What You Must Know About Azure Architecture and Services for AZ-900 Exam Preparation

Understanding the Core Architectural Components of Azure: Essential for AZ-900 Exam Preparation

Initially, you are guiding your management about the Azure core architectural components. Through your guidance, the management will decide to transform their app features and make it better for the users.

The Azure architecture is built on a global network of data centers, designed to ensure scalability, reliability, and flexibility. The core architectural components are numerous, and here, you will get to know them all one by one. These components are fundamental to Azure architecture and are often covered in the AZ-900 exam topics, making them essential to understand.First of all, we have the Regions and Availability Zones. Azure operates in multiple geographic regions worldwide, each containing one or more data centers. Availability Zones within these regions are isolated locations that enhance fault tolerance and high availability by distributing resources across physically separate facilities. Next, we have Resource Groups. A resource group is a logical container that holds related Azure resources, such as virtual machines, databases, or storage accounts. It simplifies management, monitoring, and access control for a collection of resources.

Next is the Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is the deployment and management service in Azure. It allows users to create, update, and invariably delete resources using templates, providing a unified way to manage infrastructure as code. Finally, we have Subscriptions. An Azure subscription is a billing and access boundary. It ties resources to a payment method and defines the scope of what a user can access or manage within Azure. These components work together to form the backbone of Azure’s infrastructure, ensuring that services are deployed efficiently and remain highly available.

What are the Azure Compute and Networking Services for?

Previously, you described the core architectural components of Azure to the management. Next, you are introducing them to the Compute and Networking Services of Azure. The management is keen to know about this before taking any step further.

Azure offers a wide range of compute and networking services to power applications and ensure seamless connectivity. First of all, we have the compute services. These services include Azure Virtual Machines, Azure App Service, Azure Functions, and Azure Kubernetes Service. We have the Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) as the first one in the compute services. These are scalable, on-demand, virtualized compute resources that allow users to run applications on Windows or Linux operating systems. The next one is the Azure App Service. It is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering for hosting web apps, APIs, and mobile backends without managing underlying infrastructure. If we step up, then we have the Azure Functions. These are serverless computing services that enable event-driven code execution, which is ideal for lightweight, scalable workloads. Finally, we have the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). It is a managed Kubernetes service for deploying and managing containerized applications.

Next, we have the Networking Services. The networking services include the Azure Virtual Network, Azure Load Balancer, Azure VPN Gateway,  and Azure Content Delivery Network. We will start with Azure Virtual Network (VNet). It is a private network in the cloud that enables secure communication between Azure resources and on-premises infrastructure. Next, we have the Azure Load Balancer. It distributes incoming traffic across multiple VMs to ensure high availability and performance. The next networking service is the Azure VPN Gateway. It connects on-premises networks to Azure securely via a virtual private network. Finally, we have the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN). It accelerates content delivery by caching it closer to users globally. These services provide the computational power and connectivity required to build robust, scalable applications in the cloud.

Choosing the Right Azure Storage Services

Previously, you guided the management about the compute and networking services. Next, the management is interested to know more about the storage services that Azure offers. This is because the management is concerned about the app and the photo-sharing services. To share initially, the users need to store the data.

Azure storage services are designed to handle diverse data needs, offering scalability, durability, and accessibility. The first one is the Azure Blob Storage. It is a massively scalable object storage solution for unstructured data like images, videos, and backups. The next one is Azure Files. It provides fully managed file shares accessible via the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, ideal for replacing on-premises file servers. Furthermore, we have the Azure Que Storage. It enables message-based communication between application components, supporting asynchronous task processing. Next, we have the Azure Disk Storage. It offers high-performance block storage for VMs, available in options like Standard HDD, Standard SSD, and Premium SSD. Finally, Azure Table Storage is in the queue.  It is a NoSQL key-value store for semi-structured data, suitable for applications requiring fast access to large datasets.

Securing Azure: Identity, Access, and Security Essentials

Finally, your company management is concerned about identity, Access and security. They are concerned about this because it is crucial of all. The management has planned to give specific access to a specific number of people. Moreover, the security of the user data is important than anything else.

Security and identity management are critical in Azure, ensuring that resources are protected and access is tightly controlled. The first of all is Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). It is A cloud-based identity and access management service that provides single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and user provisioning for Azure and third-party applications.  The next one is Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). It allows fine-grained access management by assigning roles (e.g., Owner, Contributor, Reader) to users, groups, or applications within a scope like a subscription or resource group. Next in the queue is the Azure Security Center. It is a unified security management tool that provides threat protection, security posture assessment, and recommendations for Azure resources. One of the most important security of Azure is Azure Key Vault. It safeguards cryptographic keys, secrets, and certificates, ensuring secure access to sensitive information in applications. Finally, we have the Network Security Groups (NSGs). It acts as a virtual firewall to control inbound and outbound traffic to Azure resources based on security rules.

Final Thoughts on AZ-900 Exam Preparation

Understanding Azure’s architecture and services is fundamental to passing the AZ-900 exam and leveraging the platform effectively. Practicing with updated AZ-900 exam questions can help reinforce your knowledge of Azure’s core components, compute, networking, storage, and security services, which together provide a robust ecosystem for cloud solutions.