Azure cloud is backed up by large data centers interconnected into a single large network. The data centers are grouped together based on their physical proximity to Azure regions. For example, a couple of data centers in Western Europe together are available to Azure users as the West Europe region. Users cannot control which data center that is, the exact data center for their deployment. They can inform Azure about the region and Azure will pick an appropriate data center.

Choosing an appropriate region is an important architectural decision as it affects the following:

• Availability of resources
• Data and privacy compliance
• Performance of applications
• Cost of running applications

A virtual network should be thought of as a physical LAN network in your office or home. Conceptually, they both are the same, although the Azure virtual network is implemented as a software-defined network backed up by a giant physical network infrastructure.

A virtual network is required for hosting a virtual machine. They provide a secure communication mechanism between Azure resources to connect to each other. They provide an internal IP address to them, access, and connectivity to other resources including virtual machines on the same virtual network, routing of requests, and connectivity to other networks.

A virtual network is contained within a resource group and is hosted within a region, for example, West Europe. Virtual network cannot span multiple regions, but it can span all data centers with a region. For connectivity across regions, virtual networks...

Azure provides durable, highly available, and scalable storage solutions through storage services.

Storage is used for persisting data for long-term needs. Azure storage is available through the internet from almost every programming language.

Storage has two categories of storage accounts:

• A standard storage performance tier that allows you to store tables, queues, files, blobs, and Azure virtual machine disks.
• A premium storage performance tier supporting Azure virtual machine disks at the time of writing. Premium storage provides higher performance and IOPS compared to standard general storage. Premium storage is currently available as data disks for virtual machines are backed up by SSD&apos...

Design patterns are proven solutions to known design problems. They are reusable solutions that can be applied to problems. They are not reusable codes or designs that can be incorporated as is within a solution. They are documented descriptions and guidance to solve a problem. The problem might manifest itself in a different context and design patterns can help solve them. Azure provides numerous services with each service providing a specific feature and capability. Using these services is straightforward, but creating solutions weaving multiple services can be a challenge. Moreover, achieving high availability, super-scalability, reliability, performance, and security for a solution is not a menial task. Azure design patterns provide ready solutions to these problems and provide solutions that can be tailor-made to individual solutions. They help in making...

There are numerous services available on Azure and most can be combined to create real solutions. It was difficult to write about design patterns in 20 pages where there are hundreds of services and multiple ways to bring them together. This chapter explained the three most important services from Azure--regions, storage, and networks. They almost form the backbone of every solution deployed on any cloud. This chapter provided details about these services and how their configuration and provisioning can affect design decisions. The important considerations for both storage and networks were detailed in this chapter. Both networks and storage provide lots of choices and it is important to choose an appropriate configuration based on requirement. Finally, some of the important design patterns related to messaging such as competing consumers, priority queues, and load leveling...