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.
