Preface

Over the years, Azure cloud services have grown quickly, and the number of organizations adopting Azure for their cloud services has also been on the increase. Leading industry giants are discovering that Azure fulfills their extensive cloud requirements.

This book starts with an extensive introduction to all the categories of designs available with Azure. These design patterns focus on different aspects of the cloud, including high availability and data management. Gradually, we move on to various other aspects, such as building your cloud deployment and architecture. Every architect should have a good grasp of some of the important architectural concerns related to any application. These relate to high availability, security, scalability, and monitoring. They become all the more important because the entire premise of the cloud is dependent on these important concerns. This book will provide architects with all the important options related to scalability, availability, security, and the monitoring of Infrastructure of a Service (IaaS) as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) deployments. Data has become one of the most important aspects of cloud applications. This book covers the architecture and design considerations for deploying Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications on Azure. Big data and related data activities, including data cleaning, filtering, formatting, and using Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) services are provided by the Azure Data Factory service. Finally, serverless technologies are gaining a lot of traction with their orchestration using Azure Logic Apps. This will also be covered comprehensively in this book.

By the end of this book, you will be able to develop a fully-fledged Azure cloud instance.

Who this book is for

If you are a cloud architect, DevOps engineer, or developer who wants to learn about key architectural aspects of the Azure cloud platform, then this book is for you.

Prior basic knowledge of the Azure cloud platform is good to have.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started, introduces the Azure cloud platform. It provides details regarding IaaS and PaaS and provides an introduction to some of the important features that help in designing solutions.

Chapter 2, Azure Solution Availability and Scalability, takes you through an architect's perspective for deploying highly available and scalable applications on Azure.

Chapter 3, Security and Monitoring, helps you to understand how security is undoubtedly the most important non-functional requirement for architects to implement.

Chapter 4, Cross-Subscription Deployments Using ARM Templates, explains how ARM templates are the preferred mechanism for provisioning resources.

Chapter 5, ARM Templates – Modular Design and Implementation, focuses on writing modular, maintainable, and extensible Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

Chapter 6, Designing and Implementing Serverless Solutions, focuses on providing an explanation of the serverless paradigm, Azure Functions, and their capabilities.

Chapter 7, Azure Integration Solutions, is a continuation of the previous chapter, continuing the discussion on Serverless technologies, covering Azure Event Grid as part of serverless events, and Azure Logic Apps as part of Serverless workflows.

Chapter 8, Cost Management, focuses on calculating the cost of deployment on Azure using the Azure cost calculator. It also demonstrates how changing the location, size, and type of resources affects the cost of solutions and provides best practices for reducing the overall cost of Azure deployments.

Chapter 9, Designing Policies, Locks, and Tags, helps you to understand the best practices for implementing policies and locks, and how both can work together to provide complete control over Azure resources.

Chapter 10, Azure Solutions Using Azure Container Services, sheds some light on numerous services, including Azure Container Services, Azure Container Registry, and Azure Container Instances for hosting containers, as well managing them using orchestration services such as Kubernetes.

Chapter 11, Azure DevOps, is about adopting and implementing practices that reduce risk considerably and ensure that high-quality software can be delivered to the customer.

Chapter 12, Azure OLTP Solutions Using Azure SQL Sharding, Pools, and Hybrid, focuses on various aspects of using the transaction data store, such as Azure SQL, and other open source databases typically used in OLTP applications.

Chapter 13, Azure Big Data Solutions Using Azure Data Lake Storage and Data Factory, focuses on big data solutions on Azure. We will study Data Lake Storage, Data Lake Analytics, and Data Factory.

Chapter 14, Azure Stream Analytics and Event Hubs, concerns the creation of solutions for these events. It focuses on reading these events, storing and processing them, and then making sense of them.

Chapter 15, Designing IoT Solutions, covers topics related to IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, Event Hubs, registering devices, device-to-platform conversion, and logging and routing data to appropriate destinations.

To get the most out of this book

This book assumes a basic level of knowledge of cloud computing and Azure. To use this book, all you need is a valid Azure subscription and internet connectivity. A Windows 10 OS with 4 GB of RAM is sufficient for using PowerShell and executing ARM templates.

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