Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification and Beyond

Steve Miles, Peter De Tender

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781801077125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Guides de certification en informatique

Gain in-depth knowledge of Azure fundamentals that will make it easy for you to achieve AZ-900 certificationKey Features• Get fundamental knowledge of cloud concepts and the Microsoft Azure platform• Explore practical exercises to gain experience of working with the Microsoft Azure platform in the real world• Prepare to achieve AZ-900 certification on the first go with the help of simplified examples covered in the bookBook DescriptionThis is the digital and cloud era, and Microsoft Azure is one of the top cloud computing platforms. It's now more important than ever to understand how the cloud functions and the different services that can be leveraged across the cloud. This book will give you a solid understanding of cloud concepts and Microsoft Azure, starting by taking you through cloud concepts in depth, then focusing on the core Azure architectural components, solutions, and management tools. Next, you will understand security concepts, defense-in-depth, and key security services such as Network Security Groups and Azure Firewall, as well as security operations tooling such as Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel. As you progress, you will understand how identity, governance, privacy, and compliance are managed in Azure. Finally, you will get to grips with cost management, service-level agreements, and service life cycles. Throughout, the book features a number of hands-on exercises to support the concepts, services, and solutions discussed. This provides you with a glimpse of real-world scenarios, before finally concluding with practice questions for AZ-900 exam preparation. By the end of this Azure book, you will have a thorough understanding of cloud concepts and Azure fundamentals, enabling you to pass the AZ-900 certification exam easily.What you will learn• Explore cloud computing with Azure cloud• Gain an understanding of the core Azure architectural components• Acquire knowledge of core services and management tools on Azure• Get up and running with security concepts, security operations, and protection from threats• Focus on identity, governance, privacy, and compliance features• Understand Azure cost management, SLAs, and service life cyclesWho this book is forThis Azure fundamentals book is both for those with technical backgrounds and non-technical backgrounds who want to learn and explore the field of cloud computing, especially with Azure. This book will also help anyone who wants to develop a good foundation for achieving advanced Azure certifications. There is no prerequisite for this book except a willingness to learn and explore cloud concepts and Microsoft Azure.

Section 1: Cloud Concepts

This section provides complete coverage of the knowledge and skills required for the skills measured of the Describe cloud Azure concepts section of the exam. We also cover knowledge and skills that go beyond the exam content, so you are prepared for a real-world, day-to-day Azure-focused role.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introduction to Cloud Computing
• Chapter 2, Benefits of Cloud Computing

Chapter 1: Introduction to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is somewhat of a misnomer; it's a marketing term for a technology model that an organization may adopt to consume computing resources. It can benefit many audiences, addressing a need to access on-demand computing resources that are self-service, automated, and elastic to cater to demand.

Its value to a business is as an enabler for digital transformation and innovation, quicker time to market and value, economies of scale, a flexible cost model, and an agile operating model; this ability gives a choice in how computing resources can be provided and consumed by a business to suit their operating model in the most appropriate way.

Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are some of the public cloud computing platform providers. These providers own hardware on their facilities, from which they create computing resources that are made available to all tenants on the platform, which use their portion of the resources and get billed only for what they use. The users of these computing resources benefit through what is described as economies of scale.

The objectives for this chapter cover the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam skills area Describe Cloud Concepts.

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the skills to be able to do the following:

• Define cloud computing.
• Describe public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.
• Compare and contrast the three types of cloud computing.
• Describe Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Serverless | Functions as a Service (FaaS).
• Identify a service type based on a use case.

In addition, this chapter's goal is also to take your knowledge beyond the exam content so you are prepared for a real-world, day-to-day Azure-focused role.

It is important to note that in November 21 some Microsoft Security Services have been renamed. These are renamed as follows:

• Azure Security Center and Azure Defender are now called Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Azure Defender plans to Microsoft Defender plans
• Azure Sentinel is now called Microsoft Sentinel
• Azure Defender for IoT is now called Microsoft Defender for IoT
• Azure Defender for SQL is now called Microsoft Defender for SQL
• Microsoft Cloud App Security is now called Microsoft Defender for Cloud App
• Microsoft Defender for Business is introduced as a new Service SKU

You can learn more about the update of Microsoft security services at this url: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/defender-for-cloud/defender-for-cloud-introduction

Where has the cloud computing model evolved from?

Cloud computing is the next phase in the evolution of the computing platform and the next significant shift of the IT industry; it is another model for delivering computing resources to an organization.

We have evolved from physical hardware to virtualization that is run from our facilities or somebody else's to another computing model shift of virtual machines to containers and now the leap to serverless, where the business logic layer is the new scale unit in the journey to the cloud:

Figure 1.1 – Evolution of cloud computing

The goal of hybrid computing is to provide computing resources anywhere, anytime, and give a business the power of choice as to the most suitable technology platform for any given workload, business initiative, or scenario that needs to be supported.

Cloud computing is not only a technical evolution but also a financial evolution; the expenditure model shifts from that of capital expenditure (CapEx) of hardware (buying upfront before you can use resources) to operating expense (OpEx) and paying as you use resources.

It should be noted, though, that the private cloud model can contain an element of CapEx and OpEx; typically (and for the exam objectives), the primary cost expenditure model is CapEx. However, leased hardware and software are financially also considered OpEx, but would mainly mean building an on-premises infrastructure.

As the computing platform environments have changed over time, so have the architectures; this next section will look at the evolution of the cloud computing architectures.

Evolution of cloud computing architectures

Serverless comes about from another architectural shift in the compute layer and is an extension and evolution of PaaS.

When you use PaaS resources to host a website or application or execute code, you are still using servers; you specify a set of underlying compute resources and pay for those. This would be the server farm in traditional hosting.

Whereas in serverless, it's exactly as it says in the name, you are not responsible for creating any compute resources; there are servers involved, but this compute layer is provided by the platform provider – it's abstracted from your control or responsibility. In essence, you provide your business logic layer, and they run it for you on their compute layer.

The term cloud-native also gets introduced here; this means moving from the monolith stacks of virtual machines to microservices such as containers or serverless architecture solutions as functions (Azure Functions) or workflows (Azure Logic Apps). This is a fundamental shift from compute stack-centric to business logic-centric, where we are only focusing on the outcomes and not the inputs; that is, we no longer care or have to concern ourselves with the lower layers such as the languages, runtimes, compute, and so on, as these are now provided as a service for us to consume by the provider. You give the code, and the provider will decide how they will handle the execution of it.

As I mentioned earlier, serverless is about abstracting the language runtime, PaaS is about abstracting the compute, and IaaS is about abstracting the hardware. When we say abstract, what we mean is to remove, that is, remove the requirement to provide that layer; we make that layer the cloud provider's responsibility to provide, scale, keep available, maintain, and so on. It is a layer that we no longer need to know or care about:

Figure 1.2 – Cloud computing architectures

This section looked at the evolution of both the computing platform environments and the cloud computing architectures. The illustration outlines where the architectures differ in their characteristics and outlines decision criteria to consider so that each architecture can be positioned to make the most appropriate choice for any given scenario.

In the next section, we look at the Shared Responsibility Model, one of the most misunderstood cloud ...