Microsoft Azure Architect

Lessons

What is cloud computing?

Length: 8 minutesComplexity: Easy

Cloud computing is renting resources, like storage space or CPU cycles, on another company’s computers. You only pay for what you use. The company providing these services is referred to as a cloud provider. Some example providers are Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The cloud provider is responsible for the physical hardware required to execute your […]

What is Azure?

Length: 5 minutesComplexity: Standard

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. Azure is a continually expanding set of cloud services that help your organization meet your current and future business challenges. Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network using your favorite tools and frameworks. How does Azure work? Before we go […]

Tour of Azure services

Length: 20 minutesComplexity: Hard

Azure can help you tackle tough business challenges. You bring your requirements, creativity, and favorite software development tools. Azure brings a massive global infrastructure that’s always available for you to build your applications on. Let’s take a quick tour of the high-level services Azure offers. Azure: the big picture Azure services Here’s a big-picture view […]

Datacenters and Regions in Azure

Length: 10 minutesComplexity: Standard

Microsoft Azure is made up of datacenters located around the globe. When you leverage a service or create a resource such as a SQL database or virtual machine, you are using physical equipment in one or more of these locations. The specific datacenters aren’t exposed to end users directly; instead, Azure organizes them into regions. What […]

Service Level Agreements for Azure

Length: 20 minutesComplexity: Hard

Microsoft maintains its commitment to providing customers with high-quality products and services by adhering to comprehensive operational policies, standards, and practices. Formal documents called Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) capture the specific terms that define the performance standards that apply to Azure. SLAs describe Microsoft’s commitment to providing Azure customers with specific performance standards. There are SLAs for individual […]

Composing SLAs across services

Length: 10 minutesComplexity: Standard

When combining SLAs across different service offerings, the resultant SLA is a called a Composite SLA. The resulting composite SLA can provide higher or lower uptime values, depending on your application architecture. Calculating downtime Consider an App Service web app that writes to Azure SQL Database. These Azure services currently have the following SLAs: In this […]

Improve your app reliability

Length: 15 minutesComplexity: Standard

You can use SLAs to evaluate how your Azure solutions meet business requirements and the needs of your clients and users. By creating your own SLAs, you can set performance targets to suit your specific Azure application. This approach is known as an Application SLA. Understand your app requirements Building an efficient and reliable Azure solution […]

Containers in Azure

Length: 10 minutesComplexity: Standard

If you wish to run multiple instances of an application on a single virtual machine, containers are an excellent choice. The container orchestrator can start, stop, and scale out application instances as needed. Containers are meant to be lightweight, created, scaled out, and stopped dynamically. This design allows you to respond quickly to changes in […]