Preface

Azure, the cloud from the Microsoft stable, is a mature and continually growing cloud platform. It is gaining lots of momentum, traction, and popularity and continues to be the preferred cloud platform for many. Azure is a large platform, but behind this platform are hundreds of Azure resources and services that make the magic happen. All these resources and services are provided to users uniformly using Azure Resource Manager. A cloud platform should respect users and each country's sovereign rules regarding security and data. Azure has more than 35 data centers across the globe and this number keeps on increasing every year. Azure has most of the security certifications that are available in the industry today. Azure provides different levels of control on deployment using different models, such as Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. It also provides rich resources and features to implement hybrid cloud. In fact, with the release of Azure Stack, Azure is one of the most feature-rich and mature platforms to implement hybrid deployments. Azure is an open cloud, allowing any operating system, any programming language, and any runtime to run on it. Azure is flexible and provides multiple resources and options for implementing similar functionalities, although they do have some differences. Azure provides multiple cost and usage models and covers almost every kind of customer—whether in pay-as-you-go mode, enterprise agreements, or a cloud solution provider model. On top of these, it has multiple offers, such as reserved VM instances and Azure hybrid benefits to reduce the overall cost of deployments. Azure provides rich tooling to ensure that customers can automate their deployments and also start their journey on DevOps. DevOps is an emerging paradigm and Azure provides all the features to get it implemented.

With so many options, resources, and different deployment models, it is important that users of Azure understand the purpose, importance, and utility of each resource at the architectural level, and how they compare to their peer resources. Based on requirements, appropriate resources should be deployed. An architecture for a cloud-based solution comprises multiple resources. The choice of resources, their configuration, and interaction must be architected meticulously and appropriately. Azure provides advance platforms, such as IoT, serverless, and big data. These are emerging technologies and each of them is covered in this book.

Azure provides almost all kinds of services to meet the computing needs of any organization and it is important to approach them using the right strategy and architecture. This book is an attempt in this direction, to provide its users enough ammunition to design and architect their solutions, covering design patterns, high availability, security, scalability, cost management, monitoring, and auditing. The topics of all of the chapters in this book demand a complete book of their own. It was extremely difficult to summarize the architectural concerns, best practices, and using Azure features in a single chapter. I would urge all readers to go through each chapter and read the Microsoft online documentation related to each chapter to gain further insights.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started, introduces cloud computing as a new strategy and paradigm. The focus of this book is Azure and starts with its introduction. It provides details about IaaS, PaaS, and an introduction to some of the important features that help when designing solutions. It will introduce Azure Resource Manager and Resource groups. It will also introduce major Azure resources such as compute, network, storage, functions, IoT, data services, and automation tools and languages.

Chapter 2, Azure Design Patterns, talks about Azure cloud patterns related to virtual networks, storage accounts, regions, and availability sets. It also briefly discusses cloud patterns that help in implementing scalability and performance. Messaging patterns help with the building of reliable solutions. Messaging patterns will also be focused in this chapter.

Chapter 3, Designing High Availability, focuses on describing the high availability features available on Azure. Enterprises need high availability for their deployments. This chapter will build a solid foundation on high availability concepts and help the user make informed decisions related to IaaS and PaaS deployment strategies.

Chapter 4, Implementing Scalability, focuses on designing solutions that can automatically increase and decrease the available resources based on its current consumption to maintain its performance levels. Azure provides virtual machine scale sets (VMSS) for deploying highly scalable solutions. This chapter focuses on VMSS-based architecture and deployment. It will also describe PaaS-based scalability and its strategies.

Chapter 5, Cloud Security, introduces important concepts from a security viewpoint. Security is super important in any cloud deployment. Azure provides network security groups, firewalls, NAT, security center, and key vaults features to deploy cyber security applications. This chapter will provide details about these features and architect a solution using them.

Chapter 6, Designing IoT Solutions, provides in-depth information about implementing an IoT solution using the Azure cloud. The Azure cloud provides a complete IoT platform for developing device-based solutions. This chapter will show how to architect IoT-based solutions using the Azure cloud. It will also describe architectural concerns that every architect should keep in mind while creating a solution. This chapter will discuss topics related to IoT hubs, event hubs, registering devices, a device to platform conversation, and logging and routing them to appropriate destinations.

Chapter 7, Designing and Implementing Data Solutions, dedicates itself to data storage and services. Azure provides multiple features related to data services. This chapter will focus on providing insights about which features and resources to use for different types of solutions, and their pros, cons, and advantages. A complete architecture for ingesting data, cleaning and filtering data, and storing it in appropriate data stores, such as Data Lake and Cosmos DB, and then pushing data to Power BI for visualizing will be part of this chapter.

Chapter 8, Designing and Implementing Serverless Solutions, focuses on serverless computing. Azure functions are a versatile platform for hosting small business functionalities as functions and help in weaving solutions together. This chapter will focus on understanding the serverless paradigm, Azure functions, its capabilities, creating solutions by combining multiple functions, understanding triggers and parameters, and different sources of inputs and outputs.

Chapter 9, Designing Policies, Locks, and Tags, focuses on using the management features provided by Azure to implement better manage deployments. Tags help by adding additional metadata information to Azure resources. They also help by providing information architecture regarding Azure resources. This chapter provides design guidelines for defining tags for deployments. It also provides details about policies and locks to restrict and control Azure resources regarding their location, usage, size, accessibility, permissions, and so on. It is an important concept, providing management control over Azure resources.

Chapter 10, DevOps on Azure, dedicates itself to DevOps. The Azure cloud provides rich tools, utilities, and scripting support to enable automation for DevOps. Azure supports Azure Resource Manager templates, desired state configuration, PowerShell, Rest API, and open source technologies such as Chef, Python, and Linux to devise end-to-end automation of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment. Infrastructure as Code and configuration management is also supported inherently using Azure features such as Azure automation. This chapter will focus on building CI/CD pipelines and configuration management for Azure resources using VSTS.

Chapter 11, Cost Management, covers a somewhat different angle compared to the other chapters in this book. It is not a technical chapter but discusses various ways of means to reduce the cost of deployments on Azure. This chapter will focus on calculating the cost of deployment on Azure using the Azure cost calculator. It will also show how changing location, size, and type of resources can affect the cost of the solution, and also provide best practices to reduce the overall cost of Azure deployments.

Chapter 12, Monitoring and Auditing, focuses on understanding how Azure services such as Operational Insights and Application Insights provide monitoring and auditing capabilities. This chapter will show how to configure them and utilize them to monitor Azure resources and take actions based on them. This chapter will also focus on architecting monitoring solutions for Azure cloud deployments.

What you need for this book

This book assumes a basic level of knowledge on cloud computing and Azure. All you need is a valid Azure subscription and internet connectivity to use this book. A Windows 10 operating system having 4 GB of RAM is sufficient for using Powershell and executing ARM templates.

Who this book is for

To make use of the content of this book, a basic prior knowledge of cloud and Azure is expected. If you think you do not possess that knowledge, it is always possible to catch up on the basic requirements by quickly reading up on the major components from the Azure documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/. This book is essentially intended for cloud architects, developers, consultants, and DevOps engineers who are using Azure to provide their services to end customers and employers. If you are also willing to architect complete solutions on Azure, then this book is ideal for you. If you already have some experience with architecture on Azure, this book can help you to speed up with it in a fast-paced way.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "An employee ID in one data store is namedEMPIDIDin another data store andEIDin the third data store within the same organization.

A block of code is set as follows:

Import-DscResource -ModuleName 'PSDesiredStateConfiguration'
Node WebServer {
  WindowsFeature IIS
    {
        Name = "Web-Server"
        Ensure = "Present"
    }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The first step is to create a data factory resource. After creation, click on theCopy data button."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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