Azure
Azure is a cloud computing platform offered by Microsoft. It provides a comprehensive set of cloud services, including virtual machines, managed databases, serverless computing, storage, networking, and AI capabilities. Azure offers scalability, reliability, and security for building and deploying various applications and services. Azure provides services like Azure App Service for web applications, Azure Functions for serverless computing, Azure SQL Database for managed databases, and Azure AI services for machine learning and cognitive capabilities.
Module 1: Azure Fundamentals
Introduction to Azure
Azure is a comprehensive set of cloud services provided by Microsoft. Azure allows businesses to build, deploy, and manage applications through Microsoft-managed data centers. Azure provides a range of cloud services, including those for computing, analytics, storage and networking.
Setting up an Azure account
To start using Azure services, you first need to create a Microsoft Azure account. This includes providing your email address and credit card details. Microsoft offers a Free Tier with certain services free for 12 months, up to a specific usage limit.
Azure Portal
The Azure portal is a web-based application for managing all your Azure resources. It provides a user-friendly platform where you can build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud applications in a single, unified console.
Understanding Azure Global Infrastructure
Azure infrastructure is globally distributed and is broken down into geographies, regions, and availability zones to ensure your services run reliably and securely. Each Azure region is paired with another region within the same geography, together making a regional pair.
Module 2: Core Azure Services
Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are software emulations of physical computers. They provide the flexibility of virtualization without having to buy and maintain the physical hardware that runs the virtual machines.
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that does not adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as text or binary data.
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a general-purpose relational database service in Microsoft Azure that supports structures such as relational data, JSON, spatial, and XML. Azure SQL Database provides a way to create, scale and extend applications into the cloud.
Azure Functions
Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables you to run code-on-demand without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure. Use Azure Functions to run a script or piece of code in response to a variety of events.
Module 3: Networking and Security on Azure
Azure Virtual Network
Azure Virtual Network enables many types of Azure resources, such as Azure Virtual Machines (VM), to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. Azure virtual network is the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure.
Azure Active Directory
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service, which helps your employees sign in and access resources in: internal resources, such as apps on your corporate network and intranet, along with any cloud apps developed by your own organization.
Network Security Groups
A network security group (NSG) contains a list of security rules that allow or deny network traffic to resources connected to Azure Virtual Networks (VNet). NSGs can be associated with subnets, individual VMs (classic), or individual network interfaces (NIC) attached to VMs (Resource Manager).
Azure Firewall
Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It's a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability.
Module 4: Advanced Azure Services and Best Practices
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps provides developer services to support teams to plan work, collaborate on code development, and build and deploy applications. Azure DevOps supports a culture and set of processes that bring developers and project managers and contributors together to complete software development.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor maximizes the availability and performance of your applications and services by delivering a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments.
Azure Best Practices
Some of the best practices for Azure include: designing for high availability and disaster recovery, implementing robust security controls with Azure Active Directory and Azure Key Vault, managing and monitoring your services with Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics, and leveraging DevOps strategies for continuous integration and deployment.