Exploring Azure Cloud Global Infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure global infrastructure is built on two key components, a physical infrastructure and connective networking components. Physical infrastructure consists of physical datacenters where the data is stored, which are further grouped into regions. The networking components connects all the azure datacenters with each other with a low latency and high availability links.

Azure infrastructure globally distributes around the world and serves the user close to their location.

When we provision any service in Azure, Azure provisions the service and stores the data on a physical server. A physical room called a datacenter houses multiple physical servers grouped together, along with dedicated power, cooling, and networking devices.

Azure has datacenters around the world. However, but individual datacenters aren’t directly accessible. Datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions and Azure Availability Zones to increase the accessibility and reliability of the services provisioned on the datacenter.

The datacenters are distributed into various Azure geographies. Compliance and data residency are key aspects of an Azure geography. It lets organizations with specific data residency and compliance needs keep their data and applications close.

The Azure geographies can align to specific countries such as the India, Australia, and so on. It can also be aligned to specific markets, such as Europe and Asia.

If an organization has all the users in India, they dont want to host the application or the data somewhere is united states. If the data is hosted in US, then all the request from the users in India will travel to US first and then the response will be sent, this will cause unnecessary delay.

To avoid this the data or the application can be hosted in India geography, which will be accessed faster by the organization users hosted in India.

India, United States, China are a few examples of Azure Geographies.

Within each geography are Azure regions. A region is a geographical area containing at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network.

You have the flexibility to deploy your applications and data to any Azure region you want. An Azure region has discrete pricing and service availability.

When we deploy a resource in Azure, we need to choose the region where the resource is to be deployed (created).

In India, Central India and South India are the regions, In Canada, Canada Central and Canada East are the regions. Similarly in Australia, Australia Central, Australia East, Australia Southeast are the regions.

In India geography, Canada Central region is paired with South India region.

In Japan geography, Japan East region is paired with Japan West region.

In Canada geography, Canada Central region is paired with Canada East region.

Many Azure regions provide availability zones, which are separate groups of datacenters within a region. It is a unique physical location within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking and connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.

Azure creates a duplicate of the data and resources in availability zone. If one zone goes down, the other continues working. Not all regions offer availability zones. Availability zones offer an additional layer of service availability.

There are few Azure regions that do not have availability zone. South India, Japan West are the examples of region with no availability zones.

There are few Azure regions without a regional pair but these regions have availability zones which achieves high availability.

In Israel geography, Israel Central is the only region, so it has Availability zones but no region to pair with. Same is with Italy geography, where Italy North is the only region.

Azure global network refers to all the networking components which makes data flows between datacenters and between datacenters and the end users who accesses the data in Azure services and Microsoft 365 services.

Examples are networking components like Microsoft global wide-area network (WAN), points of presence (PoPs), fiber, and others.

Azure Edge Network is designed to extend the data to the edge of the network, closer to end-users and devices. Demarcation point between Microsoft networking and customer network and the Internet.

Edge Network comprises of networking components like Content Delivery Network (CDN), Azure Peering Service, Azure ExpressRoute.

Microsoft Azure provides the building blocks necessary to build, deploy, and manage a wide variety of applications and services in the cloud. It offers scalability, reliability, and flexibility to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes and industries. It also provides enterprise-grade cloud global infrastructure on which organizations can use with minimum downtime.

Azure’s global infrastructure provides the necessary backbone for its services. It includes physical elements like redundant power, networking, and cooling, as well as software elements like safe deployment processes, impact less maintenance, and failure prediction.