Book Image

Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide, Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By : Aaditya Pokkunuri, Jack Lee, Greg Leonardo, Jason Milgram, David Rendón
Book Image

Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide, Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By: Aaditya Pokkunuri, Jack Lee, Greg Leonardo, Jason Milgram, David Rendón

Overview of this book

Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud computing platform that offers a multitude of services and capabilities for organizations of any size moving to a cloud strategy. This fourth edition comes with the latest updates on cloud security fundamentals, hybrid cloud, cloud migration, Microsoft Azure Active Directory, and Windows Virtual Desktop. It encapsulates the entire spectrum of measures involved in Azure deployment that includes understanding Azure fundamentals, choosing a suitable cloud architecture, building on design principles, becoming familiar with Azure DevOps, and learning best practices for optimization and management. The book begins by introducing you to the Azure cloud platform and demonstrating the substantial scope of digital transformation and innovation that can be achieved with Azure's capabilities. The guide also acquaints you with practical insights into application modernization, Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployment, infrastructure management, key application architectures, best practices of Azure DevOps, and Azure automation. By the end of this book, you will have acquired the skills required to drive Azure operations from the planning and cloud migration stage to cost management and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
8
8. Conclusion
9
Index

2. Automation and governance in Azure

In the last chapter, we saw how infrastructure in the cloud works from not only a native but also a hybrid perspective. We will now take a look at how we can build resources in Azure. You can now go to the Azure portal and create any Azure resource; however, this can be very cumbersome without automation. Automation in Azure is accomplished through Azure DevOps and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. We are strictly sticking to out-of-the-box Microsoft solutions, but there are quite a few other deployment and development tools available that can help you accomplish automation tasks. Once you've deployed your resources, you need to ensure they're secure.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following:

  • Azure DevOps and why it is important
  • ARM templates and the different ways they can be used
  • Fundamentals and best practices of deploying Azure Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  • Benefits and best practices for identity and access control in Azure
  • Azure governance

Before we dive into how you can accomplish automation and what it means to have IaC, let's get an overview of Azure DevOps and ARM templates to build a foundation for this automation approach.