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 database service tiers

Usage patterns and requirements for any type of database vary greatly depending on the application that uses them. In an on-premises scenario, you would need to calculate the optimum amount of RAM, CPU cores, and disk configurations to best optimize a database or set of databases for any given solution.

In Azure, unless you opt for running SQL on a VM, many of these configuration details are abstracted away, and instead you must choose a pricing model and a service tier.

Because Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Database are different platforms, the configuration options are also different. Therefore, the options for each must be considered separately. We will start by understanding Azure SQL pricing tiers.

SQL Database tiers

Azure SQL has the most options available; you must decide between a pricing model, a service tier, and even different SQL products.

You essentially have two options when it comes to choosing a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) SQL...