Azure Global Infrastructure
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>> Hey everybody and welcome back.
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In this lecture we're going to be talking about
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the Azure Global Infrastructure.
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What is the Azure Global Infrastructure?
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Well, it's basically a bunch
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of physical and networking components
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that make up the Azure Cloud,
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and that's going to be our learning objective
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for this lesson.
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I find this to be important because in order for you to
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understand the different services
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that are offered by the Cloud,
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you got to understand how
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the cloud is even build to begin with,
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so that's what we're going to be covering.
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What you see before you right now is the current map
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of the global infrastructure for Azure as of now.
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I'm recording this in Spring of 2021,
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so in the future,
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there will most definitely be updates.
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As you can see right here on
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the left hand bottom corner,
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is a legend of
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the different dots and what they represent.
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The way that they've classified it is they separated
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the infrastructure into regions, availability zones,
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and they have other bits and pieces to it
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that break down what these mean to you,
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but this is what you can see in their Azure Cloud map,
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the infrastructure map thus far.
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As you can see, the availability
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across the world is quite vars.
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There's a lot of solid
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filled-in dots which represent the available regions,
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and regions are areas where there's
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data centers available for you to spin up services.
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Now, the types of
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services and what you can do in those services,
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that may vary depending on where you're at.
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That's just due to data governance
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>> laws and privacy laws.
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>> If you're going to Europe,
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things get a little iffy about what you do with data,
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especially when it deals with European resident data,
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versus what you can do in the United States.
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There's some comparisons that get detailed there,
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but that's beyond the scope of this course.
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I just want to tell you that you will
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run into times when maybe you're
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architecting a solution that needs to be global,
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and maybe the service
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that you're trying to spin up isn't available.
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Just keep that in mind. Sometimes the reasons
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why is because of local laws.
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Other reasons are because Azure is growing,
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and they may not have
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the current resources available for you to
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spin up that particular service in
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>> that specific region.
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>> Availability zones, which we're
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going to get to in a little bit,
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are these things that sit within
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the regions that offer higher availability.
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Like I said, we're going to
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focus on that in a little bit,
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but the main thing I want to focus on with this slide,
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aside from just the vastness
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of coverage across the world,
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is the planning that
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Azure has in place to continue to expand.
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Now, if you don't know this already,
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it's good to have
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good coverage because not only do you have options,
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this is going to lower the latency
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between wherever maybe your data's being hosted,
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or your service are being hosted.
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Let's say you have a website,
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and you're catering to customers in New Zealand,
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but maybe your organization is based out of the UK.
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You want to obviously have
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a data center hosting your sites or your services
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over within the Australian regions
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versus having it being hosted out of the UK,
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and having the customers based out of New Zealand have
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to surf the web to a server all
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>> the way based in the UK,
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>> when they can just pull the data
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directly from a region in Australia.
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It's good to have that vast coverage because you
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can architect solutions better that way,
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you can think about the end user
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and where the data's going to be going ultimately,
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and plan for speed and high availability.
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These are the higher-level topics that we'll get
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into as we go further into our lessons here,
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but for now, that's
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what I wanted to cover within the slide.
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Let's go ahead and move forward.
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We covered, the global infrastructure is made
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up of physical infrastructure components
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that are data centers and networking
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the entire infrastructure together.
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This is actually hard
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wiring the different data centers
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together within the region,
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and across the globe.
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The physical components are comprised
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of over 160 data centers.
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When I think of a data center,
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I like to think of like a distribution center.
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If you live in the United States,
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like a Costco,
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or Sam's Club, or a Walmart,
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a very big building that houses,
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if you think about one of these larger warehouses,
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lots of stuff.
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It could be, goods for consumers,
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but in this case, it would be servers,
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just thousands of racks of servers,
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and within those servers,
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which are very, very powerful,
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you have virtual servers that actually
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hosts the services that we use
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when we are building something in the Cloud.
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It's not just for Azure,
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this is for all the Cloud environments,
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and there's many, many Cloud environments,
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this is what they look like.
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They are very big buildings,
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and sometimes clusters of buildings,
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sitting on large acreage of land,
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large pieces of land.
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Within each of these buildings,
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you have tens of thousands of
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servers hosting all these services,
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which have lots of RAM, and compute,
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and storage resources,
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and networking resources,
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and they're all virtualized.
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The virtualized services are things that
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you and I can take advantage of as consumers,
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to build our organizations information.
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That's what that looks like.
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What's also pretty cool is
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these physical data centers are heavily protected.
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You don't have to worry about
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your regulatory compliance requirements.
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Typically, if you work at health care,
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or if you work in the credit card industry, or other,
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maybe some governments regulated industry,
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you have to meet certain requirements,
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otherwise you get penalized,
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so you can't do the things that you need to
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do for your organization to be successful.
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Azure and other Cloud providers,
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they build these data centers to meet those needs.
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The more specific the needs get,
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like if you are in the United States and you have to
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build something for the Department of Defense,
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there are specific requirements you have to meet.
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One of them being, you can't house
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other types of data within the data center.
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Things have to stay very, very isolated.
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They do provide that type of offering
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as you get a little bit more specific
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into architecting solutions.
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Again, that's beyond the scope
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of this certification and this course,
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but it is an option if you are
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somebody that works in that type
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of regulated environment,
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you can learn more about that.
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Azure data centers consists of physical buildings,
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they house thousands of servers,
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and these servers are what we call the Cloud services,
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that we use to build our solutions.
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Let's go ahead and move on to the next phase here.
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Azure regions contain two or more Azure data centers.
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Now, I want to make sure that this sticks here.
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These things here that we're going to be talking
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about are things you want to memorize,
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so make sure you write
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these notes down on a piece of paper and memorize it,
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because you will likely see one or two questions
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on your exam in regards to this.
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An Azure region contains
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two or more data centers and Azure Geo,
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is going to contain one or more Azure region,
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and your availability zones,
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which we talked about earlier,
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are located within a region,
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and they contain one or more data centers.
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Now, these data centers are special
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because they provide 99.99 percent up time,
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so you know that your data's almost 100 percent
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guaranteed to be available, and ready,
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and redundant, and that SLA means a contract,
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so you know that you can hold them to
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their word when they say almost 100 percent guaranteed.
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There are equipped with independent power, and cooling,
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and networking, unlike some others
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which may not have it, they may be shared.
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Again, if it doesn't specifically say that,
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there's no guarantee,
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so the fact that availability zones are
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explicitly saying that means that
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>> you can depend on that.
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>> The unique thing with
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availability zones is that they have
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to transfer the data and
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replicate it across multiple data centers.
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If one data center loses power,
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or maybe the server
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that your data is hosted on overheats,
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you know that your service is going to be
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automatically transferred over to
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another data center that is properly running,
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and typically you have two or three of these that
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are running at once so that
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someone is okay to host services
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until everything goes back to normal, 100 percent.
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Like I said, very,
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very good, very redundant.
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It's not available in all regions,
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so it's something to keep in mind.
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I did see that they are predominantly
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available in the US, European,
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and some Asian regions,
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but the Azure Cloud is growing.
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You may see that in Fall of 2021 or 2022,
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you may start to see that there
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are more availability zones.
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I honestly would not be surprised,
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so keep that in mind.
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That about wraps up this lecture.
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To summarize everything that we covered,
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we talked about how Geos contain one or more regions,
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regions contain two or more data centers,
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availability zones are unique physical locations
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within the Azure region,
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they contain two or more data centers and they provide
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high up time for a system and application deployments.
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Everybody, I hope this was helpful.
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If you have any questions,
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feel free to reach out to me.
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If not, I'll see you in the next lecture.
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