Book Image

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification and Beyond

By : Steve Miles
Book Image

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification and Beyond

By: Steve Miles

Overview of this book

This is the digital and cloud era, and Microsoft Azure is one of the top cloud computing platforms. It’s now more important than ever to understand how the cloud functions and the different services that can be leveraged across the cloud. This book will give you a solid understanding of cloud concepts and Microsoft Azure, starting by taking you through cloud concepts in depth, then focusing on the core Azure architectural components, solutions, and management tools. Next, you will understand security concepts, defense-in-depth, and key security services such as Network Security Groups and Azure Firewall, as well as security operations tooling such as Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel. As you progress, you will understand how identity, governance, privacy, and compliance are managed in Azure. Finally, you will get to grips with cost management, service-level agreements, and service life cycles. Throughout, the book features a number of hands-on exercises to support the concepts, services, and solutions discussed. This provides you with a glimpse of real-world scenarios, before finally concluding with practice questions for AZ-900 exam preparation. By the end of this Azure book, you will have a thorough understanding of cloud concepts and Azure fundamentals, enabling you to pass the AZ-900 certification exam easily.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Cloud Concepts
4
Section 2: Core Azure Services
7
Section 3: Core Solutions and Management Tools
10
Section 4: Security
12
Section 5: Identity, Governance, Privacy, and Compliance
16
Section 6: Cost Management and Service-Level Agreements

Azure Policy

Azure Policy is a set of rules for resource creation and management that apply across multiple subscriptions; it defines what actions are allowed within a subscription and assesses resources to ensure that compliance standards are met or enforce organization mandates drift, or that non-compliance can be remediated through automation.

Some typical example use cases of Azure Policy could limit what regions can be accessed for resources to be created so that data sovereignty can be complied with. You can even limit VM types or storage types so that expensive or operationally inefficient resources are not created.

The following are the key differences to understand between Azure Policy and Azure RBAC:

  • Azure Policy:
    • Controls what can be done (regardless of the user)
    • Focuses on resource properties
    • Applied to resources

    An example of Azure Policy would be that you are the contributor of a resource group, but a policy blocks you from deploying a VM in WestUS or you cannot...