Practical Microsoft Azure IaaS

Shijimol Ambi Karthikeyan currently works as a cloud consultant with Microsoft. She has 12+ years' experience in IT and specializes in datacenter management, virtualization, and cloud computing technologies. She started her career with EY IT services in the datacenter management team managing complex virtualized production datacenters. She has expertise in managing VMware and Hyper-V virtualization stacks and Windows/Linux server technologies. She has also worked on devops CI/CD implementation projects using tools such as TeamCity, Jenkins, Git, TortoiseSVN, Mercurial, and Selenium. She later moved on to cloud computing and gained expertise in Windows Azure, focusing on Azure IaaS, backup/DR, and automation. She holds industry standard certifications in technologies including Microsoft Azure, Windows Server, and VMware. She also holds ITIL and TOGAF9 certifications. She has previously written a book on Azure automation.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Azure IaaS Chapter Goal: This chapter will provide a general introduction to basic Azure IaaS components



No of pages : 25



Sub -Topics



1. What is new in Azure Resource Manager(ARM model)



2. IaaS compute services



1. VMs



2. VM Scale sets



3. Dev test labs



3. Storage in IaaS



1. VM disks



2. Managed and unmanaged disks



3. Standard and premium storages



4. General purpose V2 storage







4. Azure Networking



1. Default segmentation using VNets



2. Configure hybrid connectivity



3. Routing in VNets



Chapter 2: Design considerations for migration Chapter Goal: This chapter will map the on-premise architecture components to counterparts in Azure. It will explore the features that are available or not available complete with alternatives and examples



No of pages: 25



Sub - Topics



1. Migrating compute workloads to Azure



1. Physical servers



2. VMware virtualization



3. Hyper-V virtualization



4. Other platforms



2. Traditional storage vs Storage in Azure



1. Storage for compute



2. File services



3. Hybrid storage - StorSimple



4. Third party solutions



3. Designing secure networks



1. VLANs and VNets



2. IPAM , DHCP and DNS



3. User defined routing



4. Forced tunnels



5. Network security groups







4. On-prem Vs Azure - Sample Architecture comparison



Chapter 3: Implementing scalable Infrastructure services Chapter Goal: This chapter will focus on different design considerations and configuration options to scale up or scale out environments on demand



No of pages : 20



Sub - Topics:



1. Choosing between Scale up vs Scale out



2. Scaling up resources on the fly



3. Scaling out using VM scale set



4. Scalability at the storage and networking layer







Chapter 4: Designing for resiliency in Azure Chapter Goal: This chapter will focus on the different features/components in Azure IaaS to be included in a resilient architecture



No of pages: 20



Sub - Topics:



1.Storage layer Resiliency



2.Azure availability zones (preview feature)



3. Azure backup service for VMs, files and applications



1. Azure IaaS VM backup



2. Azure backup agent



3. Azure backup server/DPM



4. Azure Site recovery for IaaS



1. Replicate to different Azure region



2. Azure site recovery replication for virtual machines(Preview feature)



















Chapter 5: Set up highly available infrastructure in Azure Chapter Goal: This chapter will focus on different design considerations and configuration options for hosting highly available environments in Azure



No of pages: 25







1. Deploying in availability sets



1. Fault Domains and Update domains



2. Availability set configuration



2. Load balancing client requests



1. Azure Load balancer



2. Azure application manager



3. Azure traffic manager



3. Design hybrid connections for HA



1. Active-Active VPN configuration



2. Active-Passive VPN



4. Sample architecture and implementation



Chapter 6: Automated provisioning and Resource performance fine tuning Chapter Goal: This chapter will focus on the tools available for Azure IaaS automated provisioning. It also covers the different performance monitoring and fine-tuning options available for the platform



No of pages: 25







1. Azure ARM template deployment



2. ARM template - Infrastructure as a code deployment



3. Azure automation



4. Infrastructure configuration management



5. Performance metrics monitoring



1. Integration with OMS



2. Alerts and auto remediation



















Chapter 7: Practical Azure security Chapter Goal: This chapter will focus on the different security best practice guidelines for Azure IaaS and their implementation details



No of pages: 30







1. Azure resource access control



1. Resource group segregation



2. Role based access control



3. Resource locks



4. Access audit



2. Azure VM security



3. Azure Networking security boundaries



1. Principles of least access privilege



2. NSGs



3. Virtual appliances



4. Storage security



1. Protecting Data at rest and Data in motion



2. Disk encryption using keyvault



3. Storage Service encryption



5. OMS security solutions



6. Azure security center







Chapter 8: Common IaaS architectures and implementation guidelines Chapter Goal: This chapter will focus on the most common Azure architectures and guidelines for their implementation



No of pages: 30