions here. Now, this is gonna be a little bit bigger of a topic that we'll talk about towards the end, but the idea is you may have an enterprise, a large enterprise with maybe a bunch of different subsidiaries, and underneath this enterprise you may want to have company A's Active Directory, that's what they mean by directory here, as well as their billing info.

8:35I'm gonna put a little key right here with a dollar sign underneath it. So company A may have what seems like a sub-account with their own Active Directory, and right here you may have company B that's part of your subsidiary. Basically, your one account that you log in to right here can be kind of a hierarchical organization-wide account that manages sub-accounts with sub-directories and sub-subscriptions.

9:06Now, speaking of that whole subscription thing, let's take a moment to pause and think about this. We just put a credit card on file. Are we being billed monthly for something, like you would think of when you hear about a subscription? No. One of the interesting things about the cloud is you really only get billed for what you use, and right now we're not using anything. They just have the card on file so that after 30 days elapses, at the end of the billing period, they can charge your card for whatever you use during that period. Again, you get a $200 credit on your account, first of all, and then secondly, there are a lot of free resources that you can use to test stuff out anyways.

9:44So I did wanna kind of illustrate or illuminate what they mean by subscription there. You're not actually getting billed for something until you start using something. Now, what else are we seeing here? Right here across the top, we see this Azure Services section. This is actually your most recently used or recently visited resources. Now, down here below you will see your individual resources. For instance, if I recently navigated to the Virtual Machines section, this is gonna show up first on my diagram.

10:22The individual virtual machines that I most recently visited will all be listed down here too. So I could either quickly jump into the all-encompassing Virtual Machines section, or I could see the individual virtual machines that I wanna jump into right here. Notice you can also set favorites. So here we have a Recent tab and here we have a Favorites tab. Now, you might also be thinking to yourself, I'm pretty sure Azure offers more services than what I'm seeing here on the screen.

10:54Well, that's what's this little, well, there are actually a few different ways you can get there. Let's start off by looking at the hamburger menu. This is another quick jump spot where you can actually get to frequently used resources. Now, it is kind of broken into two different pieces, which is kind of hard to see. This is kind of the dividing line right here where we have the most recently, or excuse me, the favorited resources that we wanna jump to right here. You can change the order of these resources by clicking the little dot, dot, dot menu and dragging them around, or you can click on the dot, dot, dot menu to actually jump into it.

11:31Actually, you can click on either one of these to jump into it if that's what you wanna do. So if I can move them around like so, that's really cool. And also notice that you can hover over these to pop up a little window. Now, when I hover over this, I can get a description about what this resource does, and if I wanna remove it from this entire pane, I can actually unmark the star here to remove it. So I'll jump down here to something like load balancers and then just undo the little star right here in the corner and then click off.

12:01Now when I come back, load balancers are gone. So you can kind of customize your navigation pane here too. Now, if you wanna see all things that Azure has available to you, let me kind of highlight this, All Services are things that you can deploy, but maybe haven't deployed yet. All Resources are things that you have deployed. So I can look at every resource across all of Azure that I've deployed or I can browse available things to deploy in All Services.

12:33So give All Services a click and then prepare to have your mind blown. Start scrolling. Notice how they're broken apart into categories. Compute, analytics, AI, containers, databases, DevOps, general, hybrid and multi-cloud, identity, IoT, integration. You get the idea. Do you see what I mean here? Azure has like hundreds of things that you can deploy and work with.

13:05Even if you go through the AZ-104 and you feel like you have truly mastered this content and you know every single thing that I'm about to talk to you about, you're still on the tip of the iceberg of all the things that you could actually do in Azure, and this is why they break it apart into specialties. You are here on the AZ-104, but you might also be interested on the 800 or 801, this is the hybrid infrastructure exam. You might be interested in the data platform series, like working with SQL Server or Azure SQL Resources, or in the DP-500, it's more like working with Power BI.

13:44Like I said, there's already AI courses out there. And then if you really wanna get serious about platform as a service, which, listen to me, just listen, if you're serious about the cloud, you have to be serious about platform as a service, you just have to. It is the point of the cloud, it's where you get the biggest bang for your buck, and that's all covered in the AZ-204. I would say it would significantly help you to have the 104 under your belt and understand the cloud and the administrative processes and understand the more, dare I say, traditional way of doing things.

14:23But when you really wanna have your mind blown, you go to the 204. Okay, so at this point you now have an account set up, you're in the portal, and you're able to click around on things and even customize your layout. Now, if you're ready to get started working with it and deploying resources, we need to pause first and make sure we really understand what we're doing and the choices that we make when we start doing it. So in the next video, we're gonna talk about a few different things that you need to consider before you start racking up a bill. I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00Now, believe me when I say that the number one thing that I wanna do is jump into the portal and start deploying stuff so that you can have fun and you can get an immediate W under your belt. That's what I want. Have faith that you will get there, and you will do a lot of cool things in this series of videos, but you first must absolutely understand the somethings as a service. I'm gonna put these each right here on the screen. That is infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service.

0:34Now, are these the only three as a services that exist in the world? No. There are things like databases as a service. You have machine learning or AI as a service. In fact, isn't everything as a service now? Like you can find anything that you want as a service out there on the internet, and if it doesn't exist, make it up because I guarantee you it's gonna sell. Or at least it seems like that's the case that we're in right now. There's an everything as a service because everybody's trying to brand their solution as unique.

1:05But the three core ones are infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. Now, when you see these, you should be thinking of trade-offs, okay? Why am I saying trade-offs? Because no matter what, when we're talking about using cloud resources, it's not our hardware, is it? The very fact that it's not our hardware alone means that we have relinquished some amount of control over what goes on, on these servers.

1:36And finding the right fit for you really depends on what your comfortability is or where you wanna fit in the relinquishing control spectrum. With infrastructure as a service, you maintain the most control. Why is this? Because you still control, well, guess what? The infrastructure. Put another way, you still define the network.

2:08Now, when we say this in the Azure terms, we're usually referring to what's called a VNet, which is short for a virtual network. Again, if you're coming from the AWS world, this is the synonym for a VPC, the VPC standing for virtual private cloud. But the long story short of it is, is you're defining things like subnets and routes and ACLs/firewall rules. You're 99% of the time also deploying virtual machines.

2:42Now, while they're responsible, they being Azure, is responsible for hosting this virtual machine physically on a server, you're responsible for every single thing that goes on, on the virtual machine. Things like operating system patches and software installations and dependencies. So it's the exact same as running a virtual machine on-premises, except for you don't manage the physical hardware that it runs on, you just manage the virtual machines. So when they spin up a virtual machine, you're basically given an SSH endpoint or an RDP endpoint, and you get in either over a private tunnel into Azure or over the public internet.

3:25And what you do on that virtual machine from there is up to you. Virtual machines, again, are kind of like a toolbox. You have all the tools available to you, but it's up to you to build something. And then it's gonna be up to you to maintain something on top of that. Now, when we move this direction right here towards platform as a service, as I shift back to my yellow here for a second, we're starting to relinquish some of that control. On platform as a service, we have some control, but 99% of the time we don't manage the network or VNets.

4:08In fact, you might not see VNets at all as part of the process. You're still responsible for building your own solution, but there are no, I repeat, no OSs in the mix. Wait, what do you mean by that, no OSs in the mix? It's gotta be running on some type of operating system, right? Correct. But you'll never touch it. For instance, if I want a Azure SQL Database, the Azure SQL Database basically means I want Azure to deploy their own SQL Server and create a database on that server that I connect to.

4:54On my local computer, I'll use something like SSMS or Azure Data Studio, and I'll connect in directly to that database. I never have to administer anything about that SQL Server, or at least almost anything about that SQL Server. I'm not responsible for installing the SQL Server. I'm not responsible for actually configuring the physical backups of it or any replication. There are some parameters that I can define, but it's ultimately on Azure to make them happen.

5:26Instead, with platform as a service, I just needed this platform, the SQL Server to be deployed, and then I can just ship my own code or my own database schemas to it. My application that's going to eventually write data into that SQL Server, all it needs is the connection string. The idea with platform as a service oftentimes referred to as serverless, effectively means you don't manage the servers.

5:58You just get to focus in on deploying your code or your resources to that service. You don't have to worry about the operating systems. You usually don't even have to worry about scaling it. It usually just reacts to it. It's also more affordable and it's more affordable on a bunch of different fronts, not just that the hourly rate is less. It's also that it requires less overhead to manage platform as a service resources. But again, you are relinquishing some of that control.

6:31Now, the last item here is software as a service. And this is where the solution is already built and it's already hosted in the cloud. You're just using it in the cloud. You should think about this as something like Excel online or even Outlook online. The application itself is just in your web browser, and all the data that you're generating or changing or whatever is actually being saved somewhere in a cloud resource behind the scenes.

7:06But you as an end user never know that. You know you just log in to this particular website and there's the Excel application in your web browser. So you don't actually build the software, nor do you manage the backend resources. You just use the software and typically pay something like a monthly fee for it. Now, I'll tell you this right now upfront, just gonna kinda change the colors here for my own notes. The AZ-104 is IaaS heavy with a splash of PaaS.

7:36The AZ-204 is almost exclusively PaaS. And then when you start getting into the niche programs like the DP-300 or the AI-900, you kind of straddle the line between PaaS and SaaS. So this is really just to kind of give you a roadmap. You know, currently you are here and you're gonna learn a lot about virtual networking and virtual machines, but you're also gonna learn a lot about, or at least be introduced to platform as a service offerings like Functions apps and Cosmos DB.

8:15And like I said, kind of in the previous video, I hope that starts to, you know, create an itch for you that you wanna scratch and you wanna move on and check out some of the other content that we have here at CBT Nuggets, because while this is the AZ-104 is a pretty big iceberg, it's still a tip of an iceberg. And you shouldn't think that if I get my 104, I'm done with Azure and I know everything. There's still so much more to be learned. So with that being said, now we understand the somethings as a service.

8:48You'll wanna keep this in mind no matter what, when we're introducing a new resource to understand, you gotta be thinking to yourself, "This is definitely IaaS, this is definitely PaaS, and I understand the trade-offs as I move from one to the next." I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00Okay, here's what I want you to do. Follow along with this. I promise, it's gonna be worth your time. From Google, search for Azure regions, just like this. And the first thing that comes up, you see here is Choose the Right Azure Region for You. So give that a click. Now, scroll down just a hair and you see this globe looking thing, click Explore the globe. It's gonna take you to a different website. Give it just a second to load. So this page pops up and it tells you a lot more about the data centers themselves and the types of initiatives that they have going on at the data centers.

0:31But you see over here, the Azure Global Infrastructure. Click Learn more on that one more time. And I promise you, this is where it starts to get fun. You see, the reason why I'm bringing us here to this interactive planet that you can click and drag around all you want and even zoom up and down a little bit. You can see there's a little plus sign right here. You can zoom in on it, like so. The reason why I'm telling you this is because when you choose to deploy or run your resources in Azure, I mean, think about it, it's a virtual machine, right?

1:02You can't just say, "Give me a virtual machine anywhere." No, you have to say, "I have a virtual machine that I need "and I want it to run on infrastructure, physical servers "that live maybe down here in Texas or over here in Virginia "or over here in Iowa, maybe up here in Washington "or down here in California." All of these are options to you. And these are known as the Azure regions. Now, this is where it starts to get tricky.

1:33Follow me on this one here. An Azure region is not, I repeat, an Azure region is not a data center. What do you mean an Azure region is not a data center, not? An Azure region are multiple data centers in a single region. Check this out. If I hover over East US right here and I give it a click, it tells you that the East US region is located in Virginia. It tells you things like it was open in 2014. But the big thing here is with availability zones, and specifically, I see it's available with three zones.

2:11You should think about this as three data centers, all pretty close geographically together. So if I were to kind of zoom in, like so, this one region, I'll kind of put like a little dotted box right here, might actually be Availability Zone 1, Availability Zone 2, and Availability Zone 3, three separate data centers located relatively close to each other within Virginia.

2:44Now, they don't give you the addresses for obvious security reasons, but they're connected all together by very, very, very fast dark fiber. Now, why does this matter? Because when you deploy resources, I want you to start thinking one step way ahead of where we actually are right now. But this is an important thing to plan for. When you're designing things to actually run in Azure, you should design with redundancy and resiliency in mind.

3:17Look, there's no other way to put it. At some point in this data center, they will go through maintenance. They might even experience an outage, even though the likelihood of that is minimal as they do bolster 99% availability everywhere. The point is, is I know my workload, keyword there is workload, not specific resource, but my entire workload I know needs to run in the East US. So what I might do, since this is connected by such incredibly fast fiber, I might deploy a resource in Availability Zone 1, and then replicate that resource to Availability Zone 2.

4:00That way, if something happens to Availability Zone 1, my workload maintains operation in the East US, but fails over to Availability Zone 2. Now, does that happen automatically? Does it happen manually? It's really gonna be up to you and the solutions that you build. My point is, so I want you to wrap your head around right now that a region is not a data center. A region contains data centers and those are known as Availability Zones. Now, also notice some of the other cool things they have going on, like solar energy farms, or you kind of see little fans over here, wind farms.

4:40You also see things like edge locations right here. These are points of presence, network points of presence. These play a big, a big factor when you're doing things like caching or content delivery networks. Now, we've just been poking at the US. Thumb on down here and see that resources and regions are coming in places like Chile, but here it is in Brazil, thumb on over here to Africa. We see South Africa is up and running. Lots of presences here in the EU and UK.

5:13We also see some Middle East, India and Asia and Asia Pacific regions and Australia down here. Another one of the cool things that you can do that's just kind of fun to play with, like click on West US 2 over here and you see it was year open, 2007. If you actually give that a click, it takes you way back in time to the press release from 2007 where they talked about this data center opening. I don't know why I thought that was just so cool. So before we jumped into the portal, I wanted you to really wrap your head around understanding you're gonna have to pick your region that you want to deploy your resources in, and that's gonna be determined by a lot of factors, like where the traffic is coming from, where the data needs to reside, and how does replication from one data center to the next need to occur.

6:00Every single resource or just about every single resource that you deploy in Azure requires you to select a region upfront. So now that you understand the region and potentially the complexity that comes along with it, with Availability Zones, we can move on to the next topic, which are resource groups. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00Okay, so in reality, there are actually three things that you have to have to deploy a resource, any resource in Azure. The first thing that you have to specify is your subscription, basically which credit card are we gonna charge for this. Again, a cool thing about this is that I can have one account that manages multiple subscriptions. In fact, right now, what I'm gonna do to prove that is I'm actually gonna sign out and sign in with my dare I say corporate account. And this is the account that I'm gonna be using moving forward.

0:33Of course, I have multi-factor authentication on this. Yes, we'll be showing you how to set that up when the time comes. In fact, we'll be showing you how to set that up really at the end of this particular skill. So just bear with me for one second as I get signed in. Okay, so now this happens whenever I switch accounts where it's like, wait a minute, your cache with your tokens blew up. If you just hit Try again it'll clear the cache out and request what's known as a refresh token. You may have to do it a couple times, but it will come in eventually once you hit Try again. Okay, so I had to click it one more time and then it finally just let me in.

1:05So as you can see here, I'm gonna go to Subscriptions and you'll see I have two subscriptions right here. This is for two separate credit cards that are on file. Some things that I want to be charged on credit card one and some things that I want to be charged on credit card two. This makes a lot of sense, especially if you have like different cost centers in your business. Maybe an HR credit card is on file, an IT credit card is on file, and so on and so on. Anyways, we land here, so what did I say? We have to have a subscription, right?

1:35We then have to know a region. But one other thing that all Azure resources have to have is they have to belong to a resource group. Now at the most fundamental level, this is just a way of logically grouping resources together. If you've ever worked with Active Directory before, it's kind of the exact same thing as a security group. It's just a logical way to group users together, right? The security group allows you to put, you know, this user in, this user in, this user in.

2:10Then we can assign permission to this security group and it automatically hits those users, right? Now of course, that's a little simplified, but that's really the gist of it. Resource groups are kind of the same thing. Resource groups allow us to group resources like resources together. For instance, my solution that I may have here might be a function app, and that function app might query a Redis cache.

2:41And if that data's not in the Redis cache, it might query a backend Cosmos database. Then loads the data into the cache for the next time. This is known as lazy loading by the way. Now what I just described here is a primarily AZ 204 topic, but it's one of the most common deployment patterns you see in all of cloud resources. Since my particular workload relies on these three resources, I'm gonna group them into a similar resource group or in the same resource group.

3:12Then what's really cool is I can delegate permissions to this resource group to a specific user or a group of users. Do you see how kind of where we're going here, we're trying to get users connected to resources. So a clean way to do that is to group users and group resources. So the resource group is mandatory for absolutely everything that you create. So in order to get started, what you really wanna do is you wanna create a resource group first. So if I come up here to the search bar, I'll just search for resource and we see Resource groups pops up right here on the spot.

3:49Now give it a click. You'll see I got a bunch of resource groups here in my environment, but don't worry about that. You will too by the time it's all said and done. Let's say I wanna create a resource group for that specific instance or that specific example that I was talking about where I may have a function app that queries a Redis cache and then queries a Cosmos DB if the cache is empty. So I'll start my entire process by creating a resource group to logically group these. Now look here. See, we have to choose a subscription. Yeah, remember I said, you're gonna have to have three things.

4:20We're gonna choose the resource group name. I'll call this something like cosmoscache, very simple like that. It double checks. You see this, it was kind of spinning there for a second, and now I've got a green check mark. It just make sure that I don't have an overlapping one already. Now this is interesting because right here you see a region. And you might be thinking to yourself, wait, if I choose something like South Central US right now, does that mean all of the resources that I put in this resource group will be constrained to the South Central US?

4:55No. This is more or less an indicator of where this resource group and their resources should live, but it's not by any means constraining where I actually end up putting those resources. It is definitely a best practice to keep them all together, so even though my resource group is gonna say South Central US, the underlying resources might not actually be there. Although it's a best practice to keep it that way.

5:26Now let's hit the next page here for a second. Tags, these are arbitrary key value pairs. Basically, we give the key a name like mytag and then we give it a value like myvalue. And this is really helpful later, whenever we need to actually mass deploy code to resources. We can say, ship this to everything that has a tag of this. We can also run billing reports. Show me all of my billing reports or all of my billing across all resources that I have that meet this tag value.

6:02Again, this is completely arbitrary and doesn't impact anything of the underlying resource deployment itself, the code that you ship to it, or your billing. Now the last thing is I choose review and create. It validates and we click Create. It instantly creates the resource and right here I see cosmoscache. Now all of the underlying resources that would be part of cosmoscache will be listed here whenever I actually create them, but I also can control access to cosmoscache right here in Access Control IAM, which is identity and access management.

6:40Now we're not ready to talk about IAM or access management just yet. But we'll introduce the concept of it towards the end of this set of videos. For now, I wanted you to understand resource groups and that it's absolutely required to bring any resource that you want to deploy to life, along with a subscription and a region. Now that we have that under our belt, we can move on to the last couple things that I want you to know about Azure before we start talking about specific resources.

7:10I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00So before you get started, you need to understand at least at a very fundamental high level what Azure Active Directory is, and importantly, what it's not. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna search for Active Directory right here at the top and when I get to active dir, you can see I see Azure Active Directory here on the screen. It's at this little pyramid as it symbol and we're gonna give that a click. Now, at the end of the day, first of all, Azure Active Directory is becoming Entra ID, so the name is gonna change.

0:31So make sure you know that by the time you're watching this content, it may have already changed, so I apologize if the name has gotten switched on you. The second thing to understand is this is not the same as your on-premises Active Directory. At the end of the day, this is really nothing much more than an identity store. See, you might be thinking of Active Directory Domain Services, which really leads to group policy, doesn't it, GPOs.

1:02That's not really a thing In Azure. There is something called Azure Active Directory Domain Services. We will talk about that, but it's not something you need to worry about right now. What Azure Active Directory is all about is about having users, which includes a username and a password, as well as groups to group our users together, just like we kind of fundamentally talked about. It's just an easier way to understand what a logical group of people are doing and what their permissions are, but the other things that we see in Azure Active Directory, kind of follow me down here, are app registrations or applications and then there's something I'm gonna write over here called Managed Identities.

1:52Now if you're coming from the Active Directory world, you might remember something called Managed Service Accounts or Group Managed Service Accounts. What were those about? Well, whenever I had an application running on my on-premises resources, something like a SQL Server, and that SQL Server needed to reach out over the network to something like my file share, let's say FS Nug, to write backups, SQL Server backups to it, the SQL Server application itself needed to have an identity to get permissions to this file share, this directory, so for the longest time, we manually went into Active Directory, created a username and password, promptly forgot anything about those credentials, and that's how it lived for the rest of its life.

2:43We never changed the passwords or updated it, we just knew don't mess with it because it's working right now. So along came Group Managed Service Accounts, and with this Microsoft basically said, you'll give your SQL Server a name, an identity, and we'll manage the rotation of passwords for you and keep it nice and secure so you can then delegate the permissions on your file share to this service account and we'll manage it for you. Managed identities are effectively the exact same thing in Azure.

3:17When I create a resource, like a function app or even a virtual machine, and these resources have to talk to other Azure resources, like a SQL database, we can give our resources a managed identity and grant them permissions to that managed identity and Microsoft just handles all of that for us behind the scenes. It's actually a really elegant solution. Now, here's the kicker.

3:48Managed identities are only for Azure resources. So if I have an Azure VM talking internally to an Azure SQL database, this is managed identities all day long, but what happens if I have, say, an intranet site that runs on-prem and the backend of this intranet site might be something like an Azure SQL database or a Cosmos DB. Well, in this case, my virtual machine or my server here is not an Azure resource, therefore I can't give it a managed identity.

4:27This is what app registrations do. With app registrations right here, we'll put this in Azure AD, we've effectively registered our application to talk to Azure AD. So when an end user comes along and connects to our intranet site, they'll immediately get prompted with the Microsoft login page. The user will go through the login process via Azure AD and their browser will get handed back a token that they can then use to access these resources on the backend.

5:04Now, don't stress too much about app registrations right now. Building an app registration in that login process is an AZ 204 topic, but you do need to know the difference between an app registration and a managed identity. A managed identity, again is an Azure resource connecting directly to another Azure resource. An app registration is usually a resource that lives outside of Azure being used by an end user and that end user's credentials, once they get logged into Azure, are going to be used to get passed back to that backend resource.

5:43Now you do also see the ability to hook into external identity providers. These are especially gonna be useful for your social accounts like Google or Facebook or Twitter, which is now known as X and setting these up again is far outside the scope of this video. I just wanted you to be aware of what Azure Active Directory is all about. Now click on users right here for a second. If you're not already using Office 365 or synchronizing your on premises active directory, you can manually add your users right here by just creating a new user.

6:18You can also invite an external user, maybe someone who already has a Microsoft account or an Azure Active Directory account but just isn't in your active directory. You can invite them to collaborate on your resources right here by choosing invite external user. I also wanna point out, this is where you go to set up multi-factor authentication. This is a big deal. You see right over here per user MFA. This actually takes you to a separate portal to set this up. If you're the administrator of your account, AKA you control everything that goes on in your subscription, I highly recommend you get this done.

6:56For instance, here's my account right here, the admin user. I can see right now it's currently set to disabled. What I could do to turn it on is just simply put enable, like this. Now it tells you you can enable multifactor authentication and we'll click enable multifactor authentication and then click close and now I see my account is enabled, but here's the kicker, that doesn't mean I'm forced to use it. Enable just means it's optional. If I want to make my admin users use it, we have to then set this to be enforced.

7:31So I'll say enforce multifactor authentication and now it's done. The next time I sign out and try and sign back in, it's gonna make me set up multifactor authentication. So anyone who is getting set up with multifactor authentication can simply just go to the Microsoft login page and they'll be forced to do it, but if for whatever reason they lose that setup page, it's aka.ms/mfasetup. I cannot tell you how many times I typed that in when I was a consultant.

8:07It was a lot. I mean a lot, but it's a lifesaver and anyone who has the ability to change the billing of any sort, whether that's add a resource that costs the bill to go up or delete resources or change billing or admin settings, they really need to have this going. So like I said, I really just wanted to introduce Azure Active Directory to you and make sure you understood what some of the capabilities, not all of the capabilities, but some of the capabilities were.

8:38Now that you know how to poke around and at least get new users added to your Azure environment, we can start digging into some more interesting things in Azure. But there's one last thing that I wanna make sure you fully understand before we start deploying resources and that's billing. For now, I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00Now, there's really a few different places you need to go when it comes to exploring and understanding your bill. Ideally you're thinking, "Oh, well it's under my subscriptions, right?" Eh, sort of. Under your subscriptions, you do get some pretty great things, like spending forecasts for the month, and understanding what specific resources are actually racking up your bill the most. That is very, very useful, and this is really for the most part, coming from the cost management section. This is just a sub feature of the subscription right now, but if you wanna get a full blown understanding of what's going on in your entire environment, you really wanna find cost management and billing.

0:42The overview is a great place in cost management and billing to really understand what it is that is going on in your account. In fact, immediately seeing this, I'm like, "API management. Did I leave an API management up and running, or I need to go delete that real quick." You can also scroll up a hair, and see what your invoices have been trending like over time, and understanding what this month's forecast is looking like to be. In fact, I see my next invoice is gonna be available tomorrow, so I'll be keeping my eyes on that pretty closely. We can see a cost analysis, which I think is really, really cool.

1:15It's an ability to generate queries, and actually dig in to where our costs are going. What are the services that are being deployed? Where are they being deployed? What subscription is making up the bulk of my billing? We could even set up alerts or importantly budgets. Budgets can be applied at subscriptions or resource group levels, so a billing administrator can actually control those trigger happy devs by setting budgets on their subscription or their resource groups, but also understand things like payment methods and payment history are also part of the billing, and your invoices are a pretty important thing too, right?

1:55Procurement and accounting are really gonna want a copy of these, and you can even set this up to send an automatic copy of these invoices over to them. Now, for the most part, your card on file is gonna get automatically charged at the end of the billing cycle, so you'll never have to go in and manually type in, and click charge card or anything like that, unless your card has expired, or you know was stolen or something, but before you got started actually deploying resources, I wanted to make sure you're 100% familiar with the cost management and billing section.

2:30That way you can really understand where your costs are coming from, and monitor them as you go along. At the end of the day, you only pay for what you use, and luckily for us, most of those things are billed either by the minute or by the hour. Some of those things are longer, just keep an eye out for that, but ultimately, you will want to log in, and the first place you should go, especially as a learner, every day, is cost management and billing, and just make sure that you haven't left a resource running, or that you have properly cleaned up everything.

3:09At the end of the day, if I tell you something like, "Let's deploy a virtual machine," I want you to remember to delete that virtual machine when you're done, so that you don't rack up that bill. So please, please, please, please keep in mind that as we progress through these videos, you'll need to go back and clean up these resources by deleting them so that they stop running, so that they are stopped being used, and you don't end up racking up a huge bill. So, with that being said, this is just introducing at a high level, the cost management and billing section, and very quickly exploring things like cost analysis.

3:44I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00There's not a whole lot that you can do right now because we were just focusing in on core concepts of working with the cloud. But there is one thing that you could absolutely do right now, and that's prep a resource group to be used for any of the resources that you want to deploy. Here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna jump into resource groups and we'll create a resource group real quick. I'm gonna put this in my main pay-as-you-go subscription, and I'm gonna name this resource group az-104-demo.

0:30I'm gonna put this closest to me in the South Central US and I'll just choose review and create, and then create to get this resource group created. So at least now when you start building resources, deploying things like storage accounts, SQL databases, virtual machines, you have a resource group that you can put them in. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.