A good understanding of the architecture of the Microsoft Azure platform is important to understand what is going on "under the hood". This will help us in the design of our virtual infrastructure running on Azure hosts, stored on Azure Storage, and connected by Azure Virtual Networks. It will also help us to understand what kind of availability we need to create for applications running in Azure.
Microsoft Azure is available in many data centers located in many continents. Each datacenter also houses other Microsoft online services besides Microsoft Azure services, such as Office 365, Bing, Xbox Live, and so on. Actually, many Microsoft cloud services are hosted on Azure. The average Microsoft datacenter is about 7 to 10 times the size of a football field. Each datacenter is home to thousands of servers and many petabytes of storage. The maximum capacity of an Azure datacenter is around 100,000 servers.
Data centers are grouped...