Book Image

Exam Ref AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Certification and Beyond

By : Brett Hargreaves
Book Image

Exam Ref AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Certification and Beyond

By: Brett Hargreaves

Overview of this book

The AZ-304 exam tests an architect's ability to design scalable, reliable, and secure solutions in Azure based on customer requirements. Exam Ref AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Certification and Beyond offers complete, up-to-date coverage of the AZ-304 exam content to help you prepare for it confidently, pass the exam first time, and get ready for real-world challenges. This book will help you to investigate the need for good architectural practices and discover how they address common concerns for cloud-based solutions. You will work through the CloudStack, from identity and access through to infrastructure (IaaS), data, applications, and serverless (PaaS). As you make progress, you will delve into operations including monitoring, resilience, scalability, and disaster recovery. Finally, you'll gain a clear understanding of how these operations fit into the real world with the help of full scenario-based examples throughout the book. By the end of this Azure book, you'll have covered everything you need to pass the AZ-304 certification exam and have a handy desktop reference guide.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)
1
Section 1: Exploring Modern Architecture
4
Section 2: Identity and Security
9
Section 3: Infrastructure and Storage Components
14
Section 4: Applications and Databases
19
Section 5: Operations and Monitoring
23
Section 6: Beyond the Exam
26
Mock Exam
27
Mock Answers

Monitoring and optimizing your migration

Azure has several opportunities for enhancing performance and security that you may not have used with your on-premises systems. It is also possible that your existing servers were underutilized or even overutilized, which can impact costs.

Therefore, once migrated, you should monitor your workloads for performance trends, security enhancements, or cost optimizations.

To support these tasks, Azure provides the following tools:

  • Azure Monitor
  • Azure Cost Management
  • Azure Advisor

Let's look at each one to see how they can help optimize your environment.

Azure Monitor

We cover Azure Monitor in more detail in Chapter 15, Designing for Logging and Monitoring; however, you can use Azure Monitor to record and report on performance metrics as a brief introduction. By analyzing trends over time, you can gain deep insights into a VM's usage, as you can see in the following example screenshot:

Figure 10.6 – Monitoring...