Hello everyone. I hope you all are safe. In this article, I will be explaining what Azure is and how it works internally.
What is Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a set of cloud services that helps organizations meet business challenges. It has hundreds of end to end services and is charged based on usage. Okay, this is a brief introduction, and I have already this. You can
read more here.
How does Azure work internally?
Azure is based on the virtualization concept, which means many resources can be created virtually for many purposes. It contains rack, power units, and network switches like other servers in the datacenter and each rack will have a software called fabric controller.
Fabric controller
Fabric controller is a distributed application that is responsible for managing and monitoring the servers within the racks. if there will be any problems (like server failure) in the racks then the job of the fabric controller is to recognize the problems and solve it for that rack for smooth functioning of the servers. Each of these fabric controllers is connected to software called Orchestrator.
So what is Orchestrator?
Orchestrator includes web services, Request APIs that are used to create resources, delete resources, and other operations. So what actually happens here is whenever a request from the user is made either from the Azure portal or from Powershell, firstly it goes to Orchestrator. Now Orchestrator authenticates and authorizes (it will check whether the user is allowed to do the particular task) the user and finally, it will look into the database for availability of space based on the resource and pass the request to an appropriate Azure fabric controller for the execution of the request.
As we see in the above diagram, multiple racks like this become the cluster and it will have multiple clusters within a Datacenter. We can have multiple data centers within availability zones and multiple availability zones will be under a region and likewise, multiple regions will be within geography.
Let's see what Geography, Region, and Availability Zones are.
Geography
Geography is a discrete market, typically containing two or more regions, that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries.
Region
A region is a set of data centers deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. and checks the availability of the products by region
Availability Zones
Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each Availability Zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.
I hope this was informative. Stay safe and happy learning.