Book Image

Azure for Architects. - Second Edition

By : Ritesh Modi
Book Image

Azure for Architects. - Second Edition

By: Ritesh Modi

Overview of this book

Over the years, Azure cloud services have grown quickly, and the number of organizations adopting Azure for their cloud services is also gradually increasing. Leading industry giants are finding that Azure fulfills their extensive cloud requirements. Azure for Architects – Second Edition starts with an extensive introduction to major designing and architectural aspects available with Azure. These design patterns focus on different aspects of the cloud, such as high availability, security, and scalability. Gradually, we move on to other aspects, such as ARM template modular design and deployments. This is the age of microservices and serverless is the preferred implementation mechanism for them. This book covers the entire serverless stack available in Azure including Azure Event Grid, Azure Functions, and Azure Logic Apps. New and advance features like durable functions are discussed at length. A complete integration solution using these serverless technologies is also part of the book. A complete chapter discusses all possible options related to containers in Azure including Azure Kubernetes services, Azure Container Instances and Registry, and Web App for Containers. Data management and integration is an integral part of this book that discusses options for implementing OLTP solutions using Azure SQL, Big Data solutions using Azure Data factory and Data Lake Storage, eventing solutions using stream analytics, and Event Hubs. This book will provide insights into Azure governance features such as tagging, RBAC, cost management, and policies. By the end of this book, you will be able to develop a full-?edged Azure cloud solution that is Enterprise class and future-ready.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Getting Started

Every few years, there are technological innovations that change the entire landscape and ecosystem around them. If we go back in time, the 70s and 80s were the time of mainframes. They were huge, occupying large rooms, and almost all computing work was carried out by them. It was difficult to procure one and it was also time-consuming. Enterprises used to order months in advance, before they could have an operational mainframe set up.

The first part of the 90s was the era of personal computing and the internet. Computers became much smaller in size and were comparatively easier to procure. Continuous innovation on the personal computing and internet fronts changed the entire computer industry. People had a desktop through which they could run multiple programs and could connect to the internet. The rise of the internet also propagated the rise of client-server deployments. Now, there could be centralized servers hosting applications and services that could be reached by anyone who had a connection to the internet anywhere on the globe. This was also when server technology gained a lot of prominence. Windows NT was released during this time and was followed by Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 at the turn of the century.

The most remarkable innovation of the 2000s was the rise and adoption of portable devices, especially smartphones, and with them came a plethora of apps. Apps could connect to centralized servers on the internet and could carry out business as normal. Users were no longer dependent on browsers to make this work. All servers were typically either self-hosted or hosted with a service provider, such as an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Users did not have much control over their servers. Multiple customers and their deployments were part of the same server, even without customers knowing about it.

However, there was something else happening toward the middle and later parts of the first decade of the 2000s. This was the rise of cloud computing, and it again rewrote the entire landscape of the IT industry. Initially, adoption was slow and people approached it with caution, either because the cloud was in its infancy and yet had to mature, or because people had various negative notions about what it was.

We will cover the following topics in the chapter:

  • Cloud computing
  • IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
  • Understanding Azure
  • Azure Resource Manager
  • Virtualization, Containers, and Docker
  • Interacting with the intelligent cloud