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

Exploring data analytics

Once data has been ingested, transformed, and aggregated, the next step will be to analyze and explore it. There are many tools available on the market to achieve this, and one of the most popular is Databricks.

Databricks uses the Apache Spark engine that is well suited to dealing with massive amounts of data due to its internal architecture. Whereas a traditional database server would typically run workloads, Databricks uses Spark clusters built from multiple nodes. Data analytics processes are then distributed between those nodes to process them in parallel, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 13.6 – Example Spark cluster architecture

Azure Databricks is a managed Databricks service that provides excellent flexibility for creating and using Spark clusters as and when needed.

Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks provides workspaces that multiple users can use to build and run analytics jobs collaboratively. A Databricks workspace contains...