greg jorgensenThe Exam:
A passing score is 700. The certification expires every year if you do not pass an additional renewal assessment on Microsoft Learn. A link can be found below:
Skills measured in the exam
- Describe cloud concepts (25–30%)
- Describe Azure architecture and services (35–40%)
- Describe Azure management and governance (30–35%)
Physical infrastructure (capital expenditure) costs a lot up front and loses value over time. With cloud services, you only pay operational expenditure, which is for pay-as-you-go products and services like cloud computing, this is cheaper than purchasing infrastructure yourself, also you only pay for what you use, and there’s better cost prediction as well as other benefits.
Website hosted in the cloud, but database hosted in the private cloud
Cloud owner has control of all the above, but the customer is responsible for the management of this like keeping their OS and software applications up to date and working etc.
In this case, the cloud owner takes care of the operating system, database management and updates etc. This is a good idea if you want to focus on JUST the actual application and let the cloud manage everything else.
PaaS have different Frameworks depending on what type of application you want to host.
Software is usually accessed via a browser, a good example of this is teams or email. You basically don’t see anything other than the actual application, for example you just “use” gmail you don’t need to manage anything.
Customer is ALWAYS in charge of the information and data, as well as the accounts and identities.
Region rules are different for China and US. Government Regulations.
Management groups help you manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple subscriptions. All subscriptions in a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group.
You need an Azure Account/ Subscription to access Azure.
VM Scale sets provide a load-balanced opportunity to automatically scale resources.
Virtual machine scale enables you to provision a group of matching and load-balanced virtual machines in Azure.
Imagine you are running a website that enables scientists to upload astronomy images that need to be processed. If you duplicated the VM, you would normally need to configure an additional service to route requests between multiple instances of the website. Virtual machine scale sets could do that work for you.
This is also called ELASTICITY.
Azure Virtual Desktop is a desktop and app virtualisation that runs in the cloud - this is full desktop environment but saves resources compared with a full virtual machine.
Azure Batch allows you to scale to thousands of virtual machines for high-performance computing (HPC) and large-scale parallel jobs. Other Azure functionalities allow you to scale multiple VMs, but only Azure Batch will allow for thousands of VMs for HPC.
Containers do not require an operating system.
This is “server-less” computing as you do not own the server, even though there is still a server being used somewhere in the world.
"Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers.
The cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand.
Azure Logic Apps are designed in a web-based designer and can execute logic triggered by Azure services without writing any code.
Where functions execute code, logic apps execute workflows that are designed to automate business scenarios and are built from predefined logic blocks.
- With Functions, you write code to complete each step.
- With Logic Apps, you use a GUI to define the actions and how they relate to one another.
Azure networking services allow your virtual machines to communicate with each other as well as the internet.
Azure also have networking services that network over a PRIVATE connection (not the internet)
Azure provides DNS.
It can be used to link to Azure resources directly for SPEEED. Very cool.
Point-to-point Ethernet connection is supported by ExpressRoute for connecting your on-premises network to Azure.
The three models that ExpressRoute supports are:
- CloudExchange colocation
- Point-to-point Ethernet connection
- Any-to-any-connection
Performance is Standard and Premium; the latter is for scenarios that require low latency.
Locally redundant storage, (LRS), replicates your storage account three times within a single data centre.
Zone-redundant storage replicates storage over zones, this makes it more secure as the data is in more than one data centre. (UK west, UK south)
Geo-redundant storage is available over regions (think Germany, and additionally in the US)
Every object uploaded in storage is called a BLOB. Binary Large Objects.
Only available in the standard storage:
Archived data takes time to become accessible again.
Storage Containers:
A storage account is a container that bands a set of Azure Storage services together. Containers are like buckets.
There are many ways to import data from on-prem to azure, one of the solutions for a business with large amounts of data is an “Azure Data Box” or “Data Disc”. Uploading via the internet is also an option….
other
Azure mentions they use “zero trust”. Azure follows certain Zero Trust principals like Verify explicitly, Use least privileged access, and Assume breach
Factors affecting costs?
- Geography
- Network traffic
- Subscription
- and more
Azure has a Pricing Calculator, which is a tool that helps you estimate the cost of azure products; you can calculate an estimation to include: region, tier, billing options, support options, program and offers, dev and test pricing.
Azure Arc:
Managing Hybrid and Multi-cloud environment. Arc can manage things outside the cloud as well
This exam was passed on 10/09/22 using the information found in this document and these sample questions: