1-workload-requirements.md

Determine workload requirements (10-15%)

Gather information and requirements

• identify compliance requirements

  • What do the law, authorities, and regulators require?

  • Microsoft compliance offerings

  • Azure Storage compliance offerings

  • Audit reports for various Azure services

  • Regulatory compliance dashboard in Azure Security Center

  • Apply Azure policies to enforce compliance

  • Audit and enforce policy compliance

• identify identity and access management infrastructure

  • Identity and access management

  • Self Paced Lab - Identity management

• identify service-oriented architectures

  • Plularsight - Service Oriented Architectures

• identify accessibility requirements

  • Plularsight - Accessibility Requirements

• identify availability requirements

  • Availability patterns

  • Plularsigh - Availability Requirements

  • Architecture for Availability

  • Make all things redundant

• identify capacity planning and scalability requirements

  • Plularsight - Capacity Planning and Scalability Requirements

• identify deploy-ability requirements

  • Pluralsight - Deployability Requirements

• identify configurability

  • Configure an App Service app in the Azure portal

  • What is Azure App Configuration?

• identify governance requirements

  • Plularsight - Governance Requirements

• identify maintainability requirements

  • Plularsight - Maintainability Requirements

• identify security requirements

  • Plularsight - Security Requirements

  • Overview of the security pillar

  • Lab - Design for security in Azure

• identify sizing requirements

  • Use Azure Monitor to check resources utilization and decide on sizing

  • Lab - Predict costs and optimize spending for Azure

  • Use Azure Advisor to get costs recommendations

  • Use autoscaling to avoid overprovisioning

• recommend changes during project execution

  • understand different software design modes: waterfall, agile, devops

  • intustry standards: TOGAF, ITIL

  • Use Azure DevOps to manage projects and create CI/CD pipelines

• evaluate products and services to align with solution

  • Azure Marketplace

• create testing scenarios

  • Azure DevOps Create test plans and test suites

  • Setup playground environment for developers using DevTest Labs

Optimize consumption strategy

• Azure billing and cost management documentation

• Create and manage Azure budgets to help avoid costs creep up

• Use Pricing Calculator to estimate costs

• Reduce service costs using Azure Advisor, you can even act on the advisor recommendations from the portal

• Optimizing Azure Costs: Compute, Network, Storage, Identity, and App Services - Azure Training

• Azure Cost Management technical overview

• Use Azure Policy/Initiative to enforce adding billing code tags to resources to easier identify resources cost centers

• optimize app service costs

  • Choose appropriate app service plan pricing

• optimize compute costs

  • Use Azure Reservations to optimize VM costs

  • Preview: Azure Spot VMs for virtual machine scale sets - this feature is in preview so it will not be on the exam.

• optimize identity costs

  • Azure active directory editions (Free, Basic, Premium P1, Premium P2)

• optimize network costs

  • Pay for outbound data, starting from 5GB/month

  • Incomming data traffic is free

• optimize storage costs

  • Deleta VHDs if not needed, after deleting VM

  • Storage is billed per GB/month

  • Use elastic pools for SQL Databases

  • Use different storage tiers (hot, cool, archive) for storage accounts

Design an auditing and monitoring strategy

• define logical groupings (tags) for resources to be monitored

  • Use tags in azure Youtube

  • Azure Documentation

  • Examples of resources organization using tags:

    • Billing account
    • Environment
    • CreatedBy

• determine levels and storage locations for logs

  • Query Azure storage logs with Azure Monitor Log Analytics

• plan for integration with monitoring tools

  • Plularsight - Planning for integration with Monitoring Tools

• recommend appropriate monitoring tool(s) for a solution

  • Plularsight - Recommending appropriate Monitoring Tools

• specify mechanism for event routing and escalation

  • Plularsight - Specify mechanism for event routing and escalation

• design auditing for compliance requirements

  • Tutorial: Improve your regulatory compliance

• design auditing policies and traceability requirements

  • Azure policies