Azure Architect Technologies Fundamentals and Best Practices

As an Azure Architect, you'll be working with a wide range of technologies to design and build scalable, secure, and efficient cloud solutions. This means having a solid understanding of Azure's core services and how they integrate with each other.

Azure provides a robust set of services for computing, storage, networking, and security, among others. These services include Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, and Azure Active Directory.

To get the most out of Azure, it's essential to understand its best practices for architecture, security, and scalability. This includes designing for high availability, using load balancing and autoscaling, and implementing robust security measures.

By following Azure's recommended best practices, you can ensure your cloud solutions are reliable, efficient, and secure.

Azure Virtual Machines are highly scalable and customizable computing resources that can be deployed in minutes, with a wide range of instance sizes and configurations available.

You can choose from different operating systems, including Windows and Linux, to suit your specific needs.

Azure Virtual Machines support both persistent and ephemeral storage, allowing you to store data even after the VM is shut down.

Each VM has its own unique IP address and can be configured to use a static or dynamic IP address.

Azure Virtual Machines can be deployed in various regions around the world, making it easy to deploy applications close to your users.

You can also use Azure Virtual Machines to run high-performance computing workloads, such as scientific simulations and data analytics.

Azure Networking is a powerful feature that enables you to connect and manage your virtual networks in the cloud. You can connect virtual networks within the same Azure region through virtual network peering, which supports both virtual network peering and global virtual network peering.

Virtual network peering allows you to seamlessly connect networks, while service chaining enables you to direct traffic to a virtual appliance or gateway in a peered system through user-defined routes. This is particularly useful for scaling applications and creating highly available services.

The Azure Load Balancer Standard supports both inbound and outbound scenarios, making it a versatile tool for managing traffic. You can implement inbound load balancing and NAT using the Azure Load Balancer Standard, and even configure outbound SNAT traffic for testing purposes.

Here's a quick rundown of the types of peering supported by Azure:

Configuring Vnet Peering and Service Chaining is a powerful feature in Azure Networking that allows you to connect networks seamlessly.

Azure supports two types of virtual network peering: Virtual network peering, which connects virtual networks within the same Azure region, and Global virtual network peering, which connects virtual networks across Azure regions.

To enable seamless communication between networks, Azure Virtual Network Peering is a game-changer.

You can connect virtual networks within the same Azure region using Virtual network peering.

Global virtual network peering, on the other hand, allows you to connect virtual networks across different Azure regions.

Service chaining enables you to direct traffic from one virtual network to a virtual appliance or gateway in a peered system through user-defined routes.

By using user-defined routes, you can control the flow of traffic between networks and ensure it reaches its intended destination.

Here are the two types of virtual network peering supported by Azure:

In Azure, you can scale your applications and create highly available services with Microsoft Azure Architect With Standard Load Balancer. This load balancer supports both inbound and outbound scenarios.

You can implement inbound load balancing and NAT by using the Azure Load Balancer Standard. This configuration allows you to direct traffic to specific resources in a backend pool.

The Azure Load Balancer Standard also supports outbound SNAT traffic. This means you can configure your load balancer to automatically direct traffic to the next available site when the nearest site is unavailable.

You can create an Azure Front Door to pool instances of a web application running in different Azure regions. This configuration directs traffic to the nearest site that runs the application.

Azure Front Door continuously monitors the web application, providing automatic failover to the next available site when the nearest site is unavailable. This ensures high availability and reliability for your application.

Virtual Machine Replication via ASR is a crucial aspect of Azure Networking. Site Recovery helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages.

You need to adopt a BCDR strategy to keep your data safe and your apps online. This strategy is essential for planned and unplanned outages.

Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. This replication ensures that your business remains operational even in the event of an outage.

By replicating VMs, you can minimize downtime and get back to business quickly.

Azure Storage is a cloud storage solution offered by Microsoft. It's designed for modern data storage scenarios and provides a range of services to meet different needs.

Azure Blobs is a massively scalable object store for text and binary data. This makes it ideal for storing file, videos, log files, and images.

Azure Storage services include Azure Blobs and Azure Files. Azure Files is a type of Azure service designed to support the needs of the Azure VM environment.

To access your Azure Storage account, you can use the Azure Portal or Storage Explorer. Storage Explorer allows you to create containers and upload data to your storage account.

A SAS Token can be used to access the content of your storage account. This guide will walk you through the step-by-step procedures on how to do so.

Here's a quick summary of Azure Storage services: