Understand the Point of the Cloud

0:00Welcome to the AZ-900 certification exam playlist. I am Knox Hutchinson and I am super excited to be talking to you about the cloud fundamentals. What is the point of the cloud? What does it really do differently from other things that we may be doing in enterprises now? Why has it become such a major deal for both developers as well as systems administrators, network engineers, and everybody who works with technology today? The AZ-900 certification exam seeks to answer all of these questions, to lay a foundation for what is the point of the cloud and how does Microsoft's cloud really work? What are some of the products and tools that come with Microsoft cloud and why would people choose to use that over other public clouds that are available today? The really cool thing that we're going to focus in on in this set of videos right now is just the base fundamentals.

0:58What is the point of this thing? Why do people use it and how can you get started? Start clicking around and poking on things. So follow me throughout this journey because I've been using the Azure cloud for a really long time and it is personally my favorite public cloud to use for a lot of different reasons. We're going to explore it end to end and really set up bigger discussions about where you could find fits for the public cloud using Microsoft Azure now. So without further ado, let's get started talking about what the point of the cloud is and where Microsoft fits in this picture. Let's go.

0:01So before we start talking about theories and why people choose the cloud and what the cloud does differently, and I start drawing on the screen, we're going to get a quick win under our belt, and that's just establishing a free Microsoft Azure account. So we're going to talk about some really fundamental things about how Microsoft Azure works, how billing works, and how you can get started by setting up your own account with your own subscription right now. Don't worry, this won't cost you anything yet.

0:33We'll talk about how all of that works as we progress through these sets of videos. We'll even talk about it in this video a little bit. So without further ado, let's create your first Microsoft Azure account. Let's go. So in order to actually, you know, use Azure, the way this works is we have to establish an Azure account. And a big part of Azure, this is a really big thing to understand about the cloud in general, is how subscriptions work. Now, me, when I think of the word subscription, what do I think of?

1:06I'll just kind of write it on the screen right now. When I think of subscription, I think of, you know, my Netflix subscription. And when I think of my Netflix subscription, it is a subscription per month, right? It's something like $15 a month just to make something up. That's what I think of when I think of a subscription. But Azure and clouds, for that matter, are a little bit different. The way that subscriptions work in cloud is it's more like pay as you go.

1:38And you really get billed for what you actually do. And you really get billed for what you actually use during your Azure tenure. Whenever you actually deploy something in Azure, it's going to have something like an hourly rate. Or maybe it even has a per minute rate or a per week rate or a per month rate. It really depends on what you actually order. So Azure likes to call these things subscriptions.

2:10But what it really is, it's just having a credit card on file that you can pay for things whenever you actually deploy them. And it's pretty cool because if I deploy something and only use it for one hour, I'm only going to get billed for the hour that I used it for. I don't have to get billed for the entire month. So what we need to do in order to get started with Azure is we need to create an account and we need to put that credit card on file. Again, that's going to show up with the name or the resource called a subscription.

2:45But you're not actually getting billed for anything yet. You have to deploy something in order to start getting a bill. Beyond that, Azure does offer free credits for exploring resources in your first month of getting up and running. So let's check this out and take a look at what the free credits are that are up and running for us. If we just go to google.com, we're going to take the easy way there. Don't worry, you're going to get to know the exact URL in no time at all. Search for Azure, A-Z-U-R-E.

3:16Right there you see azure.microsoft.com. Now I can tell you through my years of working with this, this is where I go straight to once I've actually gotten up and running. I go to portal.azure.com. In fact, if you actually just look at my browser bar, my URL bar, if I just type portal dot, oh, wrong portal. I went to a different portal that I also go to pretty regularly. If I go to portal.a, it automatically pops up portal.azure.com, and then the actual home site is where it's going to take me.

3:48This is where once you've got your account set up, you're going to go there an awful lot. But for now what we need to do is we need to go ahead and create an account. And you actually see right here, free account. Get started with 12 months of free services. There are a lot of free things that you can deploy in Azure. So if I click on this free account right here, it takes me to azure.microsoft.com, and we can go ahead and sign up right here by clicking the giant green button, start free.

4:21And it even shows you there is a pay as you go subscription that we're about to set up. So click the start free button right here and it takes you to the sign up. And if you've ever logged into Azure or a Microsoft account before, it's going to ask you to pick an account to sign up with. If this is your first time creating a new account, click the other button at the top and then see no account, create one. Go ahead and give that a click right here, and you can go ahead and just set your account name right here with a new email address.

4:51It does have to be a valid email address. So make sure you type in your email address. So once you type in a new email address, it's going to prompt you to type in a password. So go ahead and type in a password and then fill out some information like the country and your birth date that you're working with. From there, it'll send you an email that you need to verify with a code. So having looked up my code, I'll type it in right here to go ahead and proceed to the next spot, and it'll create this account in Microsoft's little identity registration.

5:26So there we go. Now we've got to solve a bot puzzle to create the account. And finally, once you've got your account established and you could get past that robot prompt thing here, now comes the part where it actually wants you to get set up with your free Azure account. So you type in some information. We'll go ahead, type in my first and my last name, which is Mark Suchenson. It's got my email address, and you do want to put your phone number in here. Of course, outside of the fact that it's required, you're going to want to do this, so that way you can look you up based on if you ever need support reasons or if you start to enable multi-factor authentication, something we're going to talk about in this course because it's very important.

6:10We're going to take a look at that. So then I'll go ahead and tell it to text me the code that I can type in to verify that this is the correct address after all. So there it is. You just heard the little ding maybe, and then it comes in, 489968, and click Verify Code to verify that now my phone number is valid. We'll also type in my address, and then we can go to the next section right here where we identify an identity verification by card, and that identity verification is the place where you type in your credit card.

6:44This is a really important piece to do because this is where we actually set up where our subscription is going to come from. So go ahead and type in your credit card information. Again, this is not going to start billing you right now. Do notice it says we don't accept prepaid cards. It really comes from the only four major credit card vendors, Visa, Amex, MasterCard, and DiscoverCard. Once you type that in, you can click the Sign Up button, and it will forward you into the portal, but before we do, I want to point out this piece right here, $200 credit to use in your first 30 days.

7:21This is really going to be important to kickstart your journey into Azure. Now, since we have the credit card information in place right now, again, it's important to know that this is not going to bill you for anything until you actually deploy something like a virtual machine or a web hosting application, and those things incur billing by the minute or billing by the hour, and we'll talk about how all that works and how you can turn devices off or tear stuff down so that you don't incur a bill.

7:56But for now, in order to get our foot in the door, this is how we have to set up the actual resource. So enter your information, click the Sign Up button, and then we can proceed on to the next step. So at this point, you are in the door, and this is where you are going to land whenever you log into Azure, and of course, that URL, one more time, is portal.azure.com. If you chose to remain signed in on your current web browser because it's a web browser that you trust, you can just come to portal.azure.com, and this is where it's going to drop you in every single time.

8:33This is kind of the beautiful thing about it. Now, what you see here on the home screen is the basic landing screen. When we get started a little bit later in this set of videos, we'll talk about how to browse around Azure and how you may be able to adjust some of the things to your liking. But I want to point out this thing right here. You might see it right here on your screen, and subscriptions are a really big part because that is the resource that you just deployed. So if you click on the subscriptions right here, you'll see the subscription that you just deployed right here is now an object that you can click on, and this is where you can go to analyze your billing and take a look at what credit card you have on file and what do you expect your bill to look like for the rest of this month.

9:23So I wanted you to know right now because working with your credit card and working with your money can be kind of a sensitive thing. I wanted you to know where you can go right now if you ever need to look into your Azure resources, cancel your subscription, or look at your bill that you've racked up so far, this is where you can go to immediately take control of the billing resources directly within Azure. Yes, we are going to talk a lot more about subscription, cost analysis, forecasting, how to update your credit card information.

10:00All of that is coming up. But because, again, this is a really important factor to understand for setting up an Azure subscription, now you know where to go to find it. If that little key for subscription wasn't available on your homepage, like if I jump back to home right here, and this little key subscription isn't there available for you, you can search for it right here at the top. Just type in subscriptions, and under services, you'll see subscriptions right here, and then it'll take you right back into this GUI.

10:30Now that you understand how to set up an account and you've established a subscription, now we can talk more about why the Cloud exists and where Microsoft comes into the play. But now, we've already got a big win under our belt, and that's just getting our foot in the door. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] So, you're sitting around the dinner table at Thanksgiving with your entire family, and they know that you are the tech person. You're the person who's interested in tech, and your uncle looks over you and asks you, what is the cloud? What do you answer to them? What do you say at that point? This video seeks to answer that question. What is the point of the cloud? And how does the cloud do things differently than we've done in the past?

0:32This sets up even bigger discussions about things like data centers. So let's start to lay that foundation. Let's plant that seed right now and talk about what is the cloud. Let's go. This meme to me never gets old. When you think about the cloud, one of the best answers that there are is there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer, and the fact of the matter is that's mostly true. That's mostly accurate. Where did the cloud come from? And what is it really all about?

1:03There's an OK chance that when we think about the cloud your exposure to the cloud is through cloud storage apps. You've probably heard of something like Dropbox, or OneDrive, or Google Drive, or Apple's iCloud, or they have it called iCloud drive, I think is what it's called. All of these things that you have maybe been exposed to these are storage, right?

1:34The idea here is that I can take my files like a text file, or an Excel file, or any type of file. And I could just drop it on OneDrive, or I could drop it on Dropbox. And the cool thing about it is I know that file throughout the rest of history is probably going to be safe. Nothing is going to happen to that file. If I delete my files, or my images, or whatever off of my hard drive on my computer, I know that I can go to OneDrive, or Dropbox, or Google Drive, or whatever, and download them again.

2:12Or even cooler, I could upload something to OneDrive, drive across town to my dad's house and download it on his computer over there. It becomes a way of almost sharing the files that we want to collaborate on. And this is storage. This is one type of cloud resource out of 100 that can be deployed. And there's a decent chance that you pay something like a small monthly fee to get an allocation of storage.

2:44I think for a long time, iCloud had something like for $0.99 a month you could up your storage of cloud storage like 1 terabyte, and that was used to back up our iPhones, and get all of our images, and videos, and pictures of our family, or vacations, all of that was automatically synchronized to the iCloud storage that way I could access those files, or those images, or those videos any time I want. And with all of this extra storage, I felt very comfortable knowing that I could take basically an unlimited amount of pictures or videos of my vacations, or my kids, or whatever, and it would get automatically stored in the cloud.

3:25And if I got a new phone, it would just download from the cloud. And that was a really cool thing. But what's really going on there? What is this storage when it uploads all of these images? Here is my phone right here. I'll put the little circle here, because there used to be a button on iPhones right there in iPads. So when I take a picture snap, there's my picture like that. And it's got, of my face on a vacation or something at a beach. What happens is whenever my phone typically gets connected to Wi-Fi again, it immediately transmits that image to a secure facility where they just have gigantic pools of hard drives.

4:11Just an absolutely insane amount of storage that they have running in Apple's own hardware. Apple has their own facilities with just extraordinary amounts of storage and hard drives upwards of the eta bytes. That's right, they're even bigger than petabytes or terabytes. There are eta bytes. It's just massive amounts of storage. And all around the world when people are snapping these images, these images are just getting stored securely on hard drives.

4:45And of course, they're associated with your account, and you've paid out of all of these massive blocks of storage. You've paid to carve out 1 terabyte a month worth of storage for your images to land in. And whenever you need to recall one of those images, because maybe you deleted it off your phone or your iPhone is such that it automatically pushes old images to the cloud, it just automatically seeks out that exact spot in that image on those hard drives and just redownload it back to your computer.

5:16Put this another way, the cloud, in this case, the iCloud storage is just somebody else's hard drives. In that, that's really the idea that comes to mind when we start to think about the cloud. It really is just somebody else's computer. I want you to think again for a moment, the cloud it really found its feet with Amazon. And you think about amazon.com and how big amazon.com is now.

5:46At least in the United States, but worldwide, amazon.com now has its presence. Wherever you are, you can get very quickly redirected to an amazon.com website where you can shop and buy things and with prime delivery have it dropped off in front of your house within two days in most locations, one day in some major Metropolitan locations. Think about what it took to get amazon.com spread out all around the world, right? All around the world. Wherever you go, amazon.com has web front ends that you can quickly access, because you just connect to their website.

6:24This took a tremendous amount of computers and servers spread out all around the world. So, that way, whenever you want to connect to their website and buy things, these servers are serving the content to you. They're serving the ability to shop and buy things and charge your credit card and send of to logistics to have the product shipped to you. To make all this happen, Amazon spun up really humongous facilities all around the world called data centers.

6:58We're going to talk about data centers more in an upcoming video. And what they found out pretty quickly is they invested so much in this infrastructure right here that they actually had excess servers sitting around. They had excess storage, excess compute, excess network, and excess RAM. But they had spent a humongous amount of money on building all this stuff out. So how can they get some of this money back?

7:29Effectively, they rent it. That's what the cloud is. Now, if you are a business, and you want your web front end or your applications to run with the same availability, with the same reliability of amazon.com you can simply rent these servers from amazon.com and run your infrastructure, run your applications on the exact same hardware that Amazon is running Amazon on.

8:05That's the idea with the cloud. When we say it's just somebody else's computer, if you're going to, AWS, which is Amazon Web Services. It's just Amazon's computers. But we're here to talk about Microsoft again, right? Take the exact same idea, except in yellow where I wrote Amazon things, we're going to do blue, and it's Microsoft things. We've got Microsoft websites, we've got Bing. We've got all of this infrastructure that makes Microsoft stuff work, and guess what?

8:36They did the exact same thing, spinning up servers all around the world, all around the world. It's just servers, servers, servers, servers, and storage, and hard drives, and massive networks, that do things like 300 terabits a second of data transfers. That's literally what's happened here is they have spun up these gigantic facilities again, called data centers. And they had so much success compute and storage, they started renting it out. That is Azure.

9:07Azure is where you can go to say, hey, I want to borrow some of your servers, and some of your storage, and some of your networking to run my application, and my website in. And this is what businesses do. Now, of course, there's a personal side of things. You experience this with something like OneDrive, where they're actually leasing some storage out to you. But when it comes to Azure, Azure is really for businesses to deploy business scale applications.

9:39To deploy their websites. And to deploy all of the pieces that make tracking and shipping work. If somebody places an order on our website that we were running in Azure, a big piece of that is that order needs to make its way to a warehouse to box up a package and ship it to via UPS. So that's a whole different component of the application that has to also run in the cloud. And the end result is when you use something like Azure or any other public cloud, the idea is that you are getting this reliability.

10:17And the cool thing about renting it is, instead of ping this humongous fee to deploy all of these servers, and the electricity, and networking, instead we just get paid an hourly rate. The ultimate result of this is Azure and us are now the most profitable portions of those businesses. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, their public cloud operations are now where they generate their revenue.

10:49It's not online, sales. It's not selling video games, or operating systems. It's renting out their compute. It's renting out their hardware. It's renting out their infrastructure. So, as a result of them going, oh, this was a really good idea. They threw a tremendous amount of effort into improving their public cloud offerings over basically the last decade. And now we have incredible offerings. Azure personally is the one that I choose to work with.

11:19So, now we understand the joke when you say there is no cloud, it's just somebody else's computer. You know what? That might be true. We're really just carving out a piece of Microsoft's computers and their gigantic data centers about to actually deploy our code into it. To deploy our applications, or our systems into it, and pay them a monthly bill that is charged per hour. And from there, we actually get the benefits of running our code, our infrastructure, our systems on Microsoft's hardware.

11:56So this is understanding the point of the cloud. The cloud really is somebody else's computer. In this case, for the rest of this set of videos when we're talking about the AZ 900, we're running this on Microsoft's own hardware, in their own data centers, on their own servers. Now, what are data centers? Why do we care about these things? Why is that such a benefit? That's what we're going to talk about in the next video, I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] So why do we care about data centers? And why is it such a big win for us to use somebody else's data center? In this video, we'll talk about what data centers do, how they're structured, and why we typically want to put our critical workloads within a data center. Let's go. So you've probably seen pictures of data centers before but never actually realized that you were looking at a data center.

0:31Look at this. Google "data center" real quick and just take a look at some of the Google images that come up. In fact, right here on the right-hand side, what you're looking at here is, in fact, a data center. You see it? I mean, it's not obvious at first why this is such a big deal, but it's actually a huge deal. It tells you right there on the screen, a data center is a dedicated space within a building or a group of building used to house computer systems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:01And I'm not going to read this to you because that would defeat my job. I'm going to tell you what data centers are all about. Data centers, at the end of the day, are really, really important pieces to keeping our applications online. Think about it again. When was the last time amazon.com went down? When was the last time google.com went down? When was the last time microsoft.com went down? They haven't. They don't go down.

1:32They stay up all the time. There's never some form of an outage or server or system failure that wipes out these websites. Sometimes the internet itself has problems like we see something like DNS servers get attacked, and that slows down the ability for us to find these web servers and actually access the websites themselves. But they don't go down. They don't go down due to outages.

2:02And also, importantly, something we're going to talk about in the next video, they don't go down because new features or updates are getting deployed to the applications. They stay online. And there's a combination of things that make all this happen. But really important and really at the center of it are our DCs, or Data Centers. So why are data centers such a big deal? Well, at the end of the day, the key thing that makes data centers so cool is redundancy.

2:35We want two of everything everywhere. And that does mean it costs twice as much. Sometimes it means it actually costs more than twice as much to get two of everything everywhere because if something were to die or fail on us, we want to be able to just roll over to the backup piece and gives us time to fix the initial problem that comes in. So when we look at things-- you saw those rows and rows and rows of racks.

3:08Those racks are what we call them. And within these racks, we mount our servers. I'm going to put it SRV right here, and I'm going to put SRV right here, and I'm going to put SRV right here. Here's our servers. And then right above that, we'll put in some networking components right here, some network devices like this. And all of these servers are going to have redundant connections to these network devices like this.

3:39It's going to look like a lot of spaghetti all over the place, but it's going to make sense to the network engineers who are installing it. So if one of these servers goes down right here, I've got two other servers waiting in line to pick them up. If one of these cables fails right here, I've got three other cables plugged into all of these network devices going on right here. If this network device goes down, I've got this network device standing in line to pick up the traffic and redirect it everywhere else.

4:09And if this entire rack goes down, good thing I've got an entire facility of racks absolutely everywhere to pick up all of these services that are running on these servers or these network devices. But wait, there's more. These servers and these network devices need electricity. So I'll run electricity to the rack like this. And this will come from my power company A. Is that redundant though?

4:39What if power company A goes down? Well, guess what? That's why I'm going to have power company B step in and deliver electricity to my facility and run that to the rack too. So all of these servers and these network devices will have two power plugs. But even further than that, even more than that is, at the bottom of these racks, I'll put in two batteries right here, two battery backups. These are called Uninterruptible Power Supplies, UPSs.

5:12So on the bottom of these racks, there will be batteries. So power company B will feed with this battery, and power company A will feed these batteries. And that will distribute the electricity securely and in a proper load-balanced way to these servers and these network devices. And if power company A goes down, it'll flip over to power company B. And if that company goes down, then it'll flip on to the batteries until we have enough time to restore power or migrate our services to other racks.

5:42And the crazy part about all of that is this is all done automatically. Oh, but wait, we're still not done. We still have the internet to deal with. We've got these network devices. So guess what? I will have at least two service providers and two interconnections, at least two, coming in to each one of my data centers to provide redundant internet. So if internet access goes down because ISP A is under attack or something or somebody, the new guy, cut the fiber or something, we just roll over to ISP B. Again, all of that is handled automatically.

6:20Oh, but wait, there's still more on top of that. These things that we have throughout this entire data center, they are hot. This is generating all sorts of heat and blowing heat all over the place. So we'll actually design the data centers to have a cool air lane where cool air gets sucked in by the servers and it spits hot air out the back. But we'll install fans such that it actually sucks the hot air out, returns it to the HVAC units, and then blows the cold air back in.

6:55And you guess what? Those HVAC units, they'll be redundant too. We'll have multiple HVAC units up and running to keep the cold air blasting in all the time and keep the air circulating in such a way to keep this hardware up and running. In each one of these servers, we're going to have multiple CPUs. We're going to have multiple hard drives. In fact, we're going to have storage racks of just nothing but hard drives using software-defined storage or SANs.

7:28This is Storage Area Networks. We'll talk about how storage works when the time comes. But for now, just know we're going to have dedicated storage appliances for humongous amounts of redundancy with inner storage. And we're going to talk-- again, I can't stress this enough. There is a very sophisticated way that Azure handles all of this redundancy. At the end of the day, deploying a data center-- as hopefully, this is starting to register in your mind-- deploying a single data center is an expensive feat because we have to have very good servers.

8:04And we have to have multiple of them in case one of them goes down or has a component failure. We have to have very good, very fast networking. We have to have very good electricity. And we have to have very good internet connections. We have to have very good HVAC flows. Managing power levels and temperatures and bandwidth and actual hardware component failures is an extraordinary undertaking to managing data centers.

8:34And there are many, many, many, many, many systems engineers and network engineers whose sole job is to show up to these data centers and monitor every single aspect of this to keep these things online. So you as a customer or as a systems administrator or engineer or developer who's thinking, I need to make sure that when I deploy my application or when I deploy my infrastructure like my file share or my Active Directory domain controller, when I deploy these things, I need to know that they simply will not go down because they're deployed in state-of-the-art data centers with redundancy absolutely everywhere.

9:26So when you go to Microsoft Azure and you're like, I'm going to deploy a virtual machine or a web hosting application, you are deploying it somewhere on one of these servers that has multiple hard drives, multiple CPUs, multiple RAM chips, multiple network interface cards, multiple uplinks into the network, multiple power connections into batteries, and to multiple power companies. Multiple ISPs give you a exit point out of the network.

9:59Multiple HVAC units keep this thing running cold. Do you see what I mean, how data centers are an absolutely critical part to deploying applications to keep them online? Ultimately, your application or your infrastructure is your money. It is your income stream. A lot of applications sell widgets online, but a lot of applications are also something like in-house built to help manage our processes online.

10:32Think about how the government works. The government's not really out there selling products, are they? No, but they have applications that they use. And they need those applications to be online or else they stop working. And when they stop working, they stop generating productivity. They stop efficiently using their dollars. It costs them money to be down. So this is why we use data centers. And this is why the cloud is really renting out already-existing data centers by the largest technical providers that can possibly build data centers.

11:10So now that we understand data centers and we understand how they keep applications online via availability and redundancy, now we'll talk about the other piece of how these applications stay online when we roll out new features. That's the art of DevOps, and that is a really powerful thing. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Probably the biggest thing to come out of the cloud, aside from organizing the way that we bill and pay for our infrastructure services, is DevOps. DevOps is the advent or the theory or the methodology of changing an application without really breaking anything. Think about it for a second. When was the last time google.com went down?

0:31When was the last time amazon.com went down? These websites change all the time. They get new features added to them behind the scenes, or they roll out new products. How does that really work, though? How do we change this application without actually taking it down? This is the magic of DevOps. And in this video, we're going to talk about, at a very high level, how DevOps works and how it was enabled by the cloud. Let's go. So maybe you've heard about this thing, maybe not.

1:01It's a big deal that's really found its prominence, it's really found its feet in popularity within, I'd say, the last six years, although it's been a thing for over a decade now. It's called DevOps. And the idea here is-- well, let's actually start with the scenario. Think about it again. We actually mentioned this in the previous video. We had amazon.com. We had google.com. We had microsoft.com. I'm just going to put MSFT right here to shorten it up.

1:33These sites have never gone down, or they haven't gone down for a really, really long time. But the crazy thing about these sites is that they change. In fact, let's clear the screen and take a look at some of these sites. Well, I'm on google.com right now. You saw that. If I go to amazon.com right now, this site is changing all the time, not just the stuff that it's advertising in front of you, but the actual blocks of what they're putting here themselves. And how did it know to populate this data right here?

2:06So if I'm drawing right here and I say like, explore more from across this store, or if I scroll up, how did it know that I like Mountain Dew so much? Or how does it know that I'm big into tech? Or how does it know that these are the books that I'm interested in and recommended for me? I'm looking at graphics cards and tablets and Raspberry Pis. How did it know that these are all of the things that I'm particularly interested in? Look at these glasses. I remember buying those glasses. How did it know that? The crazy thing about all of this is that behind the scenes, there are tons of miniature applications that work together to make all of this work.

2:49The idea here is called microservices. And it's a big part of a bigger picture topic that is DevOps. What we're really talking about here when we talk about DevOps is we're talking about, how can we change code? How can we troubleshoot issues, fix bugs, as well as roll out and introduce new features into a production environment without taking the production environment offline?

3:27For the longest time, when we created applications, if I were to create an amazon.com in the most traditional possible sense, we would have a web server or a web what we call the front end. This is what end users, people out there in the world interact with. So on this front end, we'll allow people to shop. They add things into their cart, and then they go to purchase the actual item itself.

3:59There's a bunch of things that have to take place if you really think about this. It has to charge a credit card. So this needs to go to a credit card processor. And the credit card processor has to tell the application, was it good? Or was it bad? Did it actually successfully charge the card? Then once it's gotten a successful charge, we then need to send this out into logistics for shipping and handling. We need someone in the warehouse to package this up and ship it out.

4:31And underneath the hood, there is typically, in a traditional sense, a back-end application that is up and running. The front end communicates to the back end. When somebody clicks the Buy button, that tells the back-end server, OK, you need to charge this credit card. And if it succeeds, process the shipping and handling and let me, the front end, know when you're done. That way, I can tell the front-end user, hey, we were able to successfully charge this credit card.

5:02Then, most importantly, we need to store a record of all of this transaction stuff in a database. That way, if our front-end user ever wants to look at their order history, we can pull it out of the database and show it back to them on their screen. And they can look at the status of their order or what they ordered or all sorts of details like that. This is a traditional three-tier app, a three-tier application.

5:32There's a front end. There's a back-end app, sometimes known as middleware. And then there is a database that actually stores all of the historical data. This three-tier app, we used to actually bundle this all up into one gigantic application. And we called it a monolithic application. There are still monolithic applications absolutely deployed today. Typically, they're very small applications.

6:02They can run on top of one server and have all of this running on the exact same server with no real issues about it at all. This would be great for an intranet website that we would use inside of our company. And only a handful of users are using it at any given time. This is the ideal with that. But with amazon.com or microsoft.com or google.com, where we are literally processing hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of requests per second, well, we have to get a little more flexible with these types of things, don't we?

6:43So what they did is, first of all, they do have front end. Of course, that's how we access amazon.com. I like to pick on Amazon a lot because it's the app that we know. But where does Amazon get its data? Where does Amazon get the information to fill in all of these boxes recommended for you and buy again and what's popular in your area? You should think of each one of these things as its own separate application right here.

7:17So I'm going to draw this right here. Instead of one back-end application, you should think of these as a cluster of applications that all serve one important purpose. And that's to get recent orders. That's to get what is currently in my shopping cart. That is to get what is popular in my area. That's to get my suggestions based on the categories of things that I shop for. You should also consider the everything that you do on this website is being recorded in an application.

7:55What did you click on? How did you navigate from one thing to the next thing? And if you clicked on this thing that was suggested for you, that might mean you're more interested in things like that. So maybe we have a machine learning algorithm that is running, that is learning, what are the types of things that you shop for? And that tells the suggestion application to suggest different kinds of products. This is the idea of microservices.

8:27We can take a huge application and break it down into smaller pieces. And, yeah, you should absolutely think that each one of these is effectively running on its own server with its own network components, with its own storage and everything like that. Why is this such a big deal? Because now instead of deploying all of this on one gigantic server, then the entire server comes under load, and we have to expand that entire server, which causes us to take that server down.

9:04Now, if the suggestion app, which was located right here-- if the suggestion app becomes really, really, really popular, we can now just take one tiny little component offline and expand it to be even bigger. But even better than that, with the advent of DevOps, we can now add redundancy in place across all of my apps. And, very interestingly, I can introduce new features to one of these apps and see how it works.

9:41If it's working well, I'll roll that feature into its little buddy application right here. And then I'll roll that feature into this little buddy application right here. So because of DevOps, I now have the ability to introduce new features into a small subset of my underlying application and then introduce that into the broader subset of the application until it's in full-blown production.

10:14And I can perform maintenance fixes on each one of these microservices without ever taking down the main production application itself. What DevOps is, to define DevOps, it has given developers a way to automatically-- this is important-- automatically introduce and test new code into an application without taking the application down because now we have the ability to introduce our code into a developer environment, where only they can see it.

10:56And then they can run all sorts of automated or manual tests against it. And then they can move that into an actual test environment, where we allow specific end users to test out new features or fixes. Then we can roll that into a staging environment, where we might allow some real-world production traffic to access that staging environment just to see how it works when we actually put a real production load on it.

11:29And then when we're finally ready and we know that it's going to work, we can roll it into the production environment again because we're really just impacting a microservice and not the entire application itself. So this is now giving developers a operational standard and a management standard for deploying code into production environments in such a way that it doesn't tear everything down.

11:59So why did the cloud enable this? Why did the cloud make all this possible? Because at the end of the day, the big thing about the cloud is called scale. We can, with the click of a button or even automatically, deploy new servers automatically. We can also, automatically or with a click of a button, reduce the number of servers that we have.

12:30Beyond that, with a click of a button or automatically, I could just as easily take my servers and make them even bigger servers. We can give them more resources because the cloud does all of these operations virtually. So what I'm saying here is when we talk about scale, if I have, say, a web server and I'm serving web content right here with these two servers. And all of a sudden, I'm getting a huge influx of traffic because the stuff that I'm selling on my website becomes really popular, I can scale out or scale horizontally.

13:14And what that means is with a few clicks of a button or automatically-- we're going to talk about this a lot more, automatically-- I can simply allow the cloud to add more servers with the exact same code, just literally copy and paste the servers themselves and load balance the traffic across all of these servers automatically or manually if I want that type of control. And the exact same thing goes. When the traffic dies off, I can just scale them back in.

13:46And remember that whole billing thing. I only get billed for what I use. That's exactly right. I would only get billed whenever I've got an influx of traffic, and I scale out. During this period, I would get billed more. When the traffic fades off and I tear down these servers, I pay less. So I literally only get billed for what I use. But then if I just decide, you know what? The real solution is I just need bigger servers. With a click of a button, I can scale them up.

14:17That's right. Instead of scaling horizontally, we can scale vertically. And when we say scale a server up, that means take it from two CPUs to four CPUs or 8 gigs of RAM to 32 gigs of RAM. Again, this stuff is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons or letting the code handle it itself. It can automatically react to current events and current workloads and scale my servers on an as-needed basis.

14:50Yes, we'll talk about how Azure specifically does all of these things coming up. But the big thing I wanted you to take away right now is understanding where DevOps came into play. So the ability to dynamically adjust the number of servers I have at any given moment, hopefully, when I start talking about these clusters of servers that I may deploy as microservices, hopefully, it's starting to make more sense how the cloud made this a thing because now when I'm talking about my suggestions app right here, if my suggestions app becomes more and more and more popular, I can just add more of them and load balance across this portion right here.

15:34And this still minimizes my cost because I didn't have to scale everything else. I only had to scale the piece that really matters. And even cooler is as I'm starting to ship new code into it, I can ship my new code into just this instance of the suggestion app right here, test it out, and then roll it into more of these right here. The actual process right here-- this is just for your trivia. If you ever find yourself in this world, this is just for your trivia.

16:07The actual process of shipping code into one of these tiny little environments before you roll it out into the rest, this is actually known as a canary deployment, just so you know, just for your own good measure. That way, you can actually tell someone, I know what a canary deployment is. It's when I have basically four of the exact same instance running, and I ship new code into just one of them just to see how it does. And if anything goes wrong, I can just roll the code back or take it out of the load balancer.

16:38That's the idea here. So because the cloud enables dynamic scaling, up, down, in, or out of each of our servers, I can break my application into a bunch of tiny little servers and scale each of those instances as needed or ship new features into one of those little subsets and see how it does and then slowly roll the code into the actual production feature set itself. So DevOps is the actual practice of leveraging the elasticity of the cloud, the flexibility and scalability of the cloud to meet our demand.

17:21We leverage that feature set to break our application into smaller pieces and then introduce new code to it safely and securely in phases. And because of this, we don't have to take down the entire application every time we make a change. This has been understanding DevOps. And this has been understanding how the cloud brought us to this point, to this entire new style of managing and running and deploying applications.

17:52I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:06So now that you have an Azure subscription, what can you do? I'd encourage you right now to just start clicking around, see what we can do to explore the Azure resources, how is it laid out, can we change any of the settings or the way it looks and feels from the Azure portal? In this video, we're going to take a quick look and encourage you to start your exploration. Let's go. So you've landed here in Azure, portal.azure.com, you can get signed in right now.

0:37I want you to explore some of the things that are in here. I want you to actually see if you can adjust this to be the way that you want it to. First of all, notice there's a hamburger menu over here in the top left corner. If you give it a click, it'll show you some quick links to other popular resources that they find out. What you're actually seeing right here is this piece will run color, right, let's do this. This piece right here, this is all kind of pinned, you're always going to have create a resource, home, dashboard and a list of every service, Azure offers right here.

1:13You're definitely going to want to click on all services just to explore what you can do to get started. There's all resources right here. So you may be thinking, what's the difference between services and resources. Well, services are the offers, resources are things you have already deployed. So that's a big thing to understand right now. This is looking at what can I shop for versus what do I have. Then the stuff that's under that this is your favorites list.

1:44This is stuff that by default comes pinned for you, and these are really popular resources that are used in Azure nearly every single day by most Azure developers and a lot of systems administrators too, you have the ability to change these favorites. When you start to explore things that you want to actually favor it. How do you adjust that list? Look, if I just hover over one of these things like virtual machine scale sets right here, do you see, right there, it's kind of tricky to see but right, oh, there was a star in the top right corner, here, let's try and get it, right there where my mouse is, you see this star, that's how you add it to your favorites.

2:25If you want to remove something from your favorites, pick on something like SQL databases right there and see how the stars already clicked, you can unfavoured it like that by just clicking the button. Bring it out over here, and now the SQL database is gone. I'm going to put it back because I like those SQL databases quite a bit. Now, there's also the actual view or template or theme itself, how can you change the appearance or what is actually on your dashboard whenever you come to Azure? Click on the little gear, right here, kind of in the top center over these menus, click on the gear, and then you see appearance in startup views.

2:57If you give that a click, look at this, now, we have dark mode. Thank you. Let's click on the theme of dark, and apply add, my eyes, they're so grateful to have dark mode in Azure like this. So with this set, now on dark mode, you can click the X right over here to close what we like to call the blades. So I'll close this right here, and we'll take a look at a little bit more of these blade things that we're talking about. Right here, I see virtual machines but if you don't see virtual machines, you can click on the hamburger menu, and I can pretty much promise you, you'll see virtual machines right here on the left hand side.

3:35Click on Virtual machines, and then this takes you into the landing zone of where you would view and manage all of your virtual machines. Now, I'm not going to deploy one right now. But I do want you to see and understand a big navigation point of Azure. When I click on Create, I'll choose Azure Virtual Machine by default, and what it does is it brings up the first blade. Azure, as you start to navigate through many different menus in Azure like this, what it'll do is it'll bring up a new menu like so.

4:09And then you'll navigate through that menu, and then it'll bring up another new menu like so. So you'll start here with menu one, and then you'll find yourself in menu two, and then you'll find yourself in menu three, each of these are known as blades. And within each of these blades, you'll see the X to closed blade that you're currently working on. This also will be seen as a navigation path right here. So as you open up more blades, you'll see these as navigation paths right here at the top.

4:43And you'll be able to quickly jump to any of them as you go along. So because we haven't talked about things like resource groups or anything like that, I'm not going to show you how to deploy a virtual machine, because that's jumping way ahead. But I do want you to see an instance of blades so give me one second while I pull up a diploid virtual machine, and you can see how the navigation path really looks. So here, I've just quickly deployed a virtual machine running in the Central US right now, look at this, notice when I start clicking on some of the virtual machine templates here, right here, I'm in home and then I'm in the Overview page this is one really long string to say I'm in the Overview page of the virtual machine.

5:29But if I start clicking into things like networking, this will bring up the networking blade. Then if I want to look at the exact interface, the actual resource that was created on this virtual machine, I can click on that, and this takes me into yet another blade one more time. Notice, if I click X right here, see, I'm in the network interface, if I click the X right here, it jumps me back to the previous screen where I was in networking, and if I click X right here, now, I'm all the way back to this deployment resource that I was originally in.

6:03So this is just to understand how the blades actually work, and how there is kind of a natural progression of clicking around in Azure when you've already deployed some resources. So again, I really, just to kind of start to wrap your head around what is in Azure because we're going to talk about a lot of this stuff, don't worry, there's going to be a lot coming up, I just wanted you to see all of the different categories under All Services that exist within Azure as well as how to customize your Azure look and feel with a theme and how to navigate around Azure.

6:41So get to know what are in these categories; compute, networking, storage, web, containers, databases, analytics, AI, machine learning, resources for IoT, look at this, mixed reality, integration is personally my favorite section, and even identity and security are crucial parts to understand when it comes to working with and administering Azure. So this has been how to get started with Azure, understanding the point of the cloud, and how we can actually kick start our Azure journey.

7:15I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.