Book Image

Learn Azure Administration - Second Edition

By : Kamil Mrzygłód
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Azure Administration - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Kamil Mrzygłód

Overview of this book

Complete with the latest advancements in Azure services, this second edition of Learn Azure Administration is a comprehensive guide to scaling your cloud administration skills, offering an updated exploration of Azure fundamentals and delving into the intricacies of Azure Resource Manager and Azure Active Directory. Starting with infrastructure as code (IaC) basics, this book guides you through the seamless migration to Azure Bicep and ARM templates. From Azure virtual networks planning to deployment, you’ll get to grips with the complexities of Azure Load Balancer, virtual machines, and configuring essential virtual machine extensions. You'll handle the identity and security for users with the Microsoft Entra ID and centralize access using policies and defined roles. Further chapters strengthen your grasp of Azure Storage security, supplemented by an overview of tools such as Network Watcher. By the end of the book, you’ll have a holistic grasp of Azure administration principles to tackle contemporary challenges and expand your proficiency to administer your Azure-based cloud environment using various tools like Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and infrastructure as code.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1:Introduction to Azure for Azure Administrators
4
Part 2: Networking for Azure Administrator
7
Part 3: Administration of Azure Virtual Machines
12
Part 4: Azure Storage for Administrators
16
Part 5: Governance and Monitoring

Migrating to Azure Bicep

Even though ARM templates have become very popular among people and companies working with Microsoft Azure, they’re hardly an ideal solution. As templates are simply JSON documents, they tend to become too verbose and difficult to maintain over time. It’s also difficult to develop a good ecosystem around such a tool because of the characteristics of JSON being a data format, not a real domain-specific language (DSL).

This is why Microsoft decided to take a step forward and proposed a new tool called Bicep. It is 100% compatible with ARM templates but provides a much smoother DevEx experience, better tooling, and IDE support with clean and easy-to-learn syntax. In this section, we’ll try to learn the main Bicep concepts and compare them to the template we created using ARM templates.

Bicep language

Bicep is a DSL, which is somewhat like the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) language used by Terraform (which is another IaC tool...