cost optimisation

consumption cost model

Azure Functions

Azure App logic

SQL Server - serverless tier

Azure API management

take advantage of the unused capacity in Azure

suitable for workloads that can handle interruption

reserved instances

can reduce resource costs up to 72%

managed services where possible

Azure SQL DB

Azure App services

cost monitoring and management

cost management

Azure advisor - cost component

alerts based on spending

Operational excellence

Azure DevOps

GitHUB

Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines is a cloud service you can use to automatically build and test your code project and make it available to others

GiHub actions

With GitHub Actions, you can build workflows that are custom automated processes to build, test, package, release, and deploy code

monitoring to gain operational insights

core monitoring

deep infrastructure monitoring

deep application monitoring

activity logging

health of services

metrics and diagnostics

recommendation on best practices

IaC

imperative automation

declarative automation

Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell

ARM templates

automation

testing

canary testing : risk mitigation

blue green deployment : minimise downtime

A/B testing : effectiveness

Network Performance

use CDN to deliver content closest to the users

use Azure Traffic Manager(dns based load balancer)to return the most available end point

this can also be used to cache dynamic content

use ExpressRoute between Azure and OnPremise

storage performance

vm disks

std hdd

std ssd

premium ssd

local ssd

temporary storage

only suitable for specific VMs

disk striping

increases throughput and IOPS by spreading disk activity across multiple disks

Azure High availability

Availability sets

Availability zones

Load balancing

PaaS HA capabilities

update domains UD

Fault domains FD

aligns to the physical sections of the DC

minimum of 3 zones (DCs with independent cooling and power)

mutually exclusive with availability sets

disaster recovery

data replication

active replication : updates to take place on multiple replicas simultaneously, guaranteeing consistency at the cost of throughput.

passive replication : replication performs synchronization in the background, removing replication as a constraint on application performance, but increasing RPO

Azure Site Recovery

Covers VMs, Physical Servers and Individual workloads

security

Zero trust model

principles (CIA)

confidentiality : that access is only via explicit grant

integrity : that the data is not tampered with

availability : that the information and systems are available

Security layers

data > app > compute > network > perimeter > Identity & Access > Physical

Identity management

Azure AD Proxy

Infrastructure security

used for providing access to internal apps from outside the Organisation firewalls

uses Azure AD and a connector agent

RBAC - Roles are collection of access permissions

Privileged Identity Management (PIM)

Management groups

data encryption

symmetric

asymmetric

paired keys public and private key

single key

used for TLS

encrypt databases

Azure SQL uses TDE - transparent data encryption

On-prem SQL DB - has always encrypt feature

make use of symmetric keys

encrypt virtual hard disks VHD

uses Azure disk encryption (ADE)

uses Bit Locker for windows and DM-Crypt for Linux

encrypts OS and data disks

Network security

perimeter security

Azure Application Gateway with WAF

WAF provides advanced security to HTTP based services

WAF is based on OWASP

provides protection from XSS and SQL Injection

set policy to either deallocate or delete virtual machines