Book Image

Azure Data and AI Architect Handbook

By : Olivier Mertens, Breght Van Baelen
Book Image

Azure Data and AI Architect Handbook

By: Olivier Mertens, Breght Van Baelen

Overview of this book

With data’s growing importance in businesses, the need for cloud data and AI architects has never been higher. The Azure Data and AI Architect Handbook is designed to assist any data professional or academic looking to advance their cloud data platform designing skills. This book will help you understand all the individual components of an end-to-end data architecture and how to piece them together into a scalable and robust solution. You’ll begin by getting to grips with core data architecture design concepts and Azure Data & AI services, before exploring cloud landing zones and best practices for building up an enterprise-scale data platform from scratch. Next, you’ll take a deep dive into various data domains such as data engineering, business intelligence, data science, and data governance. As you advance, you’ll cover topics ranging from learning different methods of ingesting data into the cloud to designing the right data warehousing solution, managing large-scale data transformations, extracting valuable insights, and learning how to leverage cloud computing to drive advanced analytical workloads. Finally, you’ll discover how to add data governance, compliance, and security to solutions. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the expertise needed to become a well-rounded Azure Data & AI architect.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Azure Data Architect
4
Part 2: Data Engineering on Azure
8
Part 3: Data Warehousing and Analytics
13
Part 4: Data Security, Governance, and Compliance

The Azure WAF

The Azure WAF is a framework created by Microsoft for architects, as a result of being a global leader in cloud architecting for years. The framework is designed to guarantee highly qualitative cloud architectures in accordance with proven best practices.

WAF does not only cover data and analytics but can also be used for any workload in the cloud, such as website hosting or application development. However, many of its core principles trickle down into data architectures as well.

The framework is extensively documented, yet the goal of this chapter is to provide you with the core principles and learnings in a bite-sized format and curate the content that is most relevant to the role of a data architect.

The Azure WAF is built upon the following five pillars:

  • Reliability
  • Security
  • Cost optimization
  • Operational excellence
  • Performance efficiency

We will take a look at each pillar and how it translates into the responsibilities of a...