Microsoft Azure has evolved into a full-featured cloud service provider that does so much more than just host your servers. There are dozens of technologies at the user's disposal for crafting a resilient high-performance cloud application. Whether you wish to master these technologies for the sake of passing an Azure certification exam or you just want to get a better handle on the Azure services, this course will take you on a journey into some of the most vital Azure components for infrastructure engineers.
As the name implies, our priority is designing for operations. Our focus here is on DevOps - monitoring, security, automation, instrumentation - and our goal is to do it all using Azure solutions. We are going to learn how to properly instrument software applications and collect metrics for analysis and alerting. We are also going to learn how to monitor Azure itself - both the individual resources in our stack and the wider platform. We will learn all about log aggregation and network security. Finally, we will dig into Azure's numerous automation paradigms.
Once you are done, you will have developed real expertise regarding Azure infrastructure. This is a short course but also a deep one. Once you have mastered the material, you will be ready to tame any company's Azure infrastructure like a true professional. Good luck and enjoy!
Learning Objectives
- Learn how to configure monitoring and alerting for software applications in Azure
- Learn how to configure monitoring and alerting for Azure infrastructure, including networks
- Learn how to implement autoscaling and automate system tasks in Azure
Intended Audience
- Anyone who wants to learn how to master Microsoft Azure infrastructure
Prerequisites
- General IT knowledge, including an understanding of virtual machines and cloud platforms
Congratulations on completing the Microsoft Azure Design for Operations course. For a relatively short course there is a lot of material crammed in here, and you made it through, so kudos. We covered a lot of ground.
We started by talking about application monitoring and alerting. We learned how to thoroughly instrument applications using Azure Application Insights and we learned how to aggregate log data using Azure Log Analytics. We explored the numerous features in the Azure Monitor system.
We then learned all about how to monitor the Azure platform itself. We went over how to use Azure Status and Azure Health to quickly assess the state of both our own Azure resources and the wider Azure platform. We learned about how to optimize our resource usage with Azure Advisor. We covered how to use the Activity Log for forensic investigations and resource tracking. We also covered the Azure Network Watcher service and Azure Security Center to handle network and platform security respectively.
Finally we did a deep dive on Azure automation. We learned how to autoscale resources using Azure Autoscale, and we learned how to automate various tasks by using Powershell and Runbooks. We also reviewed configuration management technologies like Chef and Puppet to see how they integrate with our Azure systems.
By combining all of this knowledge we have a skill set for thoroughly modernizing our cloud infrastructure. We can instrument, monitor, configure, automate, and secure our Azure systems as well as a professional DevOps engineer. That’s pretty darn cool for a class like this. Of course remember that practice makes perfect. We have described a lot of technology in this course. It is up to you to actually play around with things in Azure and develop some intuition.
Now that you are done I’d like to invite you to send any feedback you have about the course to support@cloudacademy.com. We greatly appreciate your comments, questions, and suggestions. Congratulations again on fighting through the whole course and good luck in your future endeavors.
Jonathan Bethune is a senior technical consultant working with several companies including TopTal, BCG, and Instaclustr. He is an experienced devops specialist, data engineer, and software developer. Jonathan has spent years mastering the art of system automation with a variety of different cloud providers and tools. Before he became an engineer, Jonathan was a musician and teacher in New York City. Jonathan is based in Tokyo where he continues to work in technology and write for various publications in his free time.