This week, I had an opportunity to join a meeting in order to share my experience with military veterans on how to get them ready for the first cloud position interview. We had really awesome participation and a number of questions that benefited all attendees.
Thank you, Douglas for an opportunity to help the transitioning service members and veterans with critical technical and career skills development and tips.
The MSSA provides technical training that enables the service members to leverage their core skills and interests to chart—and start—their career journey in IT.
Summary
It was truly a unique event to help our transitioning service members and veterans and Thank You to everyone who took some time in providing follow-up feedback on the following LinkedIn post.
Two weeks ago, I have earned and shared a Microsoft Advertising badge. I got several request to provide information about the training material and my expereince with the exam.
What is the digital advertising?
Well, if you are you new to digital advertising, then these Microsoft courses will provide you an introduction to the digital marketing industry. You could start learning the foundations and then looking at search, shopping, and display advertising.
Earn the Badge
By complete the 4 courses in the Learning Path (in any order) you could earn a digital Badge. As you know, it can be shared and verified on LinkedIn or other social media platforms to demonstrate your new knowledge.
Keep in mind that each chapter has assessment questions
Finally, review all the material and get ready to pass the final assessment
High availability (HA) is an important quality measure of computing infrastructure that is mission-critical for the customer facing applications and overall organization’s systems. High availability permits the computing infrastructure to continue functioning, even when certain components fail.
Thus, cloud solution providers (CSPs) are expected to deliver certain measures and guarantees to claim the high availability of the offered services.
The diagram below, equates Service Level Agreement (SLA) percentual to actual downtime, measured in seconds per week, month and year.
How to achieve High Availability in Azure?
Azure infrastructure is composed of geographies, regions, and availability zones which in turn limits the impact of a physical server or Sofware update failure and therefore limit potential impact to customer applications and data.
The Azure availability zones construct was developed to provide a software and networking solution to protect against datacenter failures and to provide increased high availability (HA) to the Azure customers.
Availability zones are playing very important role in designing your HA solution to meet customer needs. Please, read more about the Azure Regions and availability zones here.
Part 12: Design for high availability
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing HA solutions in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links is gathered with a focus on the exam objectives of the AZ-305 certification exam.
Welcome to the 11th blog post (Part 11/12) of the Azure Architect series to help you get ready for the AZ-305 exam. This post starts the last section of this exam – Design Business Continuity Solutions.
And please feel free to check the previous sections & blog posts listed below if you landed on this page for the first time 🙂
Table of content (blog series)
*** Design Identity, Governance, and Monitoring Solutions ***
Simply put, a Business Continuity (aka, BC) solution is based on a plan 🙂 A BC plan is a predefined approach and procedure for how a business will continue to run when dealing with an emergency.
In another words, it is a process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with any potential threats to your company. These threats could be a natural disasters, such as hurricanes, fires, floods, power outages or an unintended misconfiguration of a system. It could also be a malicious cyberattack as well.
There are many benefits provided by BC planning and Disaster Recovering (aka, DR) planning to your organization when they are drafted and approved across the board, such as:
Improved decision-making
Risk Management
People and Property Protection
Morale boost 🙂
The “Morale boost” element is very important piece, because when employees know plans are in place, they may feel safer. Moreover, it does not just boost morale, but potentially increases the business value perception to customers who recognize the high preparedness and responsibilities of the company.
What are the Backups and Disaster Recovery solutions in Azure?
In the case of service disruption or accidental deletion or corruption of data, recover your business services in a timely and orchestrated manner. The Azure backup and disaster recovery solution is simple to architect, cloud-native, highly available, and resilient.
Backup and Disaster Recovery in azure
Azure Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) services are important services that help you to achieve your company’s reliability goals for all of the system workloads in the cloud or on-premises. It is very important when CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) prioritizes transparency and keep it’s customers informed during and after the service issues.
You could easily target following goals when planning to deliver your Backup and DR services to your most critical customers:
Simplified Management across environments
Azure built-in security controls
Reduced complexity and cost
Extent solutions to Azure with our partners
Part 11: Design a business continuity solution
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing solutions in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links is gathered with a focus on the exam objectives of the AZ-305 certification exam.
Welcome to the 10th blog post (Part 10/12) of the Azure Architect series to help you get ready for the AZ-305 exam. This post finalizes the third section of this exam – Design Data Storage Solutions.
Our next post will be discussing the last section of this exam – Design Business Continuity Solutions.
And please feel free to check the previous blog posts listed below if you landed on this page for the first time 🙂
Table of content (blog series)
*** Design Identity, Governance, and Monitoring Solutions ***
It is very natural to wonder – “what is the meaning of data integration”? In a nutshell, it is a combination of differently sourced data for a high-level overview and analysis. In other words, “Data Integration” – is a common term referring to the requirement to combine data from multiple separate business systems into a single unified view, also known as a single view of the truth.
This unified view is typically stored in a central data repository known as a data warehouse.
Data integration can serve your organization some short- and long-term benefits, including the followings:
✔️ Better Data ✔️ Better Collaboration ✔️ Fast connections between Data Storage ✔️ Increased efficiency and ROI ✔️ Better customer and partner experiences ✔️ A more comprehensive view of your business
What are the Data Integration solutions in Microsoft Azure?
Application integration often requires connecting multiple independent systems, often in complex ways. This white paper explains how the components of Azure Integration Services—API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, and Event Grid—work together to provide a complete solution for integrating both cloud and on-premises applications.
There are several Azure services such as Azure Functions, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Logic Apps are just a few of the services that can help you efficiently solve complex data challenges.
Check out the Overview of Data Integration in Azure from this official resource.
Part 10: Design a data integration solution
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing Data Integration solutions in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links is gathered with a focus on the exam objectives of the AZ-305 certification exam.
A relational data is a set of data that have a certain pre-defined structure. Once this data structure (aka, data schema) is enforced on data then we can start talking about a relational database.
Thus, a relational database (DB) is a collection of data items with some pre-defined relationships. These data items are organized as a set of tables with columns and rows. The tables are used to hold a similar type of information object to be represented in the database.
WHAT is relational data storage in azure?
In Microsoft Azure, relational data could be stored in different forms and shapes. The early approach of storing and running relational databases has been accomplished through Virtual Machine (VM) instances. However, this approach brought a certain operational overhead and required specialized skills within the team to manage those VMs properly.
Nowadays, we could run the relational databases as a managed service (aka, PAAS) in the cloud. In other words, Microsoft Azure helped to offload operational overhead associated with the management of VMs that are assigned to run your database services. All this became possible by the introduction of managed relational Azure Database services like SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.
In this study guide, you will learn about these managed, relational DB services in depth.
Part 9: Design a data storage solution for relational data
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing Data Storage solutions for Relational data in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links is gathered with a focus on the exam objectives of the AZ-305 certification exam.
Welcome to the next blog post (Part 8/12) from the Az-305 series to help you get ready for the AZ-305 exam. This post is the first one that is covering the section – “Design Data Storage Solutions” for this exam.
Please, check the previous blog posts listed below, if you landed on this page for the first time 🙂
Table of content (blog series)
*** Design Identity, Governance, and Monitoring Solutions ***
A non-relational data is a set of gathered or existing data that does not have a strict schema (structure) which is a required condition for a relational data. Of course, when we speak about data in business, the first thing that comes to mind is the database 🙂
In contrast to a relational database, a NoSQL database is one that is less structured/confined in format. Thus, we gain more flexibility and adaptability with non-relational data.
A non-relational database is a database that does not use the tabular schema of rows and columns found in most traditional database systems. Instead, non-relational databases use a storage model that is optimized for the specific requirements of the type of data being stored. For example, data may be stored as simple key/value pairs, as JSON documents, or as a graph consisting of edges and vertices.
In practice, “NoSQL” means “non-relational database,” even though many of these databases do support SQL-compatible queries. However, the underlying query execution strategy is usually very different from the way a traditional RDBMS would execute the same SQL query.
Check out the following major categories for non-relational (NoSQL) databases below:
Document data stores
Columnar data stores
Key/value data stores
Graph data stores
Time series data stores
Object data stores
External index data stores
Microsoft Azure offers a number of services that help you to build these NoSQL databases, and in this post we will cover all of them.
Part 8: Design a non-relational data storage solution
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing the non-Relational Data Storage solutions in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links are gathered with a focus toward the exam objectives of AZ-305 certification exam.
Welcome to the next blog post (Part 7/12) from the Az-305 series to help you get ready for the AZ-305 exam. This post is special and will finalize one of the biggest sections – “Design Infrastructure Solutions ” for this exam.
Please, check the previous blog posts listed below, if you landed on this page for the first time 🙂
Table of content (blog series)
*** Design Identity, Governance, and Monitoring Solutions ***
An IT Migration is basically a movement of data or software from one system to another. Also, depending on the complexity of the project, an IT migration involves data migration, application migration, operating system (OS) migration, and others.
A typical migration project usually involves the movement of data too, which is called – Data Migration. Here is the definition of data migration from Wikipedia.
Data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer storage system to another. Additionally, the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommissioning of legacy data storage are considered part of the entire data migration process.[1][2] Data migration is a key consideration for any system implementation, upgrade, or consolidation, and it is typically performed in such a way as to be as automated as possible, freeing up human resources from tedious tasks. Data migration occurs for a variety of reasons, including server or storage equipment replacements, maintenance or upgrades, application migration, website consolidation, disaster recovery, and data center relocation
In last few years we also have new type of migration – called cloud migration.
WHAT is the migration solution in azure?
There are many different ways you could run your migration projects. Microsoft Azure provides specialized tools to help you migrate your IT solutions from on-premises and other cloud platforms into Azure. Thus, you could take advantage of Azure Migrate offers to you..
Azure Migrate provides a centralized hub to assess and migrate on-premises servers, infrastructure, applications, and data to Azure. It provides a range of tools to help you in the migration process. Please, check an official Microsoft documentation on Azure Migrate services here.
Part 7: Design a migration solution
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing Migration solutions in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links are gathered with a focus toward the exam objectives of AZ-305 certification exam.
A Network Infrastructure is the physical equipment (also known as, hardware) as well as the software applications that support your company’s services to run. Types of network infrastructure include foundational hardware, software, services and facilities.
The physical network infrastructure requires cabling, routers, switches, and other pieces of equipment which help support them and make sure they are connected internally and externally. However, most Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) virtualize this physical infrastructure and provide software defined, virtual networks.
WHAT are the network infrastructure solution in azure?
Azure network infrastructure connects and delivers your hybrid and cloud-native applications with low-latency, with Zero Trust based networking services.
The networking services in Azure provide a variety of networking capabilities that can be used together or separately. Those key capabilities are grouped into four services and described on Azure networking services overview :
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing Network Infrastructure solutions in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links are gathered with a focus toward the exam objectives of AZ-305 certification exam.
An application architecture is a structural map of how an organization’s software applications are assembled and how those applications interact with each other to meet business or user requirements. An application architecture helps ensure that applications are scalable and reliable, and assists enterprises identify gaps in functionality.
The Techtarget
Generally speaking, application architecture defines how applications interact with components such as middleware, databases and other applications. There are many different application architectures like; N-Tier, Web-Queue-Worker, Service-Oriented (SOA), Event-Driven, and others.
WHAT are the characteristics of APPlication Architecture in azure?
The Azure Application architecture requires a structured approach while designing applications that are capable to operate with the following characteristics; scalable, resilient and highly available.
The cloud is changing how applications are designed and secured. Instead of monoliths, applications are decomposed into smaller, decentralized services. These services communicate through APIs or by using asynchronous messaging or eventing. Applications scale horizontally, adding new instances as demand requires.
Microsoft has provided a very valuable resource on Azure architecture that you could check on “Azure Architecture Center“. Check this resource for best practices and patterns for your current or upcoming application that you plan to design and run on Azure.
Part 5: Design an application architecture solution
The references below are taken from official Microsoft docs and focused on designing Application solutions in Azure. You could also find it helpful to check the Microsoft docs and learning paths with [Tutorials] below 😉.
This collection of links are gathered with a focus toward the exam objectives of AZ-305 certification exam.
