AZ-304: Microsoft Azure Architect Design

Azure Files provides a cloud-based file share for storing and sharing files to applications. Whether it’s an application hosted in Azure App Service, an Azure VM, or an on-premises app, Azure Files can store and share file access between one or more applications and systems in a secure and failure-resilient manner.

Learn how using Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Cosmos DB – or a combination of them – for your business scenario is the best way to get the most performant solution.

Create an Azure Storage account with the correct options for your business needs.

Create a simple application and add configuration, client library references, and code to connect it to Azure Storage.

Learn how Azure Storage provides multilayered security to protect your data. Find out how to use access keys, to secure networks, and to use Advanced Threat Protection to proactively monitor your system.

In this module, you learn how to make your application storage highly available by ensuring that you can fail over resources if there’s an Azure region failure.

Azure provides a variety of disk storage options for virtual machine workloads. Identify the features of capabilities of each type to ensure your application performs optimally.

Discover the tools available to detect and correct problems with your Azure Storage to enable your cloud storage infrastructure to operate at peak performance.

Azure Storage Explorer allows you to quickly view all the storage services under your account and navigate, read, and edit data stored in those services through a user-friendly graphical interface.

Learn about the different services that are available in Azure Compute.

Review the Azure compute services and explore how they can solve common business needs.

Learn how to use the cross-platform Azure CLI to create, start, stop, and perform other management tasks related to virtual machines in Azure.

Discover the services and tools available to automate the deployment and configuration of your Azure infrastructure.

Learn how Resource Manager templates express your deployments as code, enabling you to deploy faster and more reliably.

Standardize and automate your virtual machine deployments to minimize manual configuration, variance, and errors.

Enable your application to automatically adjust to changes in load while minimizing costs with virtual machine scale sets.

Microsoft Azure provides several different ways to host and execute code or workflows without using Virtual Machines (VMs) including Azure Functions, Microsoft Flow, Azure Logic Apps, and Azure WebJobs. In this module, you will learn about these technologies and how to choose the right one for a given scenario.

Discover the services available on Azure for your high-performance computing workloads.

Azure Batch is an Azure service that enables you to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) applications efficiently in the cloud. There’s no need to manage or configure infrastructure. Just schedule the job, allocate the resources you need, and let Batch take care of the rest.

Combine multiple Azure Functions apps into a unified interface by importing them into a single Azure API Management instance.

Use API management to control who uses your APIs, to enforce usage policies, and to present a professional front-end to developers using the API.

API Management policies are configurable modules that you can add to APIs to change
their behaviors. Policies can do things like cache responses, transform documents and values,
call webhooks for notification or audit purposes, and retry requests after transient
failures. This module will use policies to enable caching in order to improve API performance
under load.

Protect your back-end APIs from information exposure and implement throttling to prevent resource exhaustion with policies in Azure API Management.

Discover how to protect your APIs from unauthorized use with API keys and client certificate authentication.

Use monitoring services on Azure to bring operational excellence to your applications and infrastructure.

Learn about governance and management in Azure services.

Use Azure Resource Manager to organize resources, enforce standards, and protect critical assets from deletion.

Use Azure Monitor logs to extract valuable information about your infrastructure from log data.

Respond to incidents and activities in your infrastructure through alerting capabilities in Azure Monitor.

Learn how to access policies, resource locks, and tags, as well as how Azure services such as Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints can help you build a comprehensive cloud governance strategy.

Automate a task for a Web App that should run in the background without affecting the performance of the Web App.

Use Azure Cache for Redis to store frequently accessed data. Learn how to create transactions, manage memory, and use the cache-aside pattern.

Package a web app so that it can be deployed as a Docker image and run from an Azure Container Instance.

Azure Container Registry is a managed Docker registry service based on the open-source Docker Registry 2.0. Container Registry is private, hosted in Azure, and allows you to build, store, and manage images for all types of container deployments. Learn how to build and store container images with Azure Container Registry.

Learn how to run containerized apps using Docker containers with Azure Container Instances (ACI).

Create a Docker image and store it in a repository in Azure Container Registry. Use Azure App Service to deploy a web application based on the Docker image. Configure continuous deployment for the web app by using a webhook that monitors the Docker image for changes.

Determine the types of business problems that can be solved using Azure Kubernetes Service. Describe the benefits of container orchestration with features like deployment management, automatic updates, and self-healing.

Azure App Service enables you to build and host web applications in the programming language of your choice without managing infrastructure. Learn how to create a website through the hosted web app platform in Azure App Service.

Plan and implement the migration of relational data from SQL Server to Azure SQL Database. Select the appropriate migration strategy for your database, and then use Data Migration Assistant to do the assessment and the migration.

Learn how to create an Azure Cosmos DB account, database, and container built to scale as your application grows.

Distribute your data globally with Azure Cosmos DB

Learn how to add data to your database and query NoSQL data in Azure Cosmos DB.

Learn about the database services that are available on Microsoft Azure, such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, as well as big data and analytics.

Learn how to create a data warehouse in Azure Synapse Analytics in minutes to take advantage of massively parallel processing (MPP) and run complex queries at petabyte scale quickly.

Load petabytes of data into an Azure Synapse Analytics database in minutes by using PolyBase.

Use the Azure Portal and Cloud Shell to provision, connect, and manage Azure SQL databases.

SQL elastic pools allow you to manage performance and cost for a collection of SQL databases.

Create a database on Azure SQL Database to store data for an application, and create an ASP.NET application to query data from the database.

In this module, we’ll explore the benefits of Azure data storage versus on-premises storage.

Minimize the time and resources required to migrate your on-premises environment to Azure. Assess your current systems with Azure Migrate, and migrate them with Azure Site Recovery and Azure Database Migration Service.

Provide disaster recovery for your on-premises infrastructure by managing and orchestrating replication, failover, and failback of VMware virtual machines, Hyper-V virtual machines, and physical servers with Azure Site Recovery.

Provide disaster recovery for your Azure infrastructure by managing and orchestrating replication, failover, and failback of Azure virtual machines with Azure Site Recovery.

Use Azure Backup to help protect the data for on-premises servers, virtual machines, virtualized workloads, SQL Server, Azure Files, and more.

Protect the data in your Azure SQL database and recover from data loss or corruption with backup and restore.

Respond to periods of high activity by incrementally adding resources, and then removing these resources when activity drops, to reduce costs.

Build an application that spans multiple geographic locations for high availability and resiliency.

Enable your application to automatically adjust to changes in load while minimizing costs with virtual machine scale sets.

Respond to periods of increased activity by incrementally increasing the resources available and then, to reduce costs, decreasing these resources when activity drops.

Build a serverless application architecture, automate your operations, and integrate applications by handling Azure events with Event Grid.

Securely expose services that run in your on-premises network to clients in the cloud, without having to open a port on your firewall or make intrusive changes to your corporate network infrastructure.

Define a workflow using built-in triggers, actions, and conditional operators. Your workflow will run automatically when data is available, process the data in the cloud, record results in a database, and send email notifications.

When you have an application that consists of components running on different computers, servers, and mobile devices, reliable communications between those components can be difficult and unreliable. Azure provides several technologies that you can use to communicate more reliably, including Storage queues, Event Hubs, Event Grid, and Service Bus. This module shows you how to choose the best technology for your communication task.

Write C# code in a custom application that sends and receives messages using Azure Service Bus topics and queues.

Implement the publish-subscribe pattern in the cloud using Azure Queue storage.

Connect sending and receiving applications with Event Hubs so you can handle extremely high loads without losing data.

Azure Functions allow developers to host business logic that can be executed without managing or provisioning infrastructure.

VPN Gateway in Azure provides secure connectivity between your on-premises networks and clients.

Connect your on-premises systems and users to Azure and Office 365 by using ExpressRoute for private, dedicated, and guaranteed throughput connectivity.

Use virtual network peering to enable communication across virtual networks in a way that’s secure and minimally complex.

Azure Traffic Manager provides DNS load balancing to your application, so you improve your ability to distribute your application around the world. Use Traffic Manager to improve the performance and availability of your application.

Discuss the different load balancers in Azure and how to choose the right Azure load balancer solution to meet your requirements.

Improve application resilience by distributing load across multiple servers and use path-based routing to direct web traffic.

Learn how to control Azure virtual network traffic by implementing custom routes.

A good Azure IP addressing schema provides flexibility, room for growth, and integration with on-premises networks. The schema ensures that communication works for deployed resources, minimizes public exposure of systems, and gives the organization flexibility in its network. If not properly designed, systems might not be able to communicate, and additional work will be required to remediate.

You have a traditional on-premises infrastructure that you need to connect to resources in Azure. In this module, you learn how to select a connectivity method for your use cases that balances functionality, cost, and security.

Design a network architecture in Azure that allows for growth and flexibility, secure isolation of critical resources, low administrative overhead, and communication with on-premises network resources.

Network security groups and service endpoints help you secure your virtual machines and Azure services from unauthorized network access.

Use Network Watcher tools, diagnostics, and logs to help find and fix networking issues in your Azure infrastructure.