Unit 1 of 4
Core Architectural Components
18 min
+200 points
Learning objectives
When you finish this unit, you will be able to:
- Describe Azure regions, region pairs, and sovereign regions.
- Describe availability zones.
- Describe Azure datacenters.
- Describe Azure resources and resource groups.
- Describe subscriptions.
- Describe management groups.
- Describe the hierarchy of resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups.
Azure core architecture
Azure is organized in a hierarchy that helps you manage resources, billing, and governance at scale.
Geography and resilience
- Regions: geographic areas containing one or more datacenters.
- Region pairs: paired regions for disaster recovery and data residency.
- Sovereign regions: isolated regions for specific compliance requirements (e.g. government clouds).
- Availability zones: physically separate datacenters within a region for high availability.
Resource organization
- Resources: individual service instances (VMs, storage accounts, etc.).
- Resource groups: containers that hold related resources for a solution.
- Subscriptions: billing and access boundary for resources.
- Management groups: containers for organizing multiple subscriptions.
Hierarchy
Management groups
└── Subscriptions
└── Resource groups
└── Resources
Exam focus: understand how regions, zones, subscriptions, and resource groups relate, and when to use each level of the hierarchy.