Learning Azure: A Brain Dump to My 2nd Brain#

I am still learning how to type and write from my head to my 2nd brain. Maybe—just maybe—one day I’ll want that chip in my brain so my ideas can pass seamlessly into the computer or wherever we’ll store memories and data in the future.

Will the singularity ever be reached? Maybe not. But maybe we’ll all become cyborgs with chips and robotic bodies. Will we even be human then? Who knows. What I do know is this: it’s officially 2025. I’ll be 31 this year, and that mid-life, third-life reflection is hitting me hard.

Anyway, let me download my human brain and understanding into this 2nd brain, starting with what I’ve learned about Azure.

Azure at a High Level#

Overall how I see Azure—and cloud platforms in general—can be broken down into two main concepts, as I’ve come to understand from the AZ-900:

  1. Compute: Think of CPU power and clock cycles—the processing behind all your services.
  2. Storage: Think databases or file storage—where all your data lives.

The main difference between cloud providers (Azure, AWS, & GCP) is how they name their services and manage resources. That said, I don’t have direct experience with AWS or GCP, but learning Azure has taught me a surprising amount about them. For example, I now see that an EC2 instance in AWS is like a Virtual Machine (VM) in Azure, and an S3 bucket is similar to Azure Blob Storage.

The more you dive into cloud platforms, the more patterns and similarities you recognize, even if you haven’t used them all. If you’re curious about comparing services, I highly recommend checking out ByteByteGo’s Cloud Services Cheat Sheet. It’s one of my favorite resources for infrastructure and architecture.

But we’re here to talk about Azure, so let’s dive deeper.

Beyond Compute and Storage#

Azure isn’t just about compute and storage. Here’s how I break it down further:

  • Governance and Hierarchy: Organizing and managing your resources effectively.
  • Networking: Connecting your resources to each other and external systems.
  • Identity and Security: Managing access, permissions, and who can do what.

Below is a summary of each of these concepts as I understand them in 2025. This isn’t a comprehensive guide—plenty of those exist online—but it’s my brain dump, and it’s where I’m starting.

Governance and Hierarchy#

At its core, Azure’s infrastructure is about delivering your services through interconnected networks of computers. But how is all of this organized?

Regions and Availability Zones#

Azure organizes its infrastructure into regions, which are geographic areas containing multiple data centers. Each region is composed of availability zones, which are physically separate and independently powered data centers. For example, East US2, the region I work with most often, has three availability zones.

When deploying resources, you choose a logical region, not a specific data center. The level of fault tolerance is up to you:

  • Deploying to a single region offers basic redundancy.
  • Spanning multiple regions increases resilience and scalability.

Currently, we only deploy to a single region, and it works great—until it doesn’t. One day, Azure had VNet issues in East US2, which brought some of our systems down. Now, we’re trying to balance the cost of spanning multiple regions against the cost of outages. There’s always a trade-off.

And so, we’ve talked about regions and the “resources” you can deploy, but what exactly is a resource?

Resources and Resource Groups#

A resource in Azure is any service or item you manage, such as a VM, database, or storage account. Organizing these resources efficiently is key, and that’s where resource groups come in. Think of them as folders that group related resources for an application or environment.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is the importance of naming conventions. Adding -{env_code} to the end of a resource name has saved me countless times. There have been moments when I’ve thought I was working in UAT or Test, only to realize I was in Prod during a gut check. This tiny detail at the end of a name is something I’ll take with me everywhere.

I could go into a whole lecture of how naming convention is equally as important if not more important than the resources you are selecting. Instead of diving into that complicated mess lets punt on that conversation and move it to another blog. For now the next logical question is: who manages these resource groups, and is there an easy way to manage them?

Spoiler Alert… The answer is yes.

How to Manage Who Gets to Manage#

Management Groups and Subscriptions
For larger organizations, Azure provides management groups to organize multiple subscriptions into a hierarchy. Subscriptions are tied to billing, quotas, and access control, while management groups help apply policies across multiple subscriptions.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Access is managed using RBAC, which lets you assign permissions at various levels:

  • Management Groups: For broad access across subscriptions.
  • Subscriptions: For managing all resources within a subscription.
  • Resource Groups: For grouping-related resources.
  • Individual Resources: For granular control.

This hierarchy ensures the right people have the right access without micromanaging every resource.

Reflecting on the Cloud#

The cloud has its pros and cons, but I can tell you this: I’ll never miss dealing with on-premises servers. The days of terrible networking setups or power outages are happily behind me. Azure and cloud platforms, in general, make scaling and managing resources so much simpler, even with their own challenges.

What’s Next?#

I planned to cover more topics in this post, but it’s already massive. Writing this has made me realize how much I’ve learned about Azure—it’s crazy to think that just two years ago, I knew nothing about it.

Look out for future posts on:

  • Compute
  • Storage
  • Networking
  • Identity and Security
  • How I Have Used Azure

As of January 18, 2025, I’m practicing for my next Azure certification: AZ-204. I’m committed to earning at least two more certifications this year, so stay tuned for more brain dumps after those.

If you’re just starting with Azure, my advice is simple: get your hands dirty. Reading is great, but doing is better. That’s the only way I’ve learned this stuff, and it’s how I keep growing.

Let me know what you’d like me to cover next!