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Certification - Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert

  • To get certified Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate : Study AZ-104 learning path.
  • To get certified Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert : Study AZ-305 learning path.

Exam Voucher - Discount - AZ-104

You can get a 50% discount code on the AZ-104 and many others by joining the Microsoft CLX (Azure Connected Learning Experience) training program.

You can also follow the 30 Days to Learn It program to get a discount code for exams that are not part of the CLX program.

Architecting Azure Solutions

  • Azure Portal.

  • Azure Architectures center.

  • Regions :

    • Specialized Regions : For Compliance and Legal purpose.
    • Region Pairs : Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe) at least 300 miles away.
  • Availability Zones.

Well-Architected Framework

The Well-Architected Framework is based on five pillars.

  • Reliability : This pillar focuses on the ability to prevent and quickly recover from failures.

  • Security : This pillar focuses on protecting information and systems.

  • Cost Optimization : This pillar focuses on avoiding unneeded costs.

    • Plan and estimate costs, Provision with optimization, Use monitoring and analytics to gain cost insights.

  • Operational Excellence : This pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver bus.

    • Use monitoring and analytics to gain operational insights, Use automation to reduce effort and error, Test.

  • Performance Efficiency : This pillar focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently.

    • Scale up/out, Optimize network/storage performance, Identify performance bottlenecks in an application.

Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure provides you with proven guidance to help with your cloud adoption journey. The Cloud Adoption Framework helps you create and implement the business and technology strategies needed to succeed in the cloud.

The Cloud Adoption Framework includes these stages (Plan-Ready-Adopt)

  1. Define your strategy.
  2. Make a Plan.
  3. Ready your organization.
  4. Adopt the cloud.
  5. Govern and manage your cloud environments.

Organizations find different triggers to adopt new technologies like Azure.
Some triggers drive the organization to migrate current applications. Other triggers require creation of new capabilities, products and experiences.

  • Migration triggers : Save costs, Reduce complexity, Optimize operations, Increase business agility.
  • Innovation triggers : Improve experiences & engagements, Transform products/services, Disrupt markets.
  • Both triggers : Scale to meet demand, Prepare for new technical capabilities.

Developing a clear business justification for cloud adoption with tangible, relevant costs and returns can be a complex process. First, review some common cloud computing business value areas to help justify the cloud adoption journey.

  • Cost : Eliminates capital expense.
  • Scale : Ability to scale elastically, delivering the right amount of IT resources.
  • Productivity : Removes the need for many IT management chores.
  • Reliability : Eases the burden of data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity.

In this stage, you focus on two main actions :

Rationalize your digital estate : Understand the organization's current digital estate to maximize return and minimize risks by running a workload assessment.

A digital estate is the collection of IT assets that power business processes and supporting operations.
During this process, we recommend that you proceed incrementally, application by application. Don't make decisions too broadly or too early across the entire application portfolio.
There are five options for cloud rationalization, sometimes referred to as the Five Rs:

  • Rehost : Also known as a lift-and-shift migration, a rehost effort moves a current state asset to the chosen cloud provider with minimal change to overall architecture.
  • Refactor : Refactor also refers to the application development process of refactoring code to allow an application to deliver on new business opportunities.
  • Rearchitect : When aging applications aren't compatible with the cloud, they might need to be rearchitected to produce cost and operational efficiencies in the cloud.
  • Rebuild/New : Unsupported, misaligned or out-of-date on-premises applications might be too expensive to carry forward. A new code base with a cloud-native design might be the most appropriate and efficient path.
  • Replace : Sometimes the best approach is to replace the current application with a hosted application that meets all functionality required in the cloud.

Create your cloud adoption plan : Develop a plan where prioritized workloads are defined and aligned with business outcomes. Key steps to build this plan are to :

  • Review sample business outcomes.
  • Identify the leading metrics that best represent progress toward the identified business outcomes.
  • Establish a financial model that aligns with the outcomes and learning metrics.
  • Define skills and support readiness : Create and implement a skills-readiness plan to
    • Address current gaps.
    • Ensure that IT and business people are ready for the change and the new technologies.
    • Define support needs.
  • Create your landing zone : Set up a migration target in the cloud to handle prioritized applications.

The adopt methodology is where you start using the cloud and experiencing its benefits. There are three common approaches for adopting the cloud : migration, modernization and innovation.

  • The migrate approach is where you move your workloads to the cloud.
  • The modernize approach is where you enhance existing applications to improve operations, increase efficiency, reduce the TCO. Modernizing uses more managed PaaS to improve your business at scale.
  • The innovate approach is where you adopt cloud-native technologies to create customer-focused solutions that rapidly transform business outcomes.