Forem: Wilfred Andrew Delamy

What is Azure Resource Manager?

Wilfred Andrew Delamy — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:05:20 +0000

Before we can start creating resources in Microsoft Azure, one of the first concepts to understand is Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is the backbone of how resources in Azure are deployed, managed, and organized. Let's talk about it.

What is Azure Resource Manager (ARM)?

Azure Resource Manager is an orchestrator and management layer that sits between users and resource providers, enabling users to create, update, and delete resources in their Azure accounts.

Resource providers are services, such as storage or compute, that supply Azure resources.

Think of ARM like a remote control for a smart home. Just as a remote allows you to manage various functions like lighting, temperature, and security from one device, ARM acts as the control center, ensuring that all your resources, such as Virtual Machines (VMs), Storage Accounts, and Databases, are deployed and managed consistently and in an organized way.

ARM provides a unified way to interact with Azure resources, regardless of the tool or interface you use.

How Can You Access ARM?

Speaking of tools or interfaces, there are different ways a user can access and interact with ARM.

For beginners, the Azure Portal is the easiest entry point.

To get started with Azure, you can click to sign up for a free Azure trial account.

Once signed up, you can access the Azure Portal by navigating to the https://portal.azure.com URL and signing in with your Azure account credentials.

The Azure Portal offers a user-friendly, web-based interface that lets you visually manage your resources without delving into scripting or code.

Some Keywords

Azure Portal: a web-based User Interface (UI) for managing resources.
Azure Command Line Interface (CLI): a cross-platform command-line tool for scripting and automation.
Azure PowerShell: ideal for Windows administrators who prefer PowerShell scripting.
REST API: direct programmatic access for custom integrations.
Client SDKs: available in languages like .NET, Java, Python, and JavaScript for developers building applications that interact with Azure.

Benefits of Azure Resource Manager

Consistent Management
When you send a request through any Azure API, tool, or SDK, ARM receives it. It authenticates and authorizes the request before forwarding it to the appropriate Azure service. Because all requests are handled through the same API, you see consistent results and capabilities in all the different tools.

The following diagram shows the role that ARM plays during Azure requests:

Declarative Templates
You can use ARM templates to define your infrastructure as code. This makes deployments repeatable and predictable.

For instance, a simple ARM template to create a storage account might look like this:


{
  "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2019-04-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
  "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
  "resources": [
    {
      "type": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts",
      "apiVersion": "2019-04-01",
      "name": "examplestorageaccount",
      "location": "westus",
      "sku": {
        "name": "Standard_LRS"
      },
      "kind": "StorageV2",
      "properties": {}
    }
  ]
}

This template specifies a storage account named 'examplestorageaccount' with standard locally-redundant storage.

By using this template, you can ensure that identical configurations are quickly deployed across different environments.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
ARM integrates with Entra ID (formerly called Azure Active Directory) to provide fine-grained access control. Entra ID is Microsoft's identity and access management service that ensures secure, streamlined authentication and authorization across your Azure resources.
Tagging and Organization
You can apply tags to resources for better cost management and organization.
Dependency Management
ARM understands resource dependencies and deploys them in the correct order.

Management Scope in Azure

ARM organizes resources into four levels of management scope:

Management Groups Used to manage access, policies, and compliance across multiple subscriptions.
Subscriptions A logical container for resources, tied to billing and access control.
Resource Groups A grouping of related resources that share the same lifecycle. For example, all the resources for a web app can be in a single resource group.
Resources The individual services, such as VMs, storage accounts, and databases.

Visualizing the Hierarchy

Why Does ARM Matter?

Understanding ARM and its scope levels helps you design your Azure environment for scalability, security, and cost efficiency. Whether you're deploying a single app or managing an enterprise cloud, ARM is your foundation.

For instance, imagine a student working on a capstone project who needs cloud resources to host a web application and a database. They can use Azure Resource Manager to set up a resource group containing all the necessary components, such as a web server, storage accounts, and a database, under a single, organized framework. This approach ensures efficient management and cost tracking.

Similarly, a small business looking to manage its online store can use ARM to group resources by environment, such as development, testing, and production, ensuring consistent deployment practices and streamlined scaling as its business grows.

Final Thought

ARM is responsible for everything done in Azure. I hope this blog gave you an introduction.

In my next blog post, I will guide you through creating your first storage account. This process will involve navigating the Azure Portal, selecting the appropriate resource group, and configuring basic settings like the storage account name and location. This will ensure that even beginners can follow along and gain actionable guidance.

Introduction to Azure Storage

Wilfred Andrew Delamy — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:22:34 +0000

What is Azure Storage?

Azure Storage is Microsoft’s cloud-based solution for storing data securely, reliably, and at scale. It provides a range of services that handle everything from unstructured files to structured tables, enabling organizations to store, access, and manage their data seamlessly across the globe.

Think of it as a digital warehouse in the cloud that is flexible enough to store massive amounts of information, yet smart enough to deliver performance, security, and redundancy.

Benefits of Azure Storage

Scalability: Store petabytes of data without worrying about hardware limitations.
High Availability: Built-in redundancy ensures your data is always accessible, even during outages.
Security: Encryption, role-based access, and secure transfer options protect sensitive information.
Cost Efficiency: Pay only for what you use, with tiered pricing models to optimize costs.
Global Reach: Data centers worldwide allow you to store data close to your users for faster access.

Types of Azure Storage Service

Storage Account Settings

When creating an Azure Storage account, several key settings determine how your data is stored, accessed, and protected.

Subscription: The billing container that ties your storage account to your Azure plan.

Location: Choose the Azure region where your data physically resides. This impacts latency and compliance.

Performance:

Standard: HDD-based, cost-effective for general workloads.
Premium: SSD-based, optimized for low-latency, high-performance needs.

Redundancy: Azure Storage always stores at least three copies of your data to protect it from planned and unplanned events. Redundancy ensures that your storage account meets its availability and durability targets even in the face of failures.
Options include:

LRS (Locally Redundant Storage): Azure keeps three copies of your data in the same data center (single location). LRS is best for backups or test data, workloads where data can be recreated, and low-cost storage needs. Some limitations of LRS are: data is not protected against data center outages, and it has the lowest durability among the options (still extremely high by global standards).
ZRS (Zone Redundant Storage): Azure keeps three copies of your data across three different physical datacenters (Availability Zones) within the same region. ZRS is best for production workloads that need higher availability, protection against zone-level failures, and applications that require consistent read/write access even if one AZ is down. Some limitations include the data being limited to one region and not protecting against complete regional outages.
GRS (Geo-Redundant Storage): Azure keeps three copies of your data in the primary region and three synchronous copies in the paired secondary region (total of 6 copies). GRS is best for disaster recovery scenarios, ensuring durability even if the entire primary region fails, and for applications where write access doesn't need to fail over automatically. Some limitations are that the secondary region is not readable, and failover is manual (you trigger it during a disaster).
RA-GRS (Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage): Azure makes 6 copies of your data as GRS, but you can read from the secondary region anytime. It is best for applications that need global read distribution, analytics reading from the secondary region and extra resiliency for read-heavy workloads. Some of its limitations are: writes still go only to the primary region, and the secondary region still requires manual failover for write access.

Summary for Redundancy

LRS → Basic local protection
ZRS → Multi–data-center protection within one region
GRS → Protection across regions
RA-GRS → GRS + read access to the secondary region

Access Tier:

Hot tier: Frequently accessed and modified data. The Hot tier has the highest storage costs, but the lowest access costs.
Cool tier: Infrequently accessed or modified data that needs to be retrieved quickly. Microsoft recommends that data in the cool tier be stored for at least 30 days. The cool tier has lower storage costs but higher access costs than the hot tier.
Cold tier - rarely accessed or modified data that still requires fast retrieval. Microsoft recommends that data in the cold tier be stored for at least 90 days. The cold tier has lower storage costs but higher access costs than the cool tier.
Archive tier: Rarely accessed data, lowest cost, but retrieval takes time. Microsoft recommends that data in the archive tier be stored for at least 180 days.
Smart tier - Smart tier automatically moves your data between the hot, cool, and cold access tiers based on usage patterns, optimizing your costs for these access tiers automatically.

Secure Transfer Required: Enforces HTTPS connections to protect data in transit.
Virtual Networks: Restrict access to your storage account by integrating with Azure VNets, ensuring only trusted resources can connect.

Final Thoughts

Azure Storage is more than just a cloud hard drive. It is a powerful storage that supports modern applications, analytics, and enterprise workloads. By understanding its services and settings, organizations can design storage solutions that are secure, scalable, and cost-effective.

Whether you’re storing terabytes of video, managing IoT sensor data, or simply migrating shared drives to the cloud, Azure Storage has a tailored option for you.

Question of the Day:

If you had to choose just one Azure Storage service to power a global application with unpredictable traffic and diverse data types, i.e. Blog, File Share, Queue, or Table, which would you pick and why?

Azure Global Infrastructure

Wilfred Andrew Delamy — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 07:21:23 +0000

If you’re new to Microsoft Azure, one of the first questions you might ask is: “Where does my data actually live?”

Azure is a massive global cloud platform, and behind every service you use is a physical infrastructure carefully designed for reliability, performance, and compliance. In this guide, we’ll break everything down step by step from the smallest server all the way up to Azure geographies using simple, beginner-friendly language.

From the Ground Up: How Azure Is Built

Servers: The Building Blocks of the Cloud
At the heart of cloud computing is the server, a powerful computer that stores data, runs applications, and processes information. Azure uses millions of servers worldwide.
A server is:

Powerful
Always online
Built to handle heavy workloads These servers live inside secure facilities called data centers.

Data Centers: Where the Cloud Lives
A data center is like a fortress for technology. It’s packed with servers, networking equipment, cooling systems, and backup power. Microsoft currently operates 400+ data centers (as of this writing) across the globe, forming the backbone of Azure.
Inside each data center, servers are organized into:

Racks
Clusters
Server farms But Azure doesn’t just store servers, it organizes them to ensure your apps stay available even if something goes wrong.

Ensuring Reliability: Fault and Update Domains

Fault Domains
Think of a fault domain as a safety zone. It’s a group of servers that share the same power source and network switch. If one fails, only that domain is affected.
Purpose: Protects your application from hardware failures.

Update Domains
Azure regularly performs maintenance like updates and patches. With update domains, some servers are updated while others stay online.
Purpose: Protects your application during maintenance.

Together, fault domains and update domains keep your workloads running smoothly.

Availability Zones
Some Azure regions offer Availability Zones (AZ). An AZ has three or more physically separate locations within a single region. Each zone has its own power, cooling, and networking.
If one zone fails:

The others stay fully operational
Your apps keep running (if designed for zone redundancy) This protects against large-scale events like fires or power outages.

Azure Region
An Azure region is a set of data centers located in a specific geographical area. Azure has 70+ regions worldwide (as of this writing).
Examples include:

East US
Canada Central
West Europe
Japan East

Regions let you choose where your data is stored based on:

Performance (closer = faster)
Data residency laws
Compliance requirements

Region Pairs
Every Azure region is paired with another in the same geography. These region pairs provide resilience and serve as a built-in disaster recovery.

Examples:
Canada Central ↔ Canada East
East US ↔ West US
UK South ↔ UK West

Key benefits:

Updates happen in one region at a time
Data stays within the same geography
Faster recovery during disasters

Fun fact: Region pairs are usually about a minimum of 300 miles (483 km) apart to reduce the risk of both being affected by the same natural disaster.

Azure Geographies
An Azure Geography is the largest organizational boundary in Azure. It includes two or more regions that meet specific compliance and residency laws.
Examples of Azure Geographies:

Africa
Canada
United States
Europe
Brazil
Asia
Australia
United Kingdom
Japan
India

Azure Geographies ensure organizations meet local regulations and keep data within legal jurisdictions.

Putting It All Together

Here’s the hierarchy from smallest to largest:

Server
Rack
Data Center
Availability Zone
Region
Region Pair
Geography

This layered design gives Azure:

High availability
Low latency
Strong disaster recovery
Global coverage
Compliance with regional laws

Fun Facts

Latency Matters: Choose regions closest to your users for better performance.
Data Residency Requirements: Industries like healthcare and finance often require data to stay within a country.
Sovereign Clouds: Azure offers specialized environments such as:

Azure Government (US)
Azure China

These are designed for customers with strict regulatory needs.

Final Thoughts

Azure’s global infrastructure is built for resilience, performance, and compliance. By understanding how servers, domains, zones, regions, region pairs, and geographies fit together, you’ll be better prepared to design reliable cloud solutions. Whether you’re studying for a Microsoft certification or just starting your cloud journey, this foundation will serve you well.

Pro Tip: If you’re a beginner, start by exploring the Azure region closest to you. It is the easiest way to see how geography impacts performance and compliance.

Virtualization vs Cloud Computing: What You Need to Know

Wilfred Andrew Delamy — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:24:08 +0000

Every complex technology has underlying fundamentals that are crucial to know. An understanding of the fundamentals makes the seemingly complex tech simple.

Now, let’s delve into the fascinating world of cloud computing. At its core, it’s all about servers (essentially, supercharged computers) and virtualization over the internet.

Let’s start with a computer. A computer is an electronic device that has many parts, namely:

Central Processing Unit (CPU)
Random Access Memory (RAM)
Storage Drive
Motherboard

As a computer user (end-user), you cannot interact directly with the various hardware components. For example, compose an email. To enable the interaction, you will need an Operating System (OS).

An OS is software that enables interoperability between the end user and a computer’s hardware components. You may need additional software, such as Microsoft Outlook, to compose the email.

In an enterprise environment, servers (powerful computers) are used to deploy and provide various services to various end-users (staff and clients). Purchasing multiple servers can quickly become expensive. How, then, are companies able to keep down the cost of buying additional servers while providing all the services to staff and clients? Aha, virtualization.

Virtualization is a technology that allows a single physical server to act as multiple virtual servers. These virtual servers, also known as virtual machines (VMs), are like independent computers with their own operating system and application software. In this setup, the physical computer that hosts the virtualization software is the ‘Host’, and the VMs are the ‘Guests’.

Speaking of a hypervisor, there are two types: Type 1 and Type 2.

A Type 1 Hypervisor, also known as a bare-metal hypervisor, runs directly on the Host’s hardware to control the hardware and manage guest operating systems.

In contrast, a Type 2 Hypervisor, also known as a hosted hypervisor, runs on the Host’s operating system. After all, it runs on a host (physical computer) operating system as a software application.

Examples of Type 1 Hypervisors include Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere by Broadcom, Proxmox, Citrix Hypervisor, KVM, Nutanix AHV, and Xen Project.

Examples of Type 2 Hypervisors include Oracle VirtualBox, VMware Workstation by Broadcom, Parallel Desktop, and QEMU.

Cloud Computing, which utilizes Type 1 Hypervisor service to provide cloud services, is a cost-effective solution. It offers the on-demand delivery of Information Technology (IT) resources (compute, storage, database, networking) over the internet, making it a financially sound choice for businesses.

Like any domain, cloud computing has jargon that can easily become overwhelming. Below are a few terms used in cloud computing.

Scalability in cloud computing is the ability to quickly and easily increase (grow) or decrease (shrink) the size or power of a cloud resource based on demand.

There are two types of Scalability: Vertical Scaling and Horizontal Scaling.

Vertical Scaling allows you to increase the size of a resource (scaling up) or decrease its size (scaling down). An example, a VM that was created for a web server with 32GB of RAM, based on the high demand on the website, the size of the memory is scaled up to 64GB and when the demand drops, the size is decreased (scaled down) to 32GB.

Horizontal Scaling, on the other hand, allows either adding more resources (scaling out) to the existing resources or removing some of them (scaling in). Coming back to our web server example, scaling out will involve adding additional physical RAM: moving from a single 64GB RAM module to five 64GB modules. When demand for physical RAM decreases, scaling down means reducing the number from five to one.

In summary, Scalability is the ability of a system to scale, whether by allocating (adding) or deallocating (removing) resources.

Elasticity in cloud computing is the ability of a cloud system to automatically scale computing resources like processing power, memory, and storage up or down in real-time to meet fluctuating demands.

Elasticity allows businesses to precisely match resource allocation to demand, helping prevent both overpaying for unused capacity and under-resourcing during peak hours.

In summary, Elasticity is a dynamic, cost-effective way to handle unpredictable workloads for applications such as web services, data processing, and e-commerce.

Agility in cloud computing is the ability to quickly adapt and respond to changing business needs by rapidly allocating (provisioning) and deallocating (deprovisioning) cloud resources based on users’ demands.
High Availability in cloud computing is when services remain accessible and operational with minimal downtime, typically aiming for nearly 100% uptime. Uptime is achieved through redundancy, load balancing, and failover.

High Availability looks at the time a service was available (uptime) to users and other services, versus when it wasn’t (downtime). In this case, downtime refers to planned occurrences, such as system downtime for patching or updates, or unplanned occurrences, such as system failures.

You can calculate Availability by using the formula: Availability = Uptime/(Uptime + Downtime).

There are four availability percentages in cloud computing. These percentages show how long a service has downtime in a year, a month, or a day. For example,

99% means a service is unavailable for 3.65 days (per year), 7.2 hours (per month), or 14.4 minutes (per day)
99.9% means a service is unavailable for 8.76 hours (per year), 43.8 minutes (per month), or 1.44 minutes (per day)
99.99% means a service is unavailable for 52.6 minutes (per year), 4.38 minutes (per month) or 8.64 seconds (per day)
99.999% means a service is unavailable for 5.26 minutes (per year), 26.3 seconds (per month) or 0.86 seconds (per day)

Fault Tolerance in cloud computing is the ability of a system to continue to operate without interruption despite the failure of one or more of its components. Fault Tolerance is possible (achievable) through redundancy, replication, failover and backups. These technologies ensure the continuity of cloud resources even in the event of hardware failures, software bugs, or network outages.

In summary, Fault Tolerance in cloud computing is a key feature that ensures the continuous operation of systems. It is the ability of a system to remain operational despite component and service failures, providing users with a sense of security and reliability.

Disaster Recovery: What is a disaster? A disaster is a severe disruption of services caused by natural factors (earthquakes, storms, or power grid failures) or human-induced factors.

In cloud computing, disaster recovery is the technical plan that cloud service providers use to replicate, back up, and restore customers’ cloud resources (applications, data, and IT infrastructure) after a disruptive event.

In summary, disaster recovery is the ability to recover from an event that has disrupted service (a disaster).

Global Reach: In cloud computing, Global Reach is the ability to deploy applications and services worldwide, allowing businesses to serve a global customer base with low latency and high performance by leveraging a provider’s extensive network of data centres, availability zones, and edge locations.

As of the time of writing this post, the AWS Global Infrastructure says that the AWS Cloud spans 120 Availability Zones within 38 Geographic Regions, with announced plans for 10 more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Chile, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Microsoft Azure currently spans 70 regions, 400+ data centers, 126 operational availability zones, and 37 more availability zones under development.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has 127 active availability zones, with 27 more under development, spread across 42 active regions worldwide, with 11 more planned or under development.

Conclusion
Cloud Computing is here to stay. It is a matter of time before there are more regions and availability zones globally. What a perfect time to learn about and get into cloud computing.

Are you working in cloud computing or thinking about learning it? Let me know in the comments down below.