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

Choosing the right storage solution on Azure

Now that we’ve reviewed various storage concepts, let’s examine the Azure storage options available to the cloud solution architect and how they correspond to OLTP, OLAP, and NoSQL.

Azure OLTP services

For OLTP scenarios, we will discuss the following:

  • SQL Server on Azure virtual machines
  • Azure SQL Managed Instance
  • Azure SQL Database

Briefly put, choosing an OLTP service on Azure comes down to deciding on the right SQL option. The level of manageability is a key difference between options, with SQL Server on virtual machines being an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, while Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database come as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. The differences are captured in Figure 5.4:

Figure 5.4 – The difference in the level of management between the three cloud-based SQL options

Figure 5.4 – The difference in the level of management between the three cloud-based SQL options

As with any IaaS versus PaaS situation, it...