Hello everybody,

today I want to write few words about Azure Infrastructure. 

Big picture

You can use Azure services in ~140 countries. And Microsoft does it's best to enalrge geography of their earnings, but if you are citizen of some countries you may be missing of usage of Azure.

For now we can consider as Azure something with Microsoft products. It can be: XBox, Office 365, Bing, hotmail, etc ( full list of services consists of ~200 services. ). 

The best idea about usage of Azure is to have something, which is closest to your target auditorium. 

If your target auditorium is located in your country, you may need to go to Azure Spped Test web site. Below goes screenshot:

As you can see from the picture, for me the best option in for Data center may be data center which is located in West Europe. 

But unfortunately, life is not always easy.

One facet of usage of Azure is Data center, and another facet of it is availability of service on Data server.

Next part of checking of infrastructure is checking of availablity of services. You can do it here:

Let's say that my target auditorium will need heavy usage of Mobile Engagement service. Then at azure services and regions I'll see, that I'll need for this purpose data center at Central us or North Europe

and unfortunately I'll not be able to use Mobile Engagement at West Europe servers.

Azure server

Next part of of Azure is environment, where Azure servers live. At picture before you can see modular blade server. It has many departments for blade servers. As usually one 

blade server is used for one of two kinds of activity: storage or compute.

Also you may be curious, what is special with switch at picture? One of the main features of that switch is fact that special switch is connected to some kind of aggregation

switches, that ensures conectivity between racks. 

Fabric controller.

I was always curious what is fabric controller. Fabric controller is another special server which can have following responsibilities:

• Providing VM
• Fixing failed VM
• Rehydrate VM
• Lifecycle management of VMs

The next level of hierarchy is claster. I believe that statement one picture is better then thousand words:

Just with one clarification: 20 racks group together make a stamp or cluster.