Exam Ref 70-535 Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions

Haishi Bai, Dan Stolts, Santiago Fernandez Munoz

• Publisher: Microsoft Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509304738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: MCSE

Prepare for Microsoft Exam 70-535–and help demonstrate your real-world mastery of architecting complete cloud solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform. Designed for architects and other cloud professionals ready to advance their status, Exam Ref focuses on the critical thinking and decision-making acumen needed for success at the MCSA level.

Focus on the expertise measured by these objectives:

• Design compute infrastructure
• Design data implementation
• Design networking implementation
• Design security and identity solutions
• Design solutions by using platform services
• Design for operations

This Microsoft Exam Ref:

• Organizes its coverage by exam skills
• Features strategic, what-if scenarios to challenge you
• Includes DevOps and hybrid technologies and scenarios
• Assumes you have experience building infrastructure and applications on the Microsoft Azure platform, and understand the services it offers

CHAPTER 1
Design compute infrastructure

What is the cloud? Among all of the possible definitions, you can capture the essence of the cloud with this simple explanation: “The cloud is a huge pool of resources that supports a variety of services.”

The foundation of the cloud is a large pool of storage, compute, and networking resources. A key value proposition of the cloud is that you can acquire any amount of these resources at any time, from anywhere, without needing to worry about managing any underlying infrastructures. And when you are done with these resources, you can return them to the cloud just as easily to avoid the unnecessary cost to keep them around.

IMPORTANT
Have you read page xix?

It contains valuable information regarding the skills you need to pass the exam.

You can run services on top of these resources. Some of the services give you access to the infrastructure, such as virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks—these services are called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Some of the services provide support for building your own services in the cloud—these services are called Platform as a Service (PaaS). On top of IaaS and PaaS run Software as a Service (SaaS), which handle all kinds of workloads in the cloud.

This first chapter gives you the knowledge you need to design many different types of compute resources using different technologies such as virtual machines, serverless computing, microservices, web applications, and finally compute-intensive workloads.

Skills in this chapter:

Skill 1.1: Design solutions using virtual machines

Skill 1.2: Design solutions for serverless computing

Skill 1.3: Design microservices-based solutions

Skill 1.4: Design web applications

Skill 1.5: Create compute-intensive applications

Skill 1.1: Design solutions using virtual machines

You can run both Windows and Linux VMs on Azure to host your workloads. You can provision a new VM easily on Azure at any time so that you can get your workload up and running without spending the time and money to purchase and maintain any hardware. After the VM is created, you are responsible for maintenance tasks such as configuring and applying software patches.

To provide the maximum flexibility in workload hosting, Azure provides a rich image gallery with both Windows-based and Linux-based images. It also provides several different series of VMs with different amounts of memory and processor power to best fit your workloads. Furthermore, Azure supports virtual extensions with which you can customize the standard images for your project needs. DevOps is a process by which companies streamline all aspects of the business. The primary driver of DevOps in business is communications and processes between development (Dev) and Operations (Ops). The biggest and most pressing component to streamline is the development pipeline (CI/CD pipeline). DevOps provides for cutting out waste through automation, so a key driver of DevOps is automation. Azure supports many tools and processes and allows for streamlining DevOps processes. While learning about compute and other areas in this book, recognize the massive opportunity available to automate any and every step of the technology you learn about. As an example, Azure can provision resources using ARM templates, deploy with code, and constantly monitor with Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and more. High availability (HA) can be achieved to limit downtime and waste associated with downtime. This is provided through designing highly resilient workloads running on Azure. Every aspect of DevOps challenges can be answered by tools and processes developed in or for Azure.

This skill covers the following topics:

Design VM deployments by leveraging Availability sets, Fault Domains, and Update Domains in Azure

Use web app for containers

Design VM scale sets

Design for compute-intensive tasks using Azure Batch

Define a migration strategy from cloud services

Recommend use of Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery

Design VM deployments by leveraging Availability sets, Fault Domains, and Update Domains in Azure

Cloud datacenters are made up of commodity hardware. With hundreds or even thousands of servers running at any given time, hardware failures are unavoidable. To help you to cope with such failures, Azure introduces three architectural constructs: Availability sets, Fault Domains and Update Domains. They work together to ensure flexibility and availability of services during failures and planned downtime such as patching.

Fault Domain This is a group of resources that can fail at the same time. For example, a group of servers on the same rack belong to the same Fault Domain because they share the same power supply, cooling, and network routing systems. When any of these shared devices fail, all servers on the same rack are affected.

Availability set This is a grouping of resources created to force multiple instances of a service to span multiple Fault Domains. This ensures resources remain available if anything in a single Fault Domain goes down.

Update domain An Update Domain is a logical group of resources that can be simultaneously updated during system upgrades. When Azure updates a service, it doesn’t bring down all instances at the same time. Instead, it performs a rolling update via an Update Domain walk. Service instances in different Update Domains are brought down group by group for updates.

Availability sets, Fault Domains, and Update Domains help you guarantee your service has at least one running instance at any given time during hardware failures and software updates.

A Fault Domain is a construct to define the physical layer of a service or deployment. It includes everything that makes up a Single Point of Failure (SPoF) for a system. This includes things such as hosts, switches, racks, and power. There is no assurance or guarantee that a Fault Domain will remain up. In fact, the very nature and definition of a Fault Domain implies that it is either up or down. You do not have the ability to set or change a particular Fault Domain. However, there is a way to force servers and services into different Fault Domains. This is done through an Availability set.

An Availability set is a logical grouping of like services that forces components into multiple Fault Domains. If there is only one component in an Availability set, the Availability set serves no purpose. The value of an Availability set is realized as additional component services are added to it. These additional services are automatically split between Fault Domains. An Availability set is designed to protect against underlying hardware or service outages. An additional value of an Availability set is that when you have duplicate services within it, Microsoft provides a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees availability to the service will be maintained (see Figure 1-1).

FIG...