Interview: Azure Fundamentals_Part 3

Azure DevOps Services

• Azure Repos is a centralized source-code repository
• Azure Boards is an agile project management suite that includes Kanban boards, reporting, and tracking ideas and work from high-level epics to work items and issues.
• Azure Pipelines
• Azure Artifacts is a repository for hosting artifacts
• Azure Test Plans is an automated test tool

Anything you can deploy in Azure via an ARM template

Regarding source-code management and DevOps tools, what level of granularity do you need for permissions?

GitHub works on a simple model of read/write permissions to every feature. Meanwhile, Azure DevOps has a much more granular set of permissions that allow organizations to refine who is able to perform most operations across the entire toolset.

Use Azure DevTest Labs to manage testing environments

The management team has concerns around the costs of a more automated test environment. For instance, it wants to make sure that the QA professionals are not wasting time configuring the testing environment to match the production environment. The team wants to ensure that the VMs are destroyed when they’re no longer in use. It wants to limit the number of VMs that each QA professional is allowed to spin up.

Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor evaluates your Azure resources and makes recommendations to help improve reliability, security, and performance, achieve operational excellence, and reduce costs.

The recommendations are divided into five categories:

• Reliability: Improve the continuity of your business-critical applications.
• Security: Used to detect threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to security breaches.
• Performance: Used to improve the speed of your applications.
• Cost: Used to optimize and reduce your overall Azure spending.
• Operational Excellence: Used to help you in deployment best practices.

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is a platform for collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and potentially taking action based on the metric and logging data from your entire Azure and on-premises environment.

Additionally, you can use the data to help you react to critical events in real time, through alerts delivered to teams via SMS, email, and so on. Or you can use thresholds to trigger autoscaling functionality to scale up or down to meet the demand.

Azure Service Health

Azure Service Health provides a personalized view of the health of the Azure services, regions, and resources you rely on.

ARM templates

By using Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates), you can describe the resources you want to use in a declarative JSON format.

• Is efficient and can potentially create many resources in parallel.
• Creates all dependencies in the correct order.
• Can be used without worrying that it failed in the middle of provisioning the necessary infrastructure.

Azure serverless computing services: Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps.

Serverless computing is ordinarily used to handle back-end scenarios. In other words, serverless computing is responsible for sending message from one system to another, or processing messages that were sent from other systems. It’s not used for user-facing systems but, rather, it works in the background.

Azure Functions

With the Azure Functions service, you can host a single method or function by using a popular programming language in the cloud that runs in response to an event

Azure Functions scales automatically, and charges accrue only when a function is triggered.

An Azure function is a stateless environment. A function behaves as if it’s restarted every time it responds to an event. This feature is ideal for processing incoming data. And if state is required, the function can be connected to an Azure storage account.

Azure Functions can perform orchestration tasks by using an extension called Durable Functions, which allows developers to chain functions together while maintaining state.

You use Functions most commonly when you need to perform work in response to an event. You do this often via a REST request, timer, or message from another Azure service, and when that work can be completed quickly, within seconds or less.

Azure Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps is intended to be a serverless orchestration service.

It can execute logic that’s triggered by Azure services

Pricing —

Azure Functions pricing is based on the number of executions and the running time of each execution. Logic Apps pricing is based on the number of executions and the type of connectors that it utilizes.