Microsoft Azure instantly stands out as one of the most popular public and private cloud platforms used right now. Azure services are used by countless individuals and businesses from all around the world but are you aware of how they actually work.
Azure is great because it uses virtualization, which is a technology that makes a difference. It actively separates close coupling present between the server or CPU and the operating system through the use of hypervisor, which is an abstraction layer.
A hypervisor emulates a server or computer’s functions and even the CPU while creating a virtual machine. With Azure, you can run many virtual machines with every single one of them being able to run a compatible operating system, like Linux or Windows.
Microsoft Azure is successful because it utilizes virtualization technology in a very smart way. This allows it to operate systems at massive scales, creating huge data centers for large corporations.
A very big advantage of Azure is that a cloud environment can be set up to become a number of data centers or physical servers, each with virtualized hardware. You can use one cloud account to set up servers for many clients.
Azure Architecture
To better understand the system, let us think about a data center and its hardware architecture. There is always a number of servers that are put in racks. One rack includes Blade servers and there is a network switch responsible for network connectivity together with a PDU (power distribution unit) for power supply. Racks can be grouped together so a larger unit is in place, which is known as a cluster.
In every server, there is a hypervisor that can run many virtual machines. The network switch offers server connectivity, with each server running Fabric Controller, which is a special software program. Every Fabric Controller is linked to an orchestrator, which is another software program.
The orchestrator is important because it manages what happens in Microsoft Azure. This includes user request responses. An orchestrator monitors server maintenance, assigns services, and in the event that an error appears, it can return the server to a normal working state. All Fabric Controller instances are connected to other servers that run the orchestration software but in the cloud. This is commonly referred to as front-end and hosts web services, like the Azure internal databases that are used by the cloud to carry out functions.
As an example, the front-end can host services controlling client requests so that Microsoft Azure can allocate resources. Examples of what can be requested include virtual machines, services, and virtual networks. The front-end is responsible to validate users and verify whether or not they are authorized. When this is the case, a database is accessed so that a server rack that has the right capacity is found. The last step is done by the Fabric Controller as it assigns resources.
Requests are made by the user by using a web API from the Orchestrator. Numerous tools can be used to call on the web API, including the user interface of Azure Portal. Azure Service Fabric is an extra interesting advanced service that can be used, but this is optional.
Conclusions
To sum up, Microsoft Azure is a huge collection of network hardware and servers, used in a combination with distributed applications that can orchestrate configurations, virtualize hardware and software. The orchestration in Azure is very efficient and allows the users to easily update hardware and maintain it. It is Azure that takes care of practically everything while it runs in the background. On the whole, using this option is something that is beneficial especially for data centers but can be utilized with great results in many other server-related settings.
