What is guaranteed in an Azure Service Level Agreement (SLA for Virtual Machines)
|
Virtual Machines (VM) are the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offered by Azure. You can deploy VM in Azure with different Operating Systems (Windows Server, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Desktop) and you don’t need to manage the underlying physical server. Show
Why are we concerned about Azure Virtual Machine at the era of Serverless services such as Azure Function or fully managed service as App Service? In case distributed systems with micro-services like architecture, App Service or Azure Function don’t give us container orchestrator functionality. Instead, a better choice will be AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service). AKS simplifies the deployment, the management and the operations of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling and management. Azure Kubernetes Service makes it quick and easy to deploy and manage containerized applications without container orchestration expertise. When setting up an AKS cluster, the AKS nodes will basically be running on Azure Virtual Machine. Because of AKS’s growing popularity, I think it’s important to understand the SLA (Service Level Agreement) provided for the VMs which will then affect the SLA of your application when hosted via AKS. In Azure, there are different SLAs for Virtual Machine.
Availability Set and Availability Zones configurations allow reducing as much as possible the VM’s downtime. A VM’s downtime can be related to reboots (planned or unplanned to patch installation) or incidents such as power supply issues, network issues, storage issues etc. Let’s see in more details Availability Set and Availability Zones. Availability Sets — 99.95% SLAAzure configures Availability sets VMs in “Fault Domains” and “Update Domains”. A fault domain is essentially a rack of servers and each of them is connected to a different network and power supply. Instead, an update domain is a logical unit of deployment. The fault domain is useful to mitigate hardware failures and the updated domain to mitigate downtime during VM’s maintenance. For each region, Azure provides a maximum of 3 fault domains and a maximum of 20 update domains. How Azure distributes the VMs inside an Availability Set? Let’s assume we want to deploy our application in Availability Sets of 2 VMs, one VM will be deployed against the fault domain 0, the other one inside fault domain 1. Each VM will also be assigned to a different update domain. Let’s see what happens in the case of a hardware failure and a reboot due to VM maintenance from Microsoft. Hardware failure — If there is an issue with the hardware from fault domain 0, it will only impact that domain and our application will still be running because there is a replica VM running in fault domain 1. VM reboot — If Microsoft needs to reboot the VMs to do a security patch installation, they reboot one update domain at a time. So they reboot all the VMs under updated domain 0, when they are all up and running, they will then reboot the VMs under Update domain 1 and so on. So with the combination of 3 fault domains and 20 update domains, Microsoft tries to reduce as much as possible the downtime due to hardware failures or security patch installation. With Availability Zones, we can deploy our VMs across multiple data-center of the same region. For example, if we have our application running 3 VMs, we can decide to deploy one VM in zone 1, one in zone 2 and another in zone 3. In this way, we make our application more reliable if one of the data-center goes down. Availability Zones can be used to provide a higher level of availability to an application deployed in AKS, where the clusters can be distributed across availability zones. When the cluster components are distributed across multiple zones, your AKS cluster is able to tolerate failure in one of those zones. In this way, our applications and management operations continue to be available even if one entire datacentre has a problem. Azure SLA is a cloud service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees the availability, performance, and security of your applications and services. Azure SLA guarantees the level of service you expect, no matter what. Azure SLA is based on the following three key metrics: Percentage of time your application is up and running. Number of service interruptions per hour. Total number of minutes your application is down. Azure SLA provides a level of service that is highly reliable. Azure SLA guarantees that your application will be available 99.9% of the time. PRO TIP: Azure SLA is a cloud computing platform that provides users with a 99.95% uptime guarantee. However, Azure SLA does not apply to all services and features. Additionally, Azure SLA does not cover user-created content or code. Azure SLA also guarantees that your application will experience no more than 1 service interruption per hour. Finally, Azure SLA guarantees that your application will be available for a total of 1,000 minutes in a 24-hour period. Azure SLA is a great way to ensure that your applications are always up and running, and that you are not experiencing any unexpected outages. Azure SLA can help you to avoid costly outages, and it can also help you to maintain a high level of reliability for your applications. 5 Related Question Answers FoundWhat is Azure IAM?Azure IAM is a cloud-based identity and access management service that gives you control over who can access your applications, data, and resources. It helps you secure access to your applications by providing a single sign-on experience, enforcing access policies, and managing authentication and authorization credentials. Azure IAM lets you manage access to your applications using a variety of mechanisms, including Windows, Mac, and Linux authentication; OpenID Connect authentication; and SAML authentication. What exactly is Microsoft Azure?Microsoft Azure is a platform as a service that provides a variety of compute, storage, and networking services. Azure is designed to make it easy for organizations of all sizes to build, deploy, and manage applications. Azure provides a variety of features, such as virtual machines, storage, networking, and application services. What is Microsoft Azure?Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and a suite of related services. Azure provides a broad range of features, including compute, storage, networking, analytics, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Azure is marketed as a platform for hosting and managing applications and services, with a focus on developer productivity. What is Azure in simple terms?Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides scalable, reliable, and affordable cloud infrastructure services. It provides a platform for developing, testing, and deploying software applications and services. Azure also provides a range of features such as storage, compute, networking, and immigration services. What is a Bentley Azure?Bentley Azure is a luxurious and powerful car made by Bentley. It is the most expensive car in the world. It has a price tag of $294,000. What is guaranteed in Azure Service Level Agreement SLA )?We guarantee that Azure Firewall will be available at least 99.95% of the time, when deployed within a single Availability Zone. We guarantee that Azure Firewall will be available at least 99.99% of the time, when deployed within two or more Availability Zones in the same Azure region.
What is guaranteed in an Azure Service Level Agreement for VM?The Windows Azure Service Level Agreement ensures that Microsoft guarantees at least 99.95% availability when deploying two or more role instances in different error and upgrade domains.
What is guaranteed in an SLA for Virtual Machine?SLA for Virtual Machines
For all Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set, we guarantee you will have Virtual Machine Connectivity to at least one instance at least 99.95% of the time.
What is guaranteed in an Azure service level agreement SLA for virtual machines Mcq?What is guaranteed in an Azure Service Level Agreement (SLA) for virtual machines? The SLA for virtual machines guarantees 'uptime'.
|
