Preface

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the community requires comprehensive guidance to fully explore the advanced features and use cases of Azure. This book provides you with a clear path to designing optimal cloud-based solutions in Azure. By delving into the platform’s intricacies, you will acquire the knowledge and skills to overcome obstacles and leverage Azure effectively.

The book establishes a strong foundation, covering vital topics such as compute, security, governance, and infrastructure-as-code. Through practical examples and step-by-step instructions, the book empowers you to build custom solutions in Azure, ensuring a hands-on and immersive learning experience.

By the time you reach the final pages of this book, you will have acquired the knowledge and expertise needed to navigate the world of cloud computing with confidence. Operating a cloud computing environment has become indispensable for businesses of all sizes, and Azure is at the forefront of this revolution. Discover strategies, best practices, and the art of leveraging the Microsoft cloud platform for innovation and organizational success. This book equips you with the tools to harness the full potential of Azure and stay ahead in today’s competitive digital landscape.

Who this book is for

The book is targeted toward Azure architects who develop cloud-based computing services or focus on deploying and managing applications and services in Microsoft Azure. They are responsible for various IT operations, including budgeting, business continuity, governance, identity, networking, security, and automation. It’s for people with experience in operating systems, virtualization, cloud infrastructure, storage structures, and networking and who want to learn how to implement best practices in the Azure cloud.Chapter 1

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Identity Foundations with Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Entra, covers key topics in IAM, including authentication, authorization, collaboration, and the significance of digital identities.

Chapter 2, Managing Access to Resources Using Azure Active Directory, provides an overview of Azure Active Directory and its capabilities for IAM, covering key components such as Azure Active Directory Connect, Azure Active Directory Application Proxy, Conditional Access, and Privileged Identity Management.

Chapter 3, Using Microsoft Sentinel to Mitigate Lateral Movement Paths, explores how Microsoft Sentinel detects and investigates security threats, compromised identities, and malicious actions. It emphasizes the importance of mitigating lateral movement, using Sentinel to prevent attackers from spreading within a network and accessing sensitive information.

Chapter 4, Understanding Azure Data Solutions, explores data storage options in Azure, including considerations for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It covers Azure Storage accounts and SQL options and highlights Cosmos DB as a powerful NoSQL database solution for global solutions.

Chapter 5, Migrating to the Cloud, covers the migration of on-premises workloads to Azure, discussing strategies such as lift and shift, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild. It explores options for moving compute to Azure, including scale sets and web apps for minimal code changes. Additionally, it addresses migrating SQL databases to Azure, considering questions, the potential issues, and utilizing the DMA tool for analysis and migration.

Chapter 6, End-to-End Observability in Your Cloud and Hybrid Environments, emphasizes the significance of a unified monitoring strategy across various environments, including Azure, on-premises, and other cloud providers.

Chapter 7, Working with Containers in Azure, provides insights into Azure containers, including their usage compared to Azure virtual machines, the features and use cases of Azure Container Instances, and the implementation of Azure container groups. It also explores the features and benefits of Azure Container Registry and the automation capabilities provided by ACR Tasks. Furthermore, it covers Azure Container Apps, its components, and how it enables running microservices on a serverless platform.

Chapter 8, Understanding Networking in Azure, emphasizes implementing controls to prevent unauthorized access and attacks. Designing a secure network is crucial in Azure, and this chapter explores the network security options, tailored to meet organizational security needs.

Chapter 9, Securing Access to Your Applications, emphasizes the importance of considering application architecture to secure access and explores tools such as VNet integration, SQL firewalls, Azure Firewall, Application Gateway, Front Door, Azure Key Vault, and managed identities to achieve this.

Chapter 10, Governance in Azure – Components and Services, addresses how Azure governance is crucial for the effective management of cloud infrastructure, compliance, security, cost optimization, scalability, and consistency. This chapter covers key components such as management groups, policies, blueprints, resource graphs, and cost management, highlighting the need for continuous improvement.

Chapter 11, Building Solutions in Azure Using the Bicep Language, discusses how Azure Bicep offers numerous benefits for organizations using Azure cloud services, simplifying resource provisioning through infrastructure-as-code templates. This enables consistent and repeatable deployments, reduces errors, and facilitates version control.

Chapter 12, Using Azure Pipelines to Build Your Infrastructure in Azure, helps you understand how Azure Pipelines automates software development pipelines, minimizing errors and enabling development teams to concentrate on producing high-quality software. This chapter also covers Azure DevOps setup, repository configuration with Azure Repos, the creation of build and release pipelines, and verifying resource creation in the Azure environment.

Chapter 13, Continuous Integration and Deployment in Azure DevOps, discusses how incorporating CI/CD with Azure Pipelines enhances software delivery with improved quality, speed, and efficiency. This comprehensive platform automates the software delivery process, allowing teams to detect and resolve issues early, resulting in fewer bugs and stable releases.

Chapter 14, Tips from the Field, provides an overview of top best practices for organizations, including Azure governance, monitoring, access management, network security, and container deployment.

To get the most out of this book

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
An Azure subscription	None
Azure PowerShell	Windows, Linux, or macOS

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Azure-Architecture-Explained. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: When an Azure AD tenant is created, it comes with a default *.on.microsoft.com domain. A custom domain name such as springtoys.com can be added to the Azure AD tenant to make usernames more familiar to the users.

A block of code is set as follows:

{
 "Logging": {
  "LogLevel": {
   "Default": "Information",
   "Microsoft.AspNetCore": "Warning"
  }

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: As the modern IT landscape continues to evolve, so does the importance of effective identity and access management (IAM) solutions.

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [e-mail] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [e-mail] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

Share Your Thoughts

Once you’ve read Azure Architecture Explained, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Please click here to go straight to the Amazon review page for this book and share your feedback.

Your review is important to us and the tech community and will help us make sure we’re delivering excellent quality content.

Download a free PDF copy of this book

Thanks for purchasing this book!

Do you like to read on the go but are unable to carry your print books everywhere?

Is your eBook purchase not compatible with the device of your choice?

Don’t worry, now with every Packt book you get a DRM-free PDF version of that book at no cost.

Read anywhere, any place, on any device. Search, copy, and paste code from your favorite technical books directly into your application.

The perks don’t stop there, you can get exclusive access to discounts, newsletters, and great free content in your inbox daily

Follow these simple steps to get the benefits:

1. Scan the QR code or visit the link below

https://packt.link/free-ebook/9781837634811

2. Submit your proof of purchase
3. That’s it! We’ll send your free PDF and other benefits to your email directly