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

Reducing and controlling costs

The following are some of the ways we can reduce and control costs:

  • Optimize resources: This is an operational activity. Its purpose is to identify any resources that are not used and can be deleted, any resources that can be right-sized onto more cost-optimal resource types or sizes, and identifying any resources that don't need to be running 24/7 and that could be shut down or paused to avoid costs. Any resources running on IaaS should be evaluated to see whether they can be moved to PaaS, serverless, or SaaS. Azure Advisor is an essential tool for this activity; tags should also be used to identify costs owners.
  • Azure hybrid benefit: This is a licensing benefit and allows an organization to maximize any investment in existing on-premises Software Assurance (SA)-enabled Windows Server or SQL licenses (or eligible subscription-based licenses); this removes the need to license and pay with the Pay as You Go (PAYG) model. For a VM, this...