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

Chapter 12: Creating Scalable and Secure Databases

In the previous chapter, we began Section 4, Applications and Databases, by looking at web-based application components in Azure and the different architectural patterns that can be leveraged to create resilient and performant applications.

Nearly all applications use a database to hold information, and therefore this chapter looks at the data tier. We start by examining the two main database options in Azure— Azure Structured Query Language (Azure SQL) and Azure Cosmos DB. We then progress into the different pricing and service tiers available for each service and look at how these impact scalability and resilience.

Finally, we look at how to secure database services through encryption and the different areas where this can be applied.

With this in mind, this chapter covers the following four topics:

  • Selecting a database platform
  • Understanding database service tiers
  • Designing scalable databases
  • Securing...