Inside Microsoft's Azure data center architecture

In the following video, as presented recently at Microsoft Ignite, the annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft, Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, instructs attendees on how Microsoft Azure's data center architecture "enables intelligent, modern, and innovative applications at scale in the cloud, on-premises, and on the edge."

Of the platform, the company notes that "Microsoft Azure has achieved massive, global scale, with more than 50 announced regions consisting of over 100 data centers, and it is growing fast. [The architecture] delivers the promise of cloud computing, including high-availability, extreme performance, and security, by custom designing software and hardware to work best together," adds the video's summary.  

In the video, Russinovich takes Ignite attendees on a tour of Azure's data center architecture and implementation innovations, describing everything from Azure's global infrastructure, to how Microsoft enables large-scale enterprise scenarios in both cloud and edge implementations. 

In a recent Microsoft Azure blog entitled, Advancing no-impact and low-impact maintenance technologies, Russinovich highlights Microsoft initiatives underway to keep improving the cloud data center platform's availability, including its investments in "no-impact and low-impact update technologies including hot patching, memory-preserving maintenance, and live migration."

As described by Microsoft's Russinovich: 

We regularly update Azure host infrastructure to improve the reliability, performance, and security of the platform. While the purposes of these ‘maintenance’ updates vary, they typically involve updating software components in the hosting environment or decommissioning hardware. If we go back five years, the only way to apply some of these updates was by fully rebooting the entire host. This approach took customer virtual machines (VMs) down for minutes at a time. Since then, we have invested in a variety of technologies to minimize customer impact when updating the fleet.  

Today, the vast majority of updates to the host operating system are deployed in place with absolute transparency and zero customer impact using hot patching. In infrequent cases in which the update cannot be hot patched, we typically utilize low-impact memory preserving update technologies to roll out the update. Even with these technologies, there are still other rare cases in which we need to do more impactful maintenance (including evacuating faulty hardware or decommissioning old hardware). In such cases, we use a combination of live migration, in-VM notifications, and planned maintenance providing customer controls. 

Read the full blog.