If you are looking for the full AZ-104 study guide: https://www.cloud13.ch/2023/10/31/az-104-study-guide-microsoft-azure-administrator/ 

It is clear to me that networking is probably the most complex topic in Azure. The concept is very different from the on-premises world,  you have so many options and a lot of topics to understand. Let us focus on Azure storage as the next topic. As always, I will follow John Savill’s guidance and look for the documentation online.

Storage Accounts

An Azure storage account contains all of your Azure Storage data objects: blobs, files, queues, and tables. The storage account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that’s accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Data in your storage account is durable and highly available, secure, and massively scalable.

When naming your storage account, keep these rules in mind:

• Storage account names must be between 3 and 24 characters in length and may contain numbers and lowercase letters only.
• Your storage account name must be unique within Azure. No two storage accounts can have the same name.

Azure Storage Redundancy

Data in an Azure Storage account is always replicated three times in the primary region. Azure Storage offers two options for how your data is replicated in the primary region:

• Locally redundant storage (LRS) copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region. LRS is the least expensive replication option, but isn’t recommended for applications requiring high availability or durability.

• Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region. For applications requiring high availability, Microsoft recommends using ZRS in the primary region, and also replicating to a secondary region.

Redundancy in a secondary region

For applications requiring high durability, you can choose to additionally copy the data in your storage account to a secondary region that is hundreds of miles away from the primary region. If your storage account is copied to a secondary region, then your data is durable even in the case of a complete regional outage or a disaster in which the primary region isn’t recoverable.

Azure Storage offers two options for copying your data to a secondary region:

• Geo-redundant storage (GRS) copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region using LRS. It then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region. Within the secondary region, your data is copied synchronously three times using LRS.

• Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region using ZRS. It then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region. Within the secondary region, your data is copied synchronously three times using LRS.

Geo-redundant storage (with GRS or GZRS) replicates your data to another physical location in the secondary region to protect against regional outages. With an account configured for GRS or GZRS, data in the secondary region is not directly accessible to users or applications, unless a failover occurs. The failover process updates the DNS entry provided by Azure Storage so that the secondary endpoint becomes the new primary endpoint for your storage account. During the failover process, your data is inaccessible. After the failover is complete, you can read and write data to the new primary region.

The following table describes key parameters for each redundancy option:

Parameter	LRS	ZRS	GRS/RA-GRS	GZRS/RA-GZRS
Percent durability of objects over a given year	at least 99.999999999% (11 9’s)	at least 99.9999999999% (12 9’s)	at least 99.99999999999999% (16 9’s)	at least 99.99999999999999% (16 9’s)
Availability for read requests	At least 99.9% (99% for cool or archive access tiers)	At least 99.9% (99% for cool access tier)	At least 99.9% (99% for cool or archive access tiers) for GRS At least 99.99% (99.9% for cool or archive access tiers) for RA-GRS	At least 99.9% (99% for cool access tier) for GZRS At least 99.99% (99.9% for cool access tier) for RA-GZRS
Availability for write requests	At least 99.9% (99% for cool or archive access tiers)	At least 99.9% (99% for cool access tier)	At least 99.9% (99% for cool or archive access tiers)	At least 99.9% (99% for cool access tier)
Number of copies of data maintained on separate nodes	Three copies within a single region	Three copies across separate availability zones within a single region	Six copies total, including three in the primary region and three in the secondary region	Six copies total, including three across separate availability zones in the primary region and three locally redundant copies in the secondary region

Azure Blobs

Azure Storage offers three types of blob storage:

• Block Blobs. Block blobs are composed of blocks and are ideal for storing text or binary files, and for uploading large files efficiently.
• Append Blobs. Append blobs are also made up of blocks, but they are optimized for append operations, making them ideal for logging scenarios.
• Page blobs. Page blobs are made up of 512-byte pages up to 8 TB in total size and are designed for frequent random read/write operations. Page blobs are the foundation of Azure IaaS Disks. 

Overview of Azure page blobs

Page blobs are a collection of 512-byte pages, which provide the ability to read/write arbitrary ranges of bytes. Hence, page blobs are ideal for storing index-based and sparse data structures like OS and data disks for Virtual Machines and Databases. For example, Azure SQL DB uses page blobs as the underlying persistent storage for its databases. Moreover, page blobs are also often used for files with Range-Based updates.

Key features of Azure page blobs are its REST interface, the durability of the underlying storage, and the seamless migration capabilities to Azure. These features are discussed in more detail in the next section. In addition, Azure page blobs are currently supported on two types of storage: Premium Storage and Standard Storage. Premium Storage is designed specifically for workloads requiring consistent high performance and low latency making premium page blobs ideal for high performance storage scenarios. Standard storage accounts are more cost effective for running latency-insensitive workloads.

Azure page blobs are the backbone of the virtual disks platform for Azure IaaS. Both Azure OS and data disks are implemented as virtual disks where data is durably persisted in the Azure Storage platform and then delivered to the virtual machines for maximum performance. Azure Disks are persisted in Hyper-V VHD format and stored as a page blob in Azure Storage. In addition to using virtual disks for Azure IaaS VMs, page blobs also enable PaaS and DBaaS scenarios such as Azure SQL DB service, which currently uses page blobs for storing SQL data, enabling fast random read-write operations for the database. Another example would be if you have a PaaS service for shared media access for collaborative video editing applications, page blobs enable fast access to random locations in the media. It also enables fast and efficient editing and merging of the same media by multiple users.

The following visual illustrates the guidelines to choose the various Azure data transfer tools depending upon the network bandwidth available for transfer, data size intended for transfer, and frequency of the transfer.

Premium block blob storage accounts

Premium block blob storage accounts make data available via high-performance hardware. Data is stored on solid-state drives (SSDs) which are optimized for low latency. SSDs provide higher throughput compared to traditional hard drives. File transfer is much faster because data is stored on instantly accessible memory chips. All parts of a drive accessible at once. By contrast, the performance of a hard disk drive (HDD) depends on the proximity of data to the read/write heads.

Access tiers for blob data

Data stored in the cloud grows at an exponential pace. To manage costs for your expanding storage needs, it can be helpful to organize your data based on how frequently it will be accessed and how long it will be retained. Azure storage offers different access tiers so that you can store your blob data in the most cost-effective manner based on how it’s being used. Azure Storage access tiers include:

• Hot tier – An online tier optimized for storing data that is accessed or modified frequently. The hot tier has the highest storage costs, but the lowest access costs.
• Cool tier – An online tier optimized for storing data that is infrequently accessed or modified. Data in the cool tier should be stored for a minimum of 30 days. The cool tier has lower storage costs and higher access costs compared to the hot tier.
• Cold tier – An online tier optimized for storing data that is rarely accessed or modified, but still requires fast retrieval. Data in the cold tier should be stored for a minimum of 90 days. The cold tier has lower storage costs and higher access costs compared to the cool tier.
• Archive tier – An offline tier optimized for storing data that is rarely accessed, and that has flexible latency requirements, on the order of hours. Data in the archive tier should be stored for a minimum of 180 days.

Object replication for block blobs

Object replication asynchronously copies block blobs between a source storage account and a destination account. Some scenarios supported by object replication include:

• Minimizing latency. Object replication can reduce latency for read requests by enabling clients to consume data from a region that is in closer physical proximity.
• Increase efficiency for compute workloads. With object replication, compute workloads can process the same sets of block blobs in different regions.
• Optimizing data distribution. You can process or analyze data in a single location and then replicate just the results to additional regions.
• Optimizing costs. After your data has been replicated, you can reduce costs by moving it to the archive tier using life cycle management policies.

Append Blobs

An append blob is composed of blocks and is optimized for append operations. When you modify an append blob, blocks are added to the end of the blob only, via the Append Block operation. Updating or deleting of existing blocks is not supported. Unlike a block blob, an append blob does not expose its block IDs.

Each block in an append blob can be a different size, up to a maximum of 4 MiB, and an append blob can include up to 50,000 blocks. The maximum size of an append blob is therefore slightly more than 195 GiB (4 MiB X 50,000 blocks).

Azure Files

Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, Network File System (NFS) protocol, and Azure Files REST API. Azure file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments.

SMB Azure file shares are accessible from Windows, Linux, and macOS clients. NFS Azure file shares are accessible from Linux clients. Additionally, SMB Azure file shares can be cached on Windows servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.

Active Directory as Authentication Source

On-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) integration with Azure Files provides the methods for storing directory data while making it available to network users and administrators. Security is integrated with AD DS through logon authentication and access control to objects in the directory. With a single network logon, administrators can manage directory data and organization throughout their network, and authorized network users can access resources anywhere on the network. AD DS is commonly adopted by enterprises in on-premises environments or on cloud-hosted VMs, and AD DS credentials are used for access control. 

Azure File Sync

Azure File Sync enables centralizing your organization’s file shares in Azure Files, while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of a Windows file server. While some users may opt to keep a full copy of their data locally, Azure File Sync additionally can transform Windows Server into a quick cache of your Azure file share. You can use any protocol that’s available on Windows Server to access your data locally, including SMB, NFS, and FTPS. You can have as many caches as you need across the world.

Azure Queue Storage

Azure Queue Storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages. You access messages from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A queue message can be up to 64 KB in size. A queue may contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account.

Azure Table Storage

Azure Table storage stores large amounts of structured data. The service is a NoSQL datastore which accepts authenticated calls from inside and outside the Azure cloud. Azure tables are ideal for storing structured, non-relational data. Common uses of Table storage include:

• Storing TBs of structured data capable of serving web scale applications
• Storing datasets that don’t require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures and can be denormalized for fast access
• Quickly querying data using a clustered index
• Accessing data using the OData protocol and LINQ queries with WCF Data Service .NET Libraries

You can use Table storage to store and query huge sets of structured, non-relational data, and your tables will scale as demand increases.

 

Azure Managed Disks

Azure managed disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. Managed disks are like a physical disk in an on-premises server but, virtualized. With managed disks, all you have to do is specify the disk size, the disk type, and provision the disk. Once you provision the disk, Azure handles the rest.

The available types of disks are ultra disks, premium solid-state drives (SSD), standard SSDs, and standard hard disk drives (HDD). For information about each individual disk type, see Select a disk type for IaaS VMs.

Disk type comparison

The following table provides a comparison of the five disk types to help you decide which to use.

* Only applies to disks with performance plus (preview) enabled.

Note: You can adjust ultra disk IOPS and throughput performance at runtime without detaching the disk from the virtual machine. After a performance resize operation has been issued on a disk, it can take up to an hour for the change to take effect. Up to four performance resize operations are permitted during a 24-hour window.

 

If you are looking for the full AZ-104 study guide: https://www.cloud13.ch/2023/10/31/az-104-study-guide-microsoft-azure-administrator/ 

In part 1, I covered vNets, public IPs, vNet peering, NSGs and Azure Firewall. Part 2 is about DNS services, S2S VPN, Express Route, vWAN, Endpoints, Azure Load Balancers and Azure App Gateway.

Azure DNS Services

Azure DNS is a hosting service for DNS domains that provides name resolution by using Microsoft Azure infrastructure. By hosting your domains in Azure, you can manage your DNS records by using the same credentials, APIs, tools, and billing as your other Azure services.

Azure Private DNS provides a reliable, secure DNS service to manage and resolve domain names in a virtual network without the need to add a custom DNS solution. By using private DNS zones, you can use your own custom domain names rather than the Azure-provided names available today.

The records contained in a private DNS zone aren’t resolvable from the Internet. DNS resolution against a private DNS zone works only from virtual networks that are linked to it.

When you create a private DNS zone, Azure stores the zone data as a global resource. This means that the private zone is not dependent on a single VNet or region. You can link the same private zone to multiple VNets in different regions. If service is interrupted in one VNet, your private zone is still available. 

The Azure DNS private zones auto registration feature manages DNS records for virtual machines deployed in a virtual network. When you link a virtual network with a private DNS zone with this setting enabled, a DNS record gets created for each virtual machine deployed in the virtual network.

Note: Auto registration works only for virtual machines. For all other resources like internal load balancers, you can create DNS records manually in the private DNS zone linked to the virtual network.

You can also configure Azure DNS to resolve host names in your public domain. For example, if you purchased the contoso.xyz domain name from a domain name registrar, you can configure Azure DNS to host the contoso.xyz domain and resolve www.contoso.xyz to the IP address of your web server or web app.

Quickstart guides:

• Create an Azure DNS zone and record using the Azure portal
• Create an Azure private DNS zone using the Azure portal

Site-to-Site VPN

First of all, to create a site-to-site (S2S) VPN, you need a VPN Gateway.

A VPN gateway is a type of virtual network gateway. A VPN gateway sends encrypted traffic between your virtual network and your on-premises location across a public connection. You can also use a VPN gateway to send traffic between virtual networks. When you create a VPN gateway, you use the -GatewayType value ‘Vpn’.

A Site-to-site (S2S) VPN gateway connection is a connection over IPsec/IKE (IKEv1 or IKEv2) VPN tunnel. S2S connections can be used for cross-premises and hybrid configurations. A S2S connection requires a VPN device located on-premises that has a public IP address assigned to it. For information about selecting a VPN device, see the VPN Gateway FAQ – VPN devices.

VPN Gateway can be configured in active-standby mode using one public IP or in active-active mode using two public IPs. In active-standby mode, one IPsec tunnel is active and the other tunnel is in standby. In this setup, traffic flows through the active tunnel, and if some issue happens with this tunnel, the traffic switches over to the standby tunnel. Setting up VPN Gateway in active-active mode is recommended in which both the IPsec tunnels are simultaneously active, with data flowing through both tunnels at the same time. An additional advantage of active-active mode is that customers experience higher throughputs.

You can create more than one VPN connection from your virtual network gateway, typically connecting to multiple on-premises sites. When working with multiple connections, you must use a RouteBased VPN type (known as a dynamic gateway when working with classic VNets). Because each virtual network can only have one VPN gateway, all connections through the gateway share the available bandwidth. This type of connection is sometimes referred to as a “multi-site” connection.

How-to guides:

• Create a site-to-site VPN connection in the Azure portal
• Configure ExpressRoute and Site-to-Site coexisting connections using the Azure portal

ExpressRoute

ExpressRoute lets you extend your on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a private connection with the help of a connectivity provider. With ExpressRoute, you can establish connections to Microsoft cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.

Connectivity can be from an any-to-any (IP VPN) network, a point-to-point Ethernet network, or a virtual cross-connection through a connectivity provider at a colocation facility. ExpressRoute connections don’t go over the public Internet. This allows ExpressRoute connections to offer more reliability, faster speeds, consistent latencies, and higher security than typical connections over the Internet. For information on how to connect your network to Microsoft using ExpressRoute, see ExpressRoute connectivity models.

You can enable ExpressRoute Global Reach to exchange data across your on-premises sites by connecting your ExpressRoute circuits. For example, if you have a private data center in California connected to an ExpressRoute circuit in Silicon Valley and another private data center in Texas connected to an ExpressRoute circuit in Dallas.

With ExpressRoute Global Reach, you can connect your private data centers together through these two ExpressRoute circuits. Your cross data-center traffic will traverse through the Microsoft network.

For more information, see ExpressRoute Global Reach.

Virtual WAN

Azure Virtual WAN is a networking service that brings many networking, security, and routing functionalities together to provide a single operational interface. Some of the main features include:

• Branch connectivity (via connectivity automation from Virtual WAN Partner devices such as SD-WAN or VPN CPE)
• Site-to-site VPN connectivity
• Remote user VPN connectivity (point-to-site)
• Private connectivity (ExpressRoute)
• Intra-cloud connectivity (transitive connectivity for virtual networks)
• VPN ExpressRoute inter-connectivity
• Routing, Azure Firewall, and encryption for private connectivity

The Virtual WAN architecture is a hub and spoke architecture with scale and performance built in for branches (VPN/SD-WAN devices), users (Azure VPN/OpenVPN/IKEv2 clients), ExpressRoute circuits, and virtual networks. It enables a global transit network architecture, where the cloud hosted network ‘hub’ enables transitive connectivity between endpoints that may be distributed across different types of ‘spokes’.

Learning Module: Introduction to Azure Virtual WAN

Service Endpoints

Service endpoints provide the following benefits:

• Improved security for your Azure service resources: VNet private address spaces can overlap. You can’t use overlapping spaces to uniquely identify traffic that originates from your VNet. Service endpoints enable securing of Azure service resources to your virtual network by extending VNet identity to the service. Once you enable service endpoints in your virtual network, you can add a virtual network rule to secure the Azure service resources to your virtual network. The rule addition provides improved security by fully removing public internet access to resources and allowing traffic only from your virtual network.
• Optimal routing for Azure service traffic from your virtual network: Today, any routes in your virtual network that force internet traffic to your on-premises and/or virtual appliances also force Azure service traffic to take the same route as the internet traffic. Service endpoints provide optimal routing for Azure traffic.Endpoints always take service traffic directly from your virtual network to the service on the Microsoft Azure backbone network. Keeping traffic on the Azure backbone network allows you to continue auditing and monitoring outbound Internet traffic from your virtual networks, through forced-tunneling, without impacting service traffic. For more information about user-defined routes and forced-tunneling, see Azure virtual network traffic routing.
• Simple to set up with less management overhead: You no longer need reserved, public IP addresses in your virtual networks to secure Azure resources through IP firewall. There are no Network Address Translation (NAT) or gateway devices required to set up the service endpoints. You can configure service endpoints through a single selection on a subnet. There’s no extra overhead to maintaining the endpoints.

Private Endpoints

A private endpoint is a network interface that uses a private IP address from your virtual network. This network interface connects you privately and securely to a service that’s powered by Azure Private Link. By enabling a private endpoint, you’re bringing the service into your virtual network.

The service could be an Azure service such as:

• Azure Storage
• Azure Cosmos DB
• Azure SQL Database
• Your own service, using Private Link service.

Azure Load Balancer (Layer 4)

With Azure Load Balancer, you can scale your applications and create highly available services. Load balancer supports both inbound and outbound scenarios. Load balancer provides low latency and high throughput, and scales up to millions of flows for all TCP and UDP applications.

Key scenarios that you can accomplish using Azure Standard Load Balancer include:

• Load balance internal and external traffic to Azure virtual machines.
• Increase availability by distributing resources within and across zones.
• Configure outbound connectivity for Azure virtual machines.
• Use health probes to monitor load-balanced resources.
• Employ port forwarding to access virtual machines in a virtual network by public IP address and port.
• Enable support for load-balancing of IPv6.
• Standard load balancer provides multi-dimensional metrics through Azure Monitor. These metrics can be filtered, grouped, and broken out for a given dimension. They provide current and historic insights into performance and health of your service. Insights for Azure Load Balancer offers a preconfigured dashboard with useful visualizations for these metrics. Resource Health is also supported. Review Standard load balancer diagnostics for more details.
• Load balance services on multiple ports, multiple IP addresses, or both.
• Move internal and external load balancer resources across Azure regions.
• Load balance TCP and UDP flow on all ports simultaneously using HA ports.
• Chain Standard Load Balancer and Gateway Load Balancer.

Azure App Gateway (Layer 7)

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic (OSI layer 7) load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 – TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

Application Gateway can make routing decisions based on additional attributes of an HTTP request, for example URI path or host headers. For example, you can route traffic based on the incoming URL. So if /images is in the incoming URL, you can route traffic to a specific set of servers (known as a pool) configured for images. If /video is in the URL, that traffic is routed to another pool that’s optimized for videos.

The App Gateway features can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-gateway/features

Here is a service comparison from all the load balancing options:

Global Load Balancing

Azure load-balancing services can be categorized along two dimensions: global versus regional and HTTP(S) versus non-HTTP(S).

• Global: These load-balancing services distribute traffic across regional back-ends, clouds, or hybrid on-premises services. These services route end-user traffic to the closest available back-end. They also react to changes in service reliability or performance to maximize availability and performance. You can think of them as systems that load balance between application stamps, endpoints, or scale-units hosted across different regions/geographies.
• Regional: These load-balancing services distribute traffic within virtual networks across virtual machines (VMs) or zonal and zone-redundant service endpoints within a region. You can think of them as systems that load balance between VMs, containers, or clusters within a region in a virtual network.

The following table summarizes the Azure load-balancing services.

Here are the main load-balancing services currently available in Azure:

• Azure Front Door is an application delivery network that provides global load balancing and site acceleration service for web applications. It offers Layer 7 capabilities for your application like SSL offload, path-based routing, fast failover, and caching to improve performance and high availability of your applications. 
• Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions, while providing high availability and responsiveness. Because Traffic Manager is a DNS-based load-balancing service, it load balances only at the domain level. For that reason, it can’t fail over as quickly as Azure Front Door, because of common challenges around DNS caching and systems not honoring DNS TTLs.
• Application Gateway provides application delivery controller as a service, offering various Layer 7 load-balancing capabilities. Use it to optimize web farm productivity by offloading CPU-intensive SSL termination to the gateway.
• Load Balancer is a high-performance, ultra-low-latency Layer 4 load-balancing service (inbound and outbound) for all UDP and TCP protocols. It’s built to handle millions of requests per second while ensuring your solution is highly available. Load Balancer is zone redundant, ensuring high availability across availability zones. It supports both a regional deployment topology and a cross-region topology.

If you are looking for the full AZ-104 study guide: https://www.cloud13.ch/2023/10/31/az-104-study-guide-microsoft-azure-administrator/ 

Learn about the various Azure networking services available that provide connectivity to your resources in Azure, deliver and protect applications, and help secure your network.

Virtual Networks

A virtual network cannot span regions or subscriptions, it has its boundaries, but can span (subnets) across availability zones in a region. Virtual networks are always IPv4 ranges, IPv6 ranges are optional.

Azure Virtual Network is a service that provides the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. An instance of the service (a virtual network) enables many types of Azure resources to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. These Azure resources include virtual machines (VMs).

A virtual network is similar to a traditional network that you’d operate in your own datacenter. But it brings extra benefits of the Azure infrastructure, such as scale, availability, and isolation.

A training module on designing and implementing core Azure networking infrastructure, including virtual networks can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-to-azure-virtual-networks/

Public IPs

Public IP addresses enable Internet resources to communicate with Azure resources and enable Azure resources to communicate outbound with Internet and public-facing Azure services. A public IP address in Azure is dedicated to a specific resource, until it’s unassigned by a network engineer. A resource without a public IP assigned can communicate outbound through network address translation services, where Azure dynamically assigns an available IP address that isn’t dedicated to the resource.

In Azure Resource Manager, a public IP (this is also bound to a region) address is a resource that has its own properties. Some of the resources you can associate a public IP address resource with:

• Virtual machine network interfaces
• Virtual machine scale sets
• Public Load Balancers
• Virtual Network Gateways (VPN/ER)
• NAT gateways
• Application Gateways
• Azure Firewall
• Bastion Host
• Route Server

Public IP addresses are created with one of the following SKUs:

vNet Peering

What if I have more than one network or vNets that should communicate with each other? Azure has the idea of peering that can happen in the same region or globally.

Virtual network peering enables you to seamlessly connect two or more Virtual Networks in Azure. The virtual networks appear as one for connectivity purposes. The traffic between virtual machines in peered virtual networks uses the Microsoft backbone infrastructure. Like traffic between virtual machines in the same network, traffic is routed through Microsoft’s private network only.

Azure supports the following types of peering:

• Virtual network peering: Connecting virtual networks within the same Azure region.

• Global virtual network peering: Connecting virtual networks across Azure regions.

Note: Network traffic between peered virtual networks is private. Traffic between the virtual networks is kept on the Microsoft backbone network. No public Internet, gateways, or encryption is required in the communication between the virtual networks.

Important: Peering connections are non-transitive! From the FAQ:

No. Transitive peering is not supported. You must manually peer VNetA to VNetC.

Network Security Groups

You can use an Azure network security group (NSG) to filter network traffic between Azure resources in an Azure virtual network. A network security group contains security rules that allow or deny inbound network traffic to, or outbound network traffic from, several types of Azure resources. For each rule, you can specify source and destination, port, and protocol.

A network security group contains as many rules as desired, within Azure subscription limits. Each rule specifies the following properties:

Azure Firewall and Routing

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native and intelligent network firewall security service that provides the best of breed threat protection for your cloud workloads running in Azure. It’s a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. It provides both east-west and north-south traffic inspection. To learn what’s east-west and north-south traffic, see East-west and north-south traffic.

Azure Firewall includes the following features:

• Built-in high availability
• Availability Zones
• Unrestricted cloud scalability
• Application FQDN filtering rules
• Network traffic filtering rules
• FQDN tags
• Service tags
• Threat intelligence
• DNS proxy
• Custom DNS
• FQDN in network rules
• Deployment without public IP address in Forced Tunnel Mode
• Outbound SNAT support
• Inbound DNAT support
• Multiple public IP addresses
• Azure Monitor logging
• Forced tunneling
• Web categories
• Certifications

Azure Firewall now supports three different SKUs to cater to a wide range of customer use cases and preferences.

• Azure Firewall Premium is recommended to secure highly sensitive applications (such as payment processing). It supports advanced threat protection capabilities like malware and TLS inspection. 
• Azure Firewall Standard is recommended for customers looking for Layer 3–Layer 7 firewall and needs autoscaling to handle peak traffic periods of up to 30 Gbps. It supports enterprise features like threat intelligence, DNS proxy, custom DNS, and web categories.
• Azure Firewall Basic is recommended for SMB customers with throughput needs of 250 Mbps.

A training module for Azure Firewalls can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-azure-firewall/ 

User-Defined Route

To send traffic through this Azure Firewall, you can create a user-defined route (UDR).

Click here for part 2.

 

If you are looking for the full AZ-104 study guide: https://www.cloud13.ch/2023/10/31/az-104-study-guide-microsoft-azure-administrator/ 

When I discuss a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture with my customers, especially organizations that just started to journey to the cloud, they mention the so-called cloud landing zones. I remember, a few years ago, when I asked my customers and the internal specialist what a “landing zone” is, I received an answer like this:

A landing zone is a concept or architecture, which helps you to get started with your cloud migrations based on best or leading practices. You start small, and you expand later – you put your apps in the right place.

Does this sound familiar? If everyone is saying almost the same, then there’s no need to investigate this term or definition further, right?

Since I want to better understand Azure and pass my first solutions architect exam, I thought I would google “landing zone” to check, if it’s only me who has doubts about the correct and full understanding of these so-called landing zones.

Guess what? It is almost 2024 and still a lot of people do not know exactly what landing zones are. As always, you find some content from people like John Savill and Thomas Maurer.

 

An Azure landing zone is part of the Cloud Adoption Frame (CAF) for Azure and describes an environment that follows key design principles. These design principles are about application migration, application modernization, and innovation. These landing zones use Azure subscriptions to isolate specific application and platform resources.

An Azure landing zone architecture is scalable and modular to meet various deployment needs. A repeatable infrastructure allows you to apply configurations and controls to every subscription consistently. Modules make it easy to deploy and modify specific Azure landing zone architecture components as your requirements evolve. The Azure landing zone conceptual architecture represents an opinionated target architecture for your Azure landing zone. You should use this conceptual architecture as a starting point and tailor the architecture to meet your needs.

According to Microsoft, an Azure landing zone is the foundation for a successful cloud environment.

Landing Zone Options

There are different options or approaches when it comes to the implementation of landing zones:

• Start small and expand
• Enterprise-scale

After studying the Azure landing zone documentation, I think my past conversations (mentioned at the beginning) were mostly about the so-called “migration landing zones”, which focus on deploying foundation infrastructure resources in Azure, that are then used to migrate virtual machines in to.

The CAF Migration blueprint lays out a landing zone for your workloads. You still need to perform the assessment and migration of your Virtual Machines / Databases on top of this foundational architecture.

Azure Landing Zones and Azure VMware Solution

If you are looking for VMware-related information about Azure VMware Solution and Azure landing zones, have a look at the following resources:

1. Azure landing zone review for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution
2. Landing zone considerations for Azure VMware Solution

Azure Landing Zone Accelerators

When you browse through the Azure documentation, you will find out that Azure landing zones have two different kinds of subscriptions:

• Platform landing zone: A platform landing zone is a subscription that provides shared services (identity, connectivity, management) to applications in application landing zones. Consolidating these shared services often improves operational efficiency. One or more central teams manage the platform landing zones. In the conceptual architecture (see figure 1), the “Identity subscription”, “Management subscription”, and “Connectivity subscription” represent three different platform landing zones. The conceptual architecture shows these three platform landing zones in detail. It depicts representative resources and policies applied to each platform landing zone.

There’s a ready-made deployment experience called the Azure landing zone portal accelerator. The Azure landing zone portal accelerator deploys the conceptual architecture and applies predetermined configurations to key components such as management groups and policies. It suits organizations whose conceptual architecture aligns with the planned operating model and resource structure.

• Application landing zone: An application landing zone is a subscription for hosting an application. You pre-provision application landing zones through code and use management groups to assign policy controls to them. In the conceptual architecture, the “Landing zone A1 subscription” and “Landing zone A2 subscription” represent two different application landing zones. The conceptual architecture shows only the “Landing zone A2 subscription” in detail. It depicts representative resources and policies applied to the application landing zone.

Application landing zone accelerators help you deploy application landing zones. 

Note: There is Azure VMware Solution landing zone accelerator available

Azure Landing Zone Review

Review your Azure platform readiness so adoption can begin, and assess your plan to create a landing zone to host workloads that you plan to build in or migrate to the cloud. This assessment is designed for customers with two or more years experience. If you are new to Azure, this assessment will help you identify investment areas for your adoption strategy.

The official Microsoft assessments website describing this service and checklist further can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/assessments/21765fea-dfe6-4bc4-8bb7-db9df5a6f6c0/ 

Conclusion

AWS defines a landing zone as a “well-architected, multi-account AWS environment that is scalable and secure“. An AWS or Azure landing zone is a starting point from which customers can quickly launch and deploy workloads and apps with the right security and governance in mind and in place. It is not about technical decisions only, but it also involves business decisions to be made about account structure, identities, networking, access management, and security with an organization’s growth and business goals for the future.

Landing zones have a lot to do with the right guardrails and policies in place. 

Even though I took the Azure Fundamentals exam a long time ago, I think it is always helpful and important to repeat the Azure basics. Believe or not, a lot of (IT) folks still have to learn the foundations and hopefully this summary is helpful for some of you.

If you are looking for the full AZ-104 study guide: https://www.cloud13.ch/2023/10/31/az-104-study-guide-microsoft-azure-administrator/ 

Microsoft Datacenters

Microsoft has datacenter around the world. If you go to https://datacenters.microsoft.com/globe/explore one can see and explore Azure’s global infrastructure. This means that the Azure cloud consists of hundreds of unique physical buildings all over the globe to provide compute, storage, networking, and many other services.

Regions

A specific set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter is called a region. Each region comes with a different pricing and service availability.

Azure services deployed to Azure regions are list here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/products-by-region/?products=all 

Paired and Unpaired Regions

Many regions also have a paired region. Paired regions support certain types of multi-region deployment approaches. Some newer regions have multiple availability zones and don’t have a paired region. You can still deploy multi-region solutions into these regions, but the approaches you use might be different.

Regions without a pair will not have geo-redundant storage (GRS). Such regions follow data residency guidelines to allow for the option to keep data resident within the same region. Customers are responsible for data resiliency based on their Recovery Point Objective or Recovery Time Objective (RTO/RPO) needs and may move, copy, or access their data from any location globally. In the rare event that an entire Azure region is unavailable, customers will need to plan for their Cross Region Disaster Recovery.

The table below lists Azure regions without a region pair:

Availability Zones

Each region has multiple availability zones (AZ) which allow customers to distribute their infrastructure and workloads/applications across different datacenters for resiliency and high availability (=reliability) purposes.

Note: If you know which apps do not need 100% high availability during certain periods of time, you can optimize costs during those non-critical periods.

Zonal and Zone-redundant Services

There are two ways that Azure services use availability zones:

• Zonal resources are pinned to a specific availability zone. You can combine multiple zonal deployments across different zones to meet high reliability requirements. You’re responsible for managing data replication and distributing requests across zones. If an outage occurs in a single availability zone, you’re responsible for failover to another availability zone.

• Zone-redundant resources are spread across multiple availability zones. Microsoft manages spreading requests across zones and the replication of data across zones. If an outage occurs in a single availability zone, Microsoft manages failover automatically.

Azure services support one or both of these approaches. Platform as a service (PaaS) services typically support zone-redundant deployments. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) services typically support zonal deployments.

Azure Edge Zones

These small-footprint extensions of Azure are place in population centers that are far from Azure regions.

Azure public MEC integrates Azure Compute and edge-optimized Azure services with the mobile operator’s public 5G network connectivity. Use the solution to rapidly develop and deliver a broad array of low-latency applications and solve critical business problems at the operator edge.

SLA on Azure

Microsoft commits to defined uptime numbers for different services:

• 99.99% compute availability monthly. Zone-redundant Azure VMs

• 99.99% identity availability monthly. Azure Active Directory authentications

• 99.995% database availability monthly. Zone-redundant Azure SQL deployments

• 99.99999999999999% object durability annually. Objects in an Azure geo-zone-redundant storage account

• 100% Azure DNS availability monthly. All valid Azure DNS requests guaranteed to receive a response

More information can be found here: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/view/Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-for-Online-Services?lang=1 

Subscriptions, Licenses, Accounts and more

To keep it simple, I’ll copy the information from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/subscriptions-licenses-accounts-and-tenants-for-microsoft-cloud-offerings?view=o365-worldwide 

An organization represents a business entity that is using Microsoft cloud offerings, typically identified by one or more public Domain Name System (DNS) domain names, such as contoso.com. The organization is a container for subscriptions.

A subscription is an agreement with Microsoft to use one or more Microsoft cloud platforms or services, for which charges accrue based on either a per-user license fee or on cloud-based resource consumption.

• Microsoft’s Software as a Service (SaaS)-based cloud offerings (Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365) charge per-user license fees.
• Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offerings (Azure) charge based on cloud resource consumption.

User Accounts

User accounts for all of Microsoft’s cloud offerings are stored in a Microsoft Entra tenant, which contains user accounts and groups. A Microsoft Entra tenant can be synchronized with your existing Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) accounts using Microsoft Entra Connect, a Windows server-based service. This is known as directory synchronization.

Here is a quick recap:

• An organization can have multiple subscriptions

  • A subscription can have multiple licenses

  • Licenses can be assigned to individual user accounts

  • User accounts are stored in a Microsoft Entra tenant

What is Microsoft Entra ID?

Microsoft Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory (AAD), is a cloud-based identity and access management service that enables your employees access external resources. Example resources include Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications.

Microsoft has renamed Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to Microsoft Entra ID for the following reasons: (1) to communicate the multicloud, multiplatform functionality of the products, (2) to alleviate confusion with Windows Server Active Directory, and (3) to unify the Microsoft Entra product family.

Microsoft Entra ID is the new name for Azure AD. The names Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, and AAD are replaced with Microsoft Entra ID.

• Microsoft Entra is the name for the product family of identity and network access solutions.
• Microsoft Entra ID is one of the products within that family.
• Acronym usage is not encouraged, but if you must replace AAD with an acronym due to space limitations, use ME-ID.

Microsoft Entra ID also helps them access internal resources like apps on your corporate intranet, and any cloud apps developed for your own organization.

To learn the differences between Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID, see Compare Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID.

Microsoft Online business services, such as Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Azure, use Microsoft Entra ID for sign-in activities and to help protect your identities. If you subscribe to any Microsoft Online business service, you automatically get access to Microsoft Entra ID Free.

I just passed the Azure AI Fundamentals exam a few weeks ago and made the decision to pursue the Microsoft Azure Administrator certification and register for the AZ-104 exam. I always have a plan and use a study guide when I prepare myself for an exam. That is why I am creating and sharing an AZ-104 study guide because it seems to be one of the hardest “associate” or entry-level certifications right now. My goal is to take the exam in about 6 weeks, latest at the end of December 2023.

Note: This approach also helped me to pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam.

Update: My articles, notes and summaries as part of my preparation can be found here: https://www.cloud13.ch/az-104-study-guide/ 

My Goal

Without having any prior Azure hands-on experience, my goal is to pass the AZ-104 exam first before taking AZ-305 to become a Microsoft certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert.

Exam Overview

As an Azure administrator, you often serve as part of a larger team dedicated to implementing an organization’s cloud infrastructure. You also coordinate with other roles to deliver Azure networking, security, database, application development, and DevOps solutions.

The skills measured are:

• Manage Azure identities and governance (20–25%)
• Implement and manage storage (15–20%)
• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources (20–25%)
• Implement and manage virtual networking (15–20%)
• Monitor and maintain Azure resources (10–15%)

Note: Obviously, the exam requires you to have hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure

Costs: $165 (in Switzerland CHF 216)

Passing score: Technical exam scores are reported on a scale between 1 and 1’000. You need a passing score of 700 or greater.

Important: The English language version of this exam was updated on October 26, 2023.

Schedule Exam: Exam AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator

AZ-104 Study Guide

I am going to use the following resources to prepare myself.

First, I would like to get a quick overview and basic understanding of Microsoft Azure. For that, I will watch John Savill’s technical training on YouTube.

Second, I need to create a free account for Azure

Third, I am going through the self-paced learning path collection of Microsoft:

• AZ-104: Prerequisites for Azure administrators
• AZ-104: Manage identities and governance in Azure
• AZ-104: Implement and manage storage in Azure
• AZ-104: Deploy and manage Azure compute resources
• AZ-104: Configure and manage virtual networks for Azure administrators
• AZ-104: Monitor and back up Azure resources

Fourth, I am going to use Microsoft’s study guide for AZ-104 but I will map the related MS docs links to each topic, see below.

Note: Please bookmark this study guide since I am going to add/update the links during my journey.

• Create users and groups

• Manage user and group properties

• Manage licenses in Microsoft Entra ID

• Manage external users

• Configure self-service password reset (SSPR)

• Manage built-in Azure roles

• Assign roles at different scopes

• Interpret access assignments 

• Implement and manage Azure Policy

• Configure resource locks

• Apply and manage tags on resources

• Manage resource groups

• Manage subscriptions

• Manage costs by using alerts, budgets, and Azure Advisor recommendations

• Configure management groups 

• Configure Azure Storage firewalls and virtual networks

• Create and use shared access signature (SAS) tokens

• Configure stored access policies

• Manage access keys

• Configure identity-based access for Azure Files 

• Create and configure storage accounts

• Configure Azure Storage redundancy

• Configure object replication

• Configure storage account encryption

• Manage data by using Azure Storage Explorer and AzCopy

• Create and configure a file share in Azure Storage

• Create and configure a container in Blob Storage

• Configure storage tiers

• Configure snapshots and soft delete for Azure Files

• Configure blob lifecycle management

• Configure blob versioning 

• Interpret an Azure Resource Manager template or a Bicep file

• Modify an existing Azure Resource Manager template

• Modify an existing Bicep file

• Deploy resources by using an Azure Resource Manager template or a Bicep file

• Export a deployment as an Azure Resource Manager template or convert an Azure Resource Manager template to a Bicep file

• Create a virtual machine

• Configure Azure Disk Encryption

• Move a virtual machine to another resource group, subscription, or region

• Manage virtual machine sizes

• Manage virtual machine disks

• Deploy virtual machines to availability zones and availability sets

• Deploy and configure an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets 

• Create and manage an Azure container registry

• Provision a container by using Azure Container Instances

• Provision a container by using Azure Container Apps

• Manage sizing and scaling for containers, including Azure Container Instances and Azure Container Apps

• Provision an App Service plan

• Configure scaling for an App Service plan

• Create an App Service

• Configure certificates and Transport Layer Security (TLS) for an App Service

• Map an existing custom DNS name to an App Service

• Configure backup for an App Service

• Configure networking settings for an App Service

• Configure deployment slots for an App Service 

• Create and configure virtual networks and subnets

• Create and configure virtual network peering

• Configure public IP addresses

• Configure user-defined network routes

• Troubleshoot network connectivity 

• Create and configure network security groups (NSGs) and application security groups

• Evaluate effective security rules in NSGs

• Implement Azure Bastion

• Configure service endpoints for Azure platform as a service (PaaS)

• Configure private endpoints for Azure PaaS 

• Configure Azure DNS

• Configure an internal or public load balancer

• Troubleshoot load balancing 

• Interpret metrics in Azure Monitor

• Configure log settings in Azure Monitor

• Query and analyze logs in Azure Monitor

• Set up alert rules, action groups, and alert processing rules in Azure Monitor

• Configure and interpret monitoring of virtual machines, storage accounts, and networks by using Azure Monitor Insights

• Use Azure Network Watcher and Connection Monitor

• Create a Recovery Services vault

• Create an Azure Backup vault

• Create and configure a backup policy

• Perform backup and restore operations by using Azure Backup

• Configure Azure Site Recovery for Azure resources

• Perform a failover to a secondary region by using Site Recovery

• Configure and interpret reports and alerts for backups

Let’s see in a few weeks if this guide and my preparation were enough to pass the exam. 😀

Good luck!

If you already passed the exam, please share your experience in the comments section!