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

Understanding microservices

One of the goals of cloud computing is to provide cost-effective solutions that are dynamic and reliable. In Chapter 7, Designing Compute Solutions, we looked at several different components: containers, Kubernetes, Azure Functions, and Logic Apps.

One of the key differences between these services and more traditional compute options, such as VMs, is the ability to scale the resources they use up and down, dynamically – that is, in response to demand.

This scaling ability is most effectively used when combined with the microservice pattern of development. Understanding microservices helps to review the problems associated with applications that don't use them.

A typical solution comprises a user interface, a backend database or storage mechanism, and some business logic in between. Each of these components has to run on some form of computer, which could be a VM. Using N-tier architectures, we break these components up so that each tier...