The Tech Lab by Aisha Ikram

Azure offers a number of ways to host your application code on the cloud. The term compute refers to the hosting model for the computing resources that your application runs on. There are many compute service that Azure offer. The most commonly used are: Virtual Machines (IAAS) App Services (PAAS- Hosting Web APIs, Mobile APIs, Web Apps etc) Container Instances and Kubernetes (clusters of containers) Azure Batch Azure Service Fabric Serverless Solutions  Azure Functions Azure Logic Apps In order to decide which type of hosting environment or compute solution you need. the following flowchart from Microsoft will help you to choose a compute service for your application. Click to Enlarge - (Photo Courtesy: Microsoft) If your application consists of multiple workloads, evaluate each workload separately. A complete solution may incorporate two or more compute services. 👉The first approach to  migrate your solution is to " Lift and shift ". This is a strategy for migrating a work...

 High Durability and Disaster Recovery (DR) Your ability to recover from a disaster and to prevent the loss of data.  Solutions that recover from a disaster is known as Disaster Recovery (DR). This is achieved by high availability due to scalable solutions. These concepts are all related to each other.  The scalable and redundant solutions provide High availability which prevent the disaster recovery. Read more about related concepts of redundancy in  High availability , and  High Scalability   Durability Parameters  Do you have a backup?  How fast can you restore that backup?  Does your backup still work?  How do you ensure current live data is not corrupt? 

Load Balancer A load balancer allows you to evenly distribute traffic to multiple servers in one or datacentre. If a datacentre or server becomes unavailable (unhealthy) the load balancer will route the traffic to only available datacentres with servers.  Load Balancer is very important infrastructure component which runs in front of every service to mange and route traffic load. Load balancer is used for scalable and available solutions. Running your workload across multiple Availability Zones ensures that if I or 2  AZs become unavailable your service / applications remains available.  load balancer behind the scene manages all the traffic across regions and scaled solutions  For more information about scalability and availability read here High Scalability  and the  High Availability 

 High Availability  Your ability for your service to remain available by ensuring there is  *no single point Of failure and/or ensure a certain level of performance. High availability is achieved by replicating the images in multiple zones or data centres. So in case of any geo-disaster the alternative systems serve the users, hence it is called highly available. There are three types of redundancies: Local Redundancy Zone Redundancy Global/Geo Redundancy Local redundancy The default behaviour is locally replicating the data/resource images in multiple copies in the same datacentre. The resources by default have three copies. so if one copy fail to serve the other two are still available. This mode has less availability comparing to the other two but still it provides some piece of mind. Zones Redundancy  In this mode three copies of the resources are kept in three different zones or data centres in the same location/city. For example, UK West is a location which may...

 There are four ways of creating a Logic App. Azure Portal You have a visual designer available here where you can visually see the workflow and all the connectors, conditions, flow paths and available actions. Easy to create design the app and understand what is going on. You can not use source control or DevOps for this LA. Visual Studio 2019 You can design your app in Visual Studio using the building logic app Designer. Also you can also check in the logic app to the source control. Hence you can take the advantage of the DevOps features   Visual Studio Code You can...

  Here is the list of learning path to prepare for AZ-204 Developing for Microsoft Azure exam from my personal experience. First foremost, subscribe to free Azure plan for portal, this will give you free access for some services for 30 days and for others 12 months access. you can browse through Azure portal and see its services. Exam expects 2 years experience of MS Azure, but if you just starting and want to go ahead with learning, you need to start from somewhere and this should be your first step. Take a Udemy course if you can buy one, go through all modules once. For absolute beginner, this is good step as the good instructor will quickly guide you through all the steps/services and give you a general idea of the content. However these courses are never comprehensive. you should go through them again and again if you are beginner or don’t have enough knowledge about a certain topic. you might want to go thro...

Microsoft Azure is the second largest cloud technology to provide you various services.  In  order to understand the cloud, you need to understand the cloud basics or glossary. Here is the brief introduction and the major terminologies used in cloud Cloud Service Model Cloud systems offer three service models for your solution: ·          IAAS – Infrastructure As A Service -Infrastructure Provisioning/providing ·       PAAS – Platform As A Service - Dev/Deployment Environment provider ·       SAAS – Software As A Service- Web based Application provider    Cloud Deployment Model ·         Public ·         Hybrid ·         Private Cloud Architecture Terminologies  While dealing with Cloud offerings you will come across with these terminologies quite frequently, lets see what...

AZ-204 - Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure      Exam Categories with %age of questions