To follow along with this chapter, you will need an Azure account (free or paid) and should have installed the Azure CLI on your workstation.

The Azure portal (https://packt.link/MPYKB) is the starting page for all Azure developers, functioning as a comprehensive dashboard that offers curated pathways to every Azure service, ensuring developers have immediate access to the entire spectrum of Azure offerings. Figure 1.2 shows the home page of the Azure portal:

Figure 1.2 – The Azure portal home page

You can browse through all the services available in Azure or quickly search for them using the search box. Once you click on a service, the corresponding service web page will appear. These service-specific pages are also known as blades in Azure.

Azure maintains strong consistency in terms of blade design. All the service blades will look very similar. So, if you are familiar with one, you should be able to easily navigate the others. You will be exploring a few of the service blades in this chapter.

You can explore Azure with or without an account. If you are just exploring Azure and are planning to run a few sandbox experiments, you don’t need to create an Azure account. But if you are planning on investing more time in Azure, then it is recommended to create an account. Azure provides 200 USD of free credits for the first 30 days which you can use for the practice exercises for this certification. You can enroll for a free account here: https://packt.link/jO2dW.

Note

Azure requires a valid credit card number to create the account, but it doesn’t charge the credit card for free accounts. Once the 200 USD credit is exhausted, it will notify you and then delete the resources.

The following are some important services that you can use for free:

• Azure VMs: You can use Windows or Linux VMs for free for up to 750 hours each of B1s, B2pls V2 (Arm-based), and B2ats V2 (Arm-based) burstable VMs...

Azure provides a wide array of services and technologies that can easily fulfill most real-world use cases. The services provided by Azure are categorized and detailed in the following sections.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

In IaaS, you get the bare infrastructure (that is, VMs, VNets, and the storage provided by the disks mounted on VMs), and you need to build the rest of the application stack yourself. This option gives the most flexibility for developers in terms of OS versions, library versions, custom patches, and so on.

For example, if you want to run SQL Server on Azure while maintaining control of which version of SQL Server to run, the only option is to create an Azure VM and install SQL Server on it. This makes IaaS the ideal solution for so-called “lift-and-shift” scenarios, where an existing on-premises application needs to be moved to the cloud with minimal changes. However, the trade-off is that IaaS still requires...

VMs are software abstractions of physical hardware. They can emulate the computer hardware for the applications running on it. You can have multiple VMs running on a single machine. Each VM will have a portion of the host machine’s CPU, memory, and storage allocated to it.

Azure VMs are the most common resources that are spun up in Azure. You can use VMs to set up virtually any application that you want. They are like plain vanilla servers that can be used to install any software that you need, except the OS upgrades and security patches, which are taken care of by Azure. Azure VMs provide the advantage of faster deployments, scalability, security isolation, and elasticity. Azure provides both Windows and Linux VMs. There is a huge collection of OS flavors and versions available in the Azure Marketplace that can be used to spin up the VMs.

Here are some of the VM types available:

• General-purpose
• Compute-optimized
• Memory-optimized
...

Azure has multiple storage options that can suit a wide range of applications and domains. You will explore the most common ones in the following sections.

Azure Blob Storage

Blob Storage is the most common storage type in Azure. It can be used to store unstructured data such as videos, audio, metadata, log files, text, and binary. It is also a highly scalable and cost-effective storage solution. It provides support for tiered storage, so the data can be stored at different tiers based on their access pattern and usage frequency. Highly used data can be kept at hot tiers and not-so-used data in cold tiers. Historical data can be archived.

The data in Blob Storage can be easily accessed via Representational State Transfer (REST) (one way of implementing web services) endpoints, as well as client libraries available in a wide set of languages, such as .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Node.js.

Go ahead and create a storage account now if you don&...

Like Azure VMs, Azure VNet is another core component of Azure that you should be aware of. A VNet ties all resources, such as VMs, storage accounts, and databases, together securely in a private network. It is used to encapsulate the cloud or on-premises services together within a secure boundary by controlling who can access these services and from which endpoints.

Azure networking provides the following four main services:

• Security: This provides secure connectivity within Azure resources using the basic VNet, VNet Peering, and Service Endpoints.
• Networking: This provides networking beyond the Azure cloud and into the internet and hybrid clouds using express routers, private endpoints, and point-to-site and site-to-site VPNs.
• Filtering: This provides network filtering, in other words firewall rules, that can be implemented either via network or app security groups. There are options to implement the same using network appliances...

With that, you have completed the first chapter. For those with some experience of Azure, this overview has hopefully offered a useful recap. For those of you who are completely new to Azure, it might have felt a bit overwhelming. Don’t worry; as you complete the next few chapters, your confidence will grow.

In this chapter, you learned how to navigate the Azure portal and observed the relationship between Azure accounts, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources. You also learned how to create new VMs, storage instances, VNets, and so on using both the Azure portal and the CLI. You are also aware of the major compute services that are available in Azure. With this foundational knowledge in place, you can move on to more interesting and certification-oriented topics.

In the next chapter, you will explore the concept of a partition strategy and how to implement it.

With that, you have completed the first chapter. For those with some experience of Azure, this overview has hopefully offered a useful recap. For those of you who are completely new to Azure, it might have felt a bit overwhelming. Don’t worry; as you complete the next few chapters, your confidence will grow.

In this chapter, you learned how to navigate the Azure portal and observed the relationship between Azure accounts, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources. You also learned how to create new VMs, storage instances, VNets, and so on using both the Azure portal and the CLI. You are also aware of the major compute services that are available in Azure. With this foundational knowledge in place, you can move on to more interesting and certification-oriented topics.

In the next chapter, you will explore the concept of a partition strategy and how to implement it.

Apart from a solid understanding of key concepts, being able to think quickly under time pressure is a skill that will help you ace your certification exam. That is why working on these skills early on in your learning journey is key.

Chapter review questions are designed to improve your test-taking skills progressively with each chapter you learn and review your understanding of key concepts in the chapter at the same time. You’ll find these at the end of each chapter.

How to Access These Materials

To learn how to access these resources, head over to the chapter titled Chapter 11, Accessing the Online Resources.

To open the Chapter Review Questions for this chapter, perform the following steps:

1. Click the link – https://packt.link/DP203E2_CH01.

   Alternatively, you can scan the following QR code (Figure 1.10):

Figure 1.10 – QR code that opens Chapter Review Questions...

Target: Your aim is to keep the score the same while trying to answer these questions as quickly as possible. Here’s an example of how your next attempts should look like:

Table 1.1 – Sample timing practice drills on the online platform

Note

The time limits shown in the above table are just examples. Set your own time limits with each attempt based on the time limit of the quiz on the website.

With each new attempt, your score should stay above 75% while your “time taken...