Azure Training Maps
Overview The Azure Training Maps are a comprehensive visual guide to the Azure ecosystem, integrating all the resources, tools, structures, and connections covered in the course into one inclusive diagram. It enables students to map out and understand the elements they've studied, providing a clear picture of their place within the larger Azure ecosystem. It serves as a 1:1 representation of all the topics officially covered in the instructor-led training. Formats available include PDF, Visio, Excel, and Video. Links: Each icon in the blueprint has a hyperlink to the pertinent document in the learning path on Learn. Layers: You have the capability to filter layers to concentrate on segments of the course by modules. I.E.: Just day 1 of AZ-104, using filters in Visio and selecting modules 1-3 Integration: The Visio Template+ for expert courses like SC-100 and AZ-305 includes an additional layer that enables you to compare SC-100, AZ-500, SC-200, and SC-300 within the same diagram. Similarly, you can compare any combination of AZ-305, AZ-700, AZ-204, and AZ-104 to identify differences and study gaps. This comparison is particularly useful for understanding the extra knowledge or skills required to advance to the next level. Advantages for Students Defined Goals: The blueprint presents learners with a clear vision of what they are expected to master and achieve by the course’s end. Focused Learning: By spotlighting the course content and learning targets, it steers learners’ efforts towards essential areas, leading to more productive learning. Progress Tracking: The blueprint allows learners to track their advancement and assess their command of the course material. Topic List: A comprehensive list of topics for each slide deck is now available in a downloadable .xlsx file. Each entry includes a link to Learn and its dependencies. Download links Note: some files may not be available in web preview so downloading is recommended if you want to view them. Associate Level PDF Visio Contents Video Overview AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate R: 12/14/2023 U: 10/28/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel Mod 01 AZ-204 Azure Developer Associate R: 11/05/2024 U: 11/11/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel AZ-500 Azure Security Engineer Associate R: 01/09/2024 U: 10/10/2024 Blueprint Visio+ Excel AZ-700 Azure Network Engineer Associate R: 01/25/2024 U: 11/04/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel SC-200 Security Operations Analyst Associate R: 04/03/2025 U:04/09/2025 Blueprint Visio Excel SC-300 Identity and Access Administrator Associate R: 10/10/2024 Blueprint Excel Specialty PDF Visio Contents AZ-140 Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty R: 01/03/2024 U: 02/27/2025 Blueprint Visio Excel Expert level PDF Visio Contents AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions R: 05/07/2024 U: 02/05/2025 Blueprint Visio+ AZ-104 AZ-204 AZ-700 AZ-140 Excel SC-100 Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect R: 10/10/2024 U: 04/09/2025 Blueprint Visio+ AZ-500 SC-300 SC-200 Excel Skill based Credentialing PDF Visio Contents AZ-1002 Configure secure access to your workloads using Azure virtual networking R: 05/27/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel AZ-1003 Secure storage for Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage R: 02/07/2024 U: 02/05/2024 Blueprint Excel Benefits for Trainers: Trainers can follow this plan to design a tailored diagram for their course, filled with notes. They can construct this comprehensive diagram during class on a whiteboard and continuously add to it in each session. This evolving visual aid can be shared with students to enhance their grasp of the subject matter. Explore Azure Training Maps! | Microsoft Community Hub Visio stencils Azure icons - Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Learn ___ Subscribe if you want to get notified of any update like new releases or updates. My email ilan.nyska@microsoft.com LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilan-nyska/ Please consider sharing your anonymous feedback <-- Thank you for your support!Azure Course Blueprints
Overview The Course Blueprint is a comprehensive visual guide to the Azure ecosystem, integrating all the resources, tools, structures, and connections covered in the course into one inclusive diagram. It enables students to map out and understand the elements they've studied, providing a clear picture of their place within the larger Azure ecosystem. It serves as a 1:1 representation of all the topics officially covered in the instructor-led training. Formats available include PDF, Visio, Excel, and Video. Links: Each icon in the blueprint has a hyperlink to the pertinent document in the learning path on Learn. Layers: You have the capability to filter layers to concentrate on segments of the course by modules. I.E.: Just day 1 of AZ-104, using filters in Visio and selecting modules 1-3 Integration: The Visio Template+ for expert courses like SC-100 and AZ-305 includes an additional layer that enables you to compare SC-100, AZ-500, and SC-300 within the same diagram. Similarly, you can compare any combination of AZ-305, AZ-700, AZ-204, and AZ-104 to identify differences and study gaps. Since SC-300 and AZ-500 are potential prerequisites for the expert certification associated with SC-100, and AZ-204 or AZ-104 for the expert certification associated with AZ-305, this comparison is particularly useful for understanding the extra knowledge or skills required to advance to the next level. Advantages for Students Defined Goals: The blueprint presents learners with a clear vision of what they are expected to master and achieve by the course’s end. Focused Learning: By spotlighting the course content and learning targets, it steers learners’ efforts towards essential areas, leading to more productive learning. Progress Tracking: The blueprint allows learners to track their advancement and assess their command of the course material. Topic List: A comprehensive list of topics for each slide deck is now available in a downloadable .xlsx file. Each entry includes a link to Learn and its dependencies. Download links Associate Level PDF Visio Contents Video Overview AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate R: 12/14/2023 U: 10/28/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel Mod 01 AZ-204 Azure Developer Associate R: 11/05/2024 U: 11/11/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel AZ-500 Azure Security Engineer Associate R: 01/09/2024 U: 10/10/2024 Blueprint Visio+ Excel AZ-700 Azure Network Engineer Associate R: 01/25/2024 U: 11/04/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel SC-200 Security Operations Analyst Associate R: 04/03/2025 U:04/09/2025 Blueprint Visio Excel SC-300 Identity and Access Administrator Associate R: 10/10/2024 Blueprint Excel Specialty PDF Visio AZ-140 Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty R: 01/03/2024 U: 02/27/2025 Blueprint Visio Excel Expert level PDF Visio AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions R: 05/07/2024 U: 02/05/2025 Blueprint Visio+ AZ-104 AZ-204 AZ-700 AZ-140 Excel SC-100 Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect R: 10/10/2024 U: 04/09/2025 Blueprint Visio+ AZ-500 SC-300 SC-200 Excel Skill based Credentialing PDF AZ-1002 Configure secure access to your workloads using Azure virtual networking R: 05/27/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel AZ-1003 Secure storage for Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage R: 02/07/2024 U: 02/05/2024 Blueprint Excel Benefits for Trainers: Trainers can follow this plan to design a tailored diagram for their course, filled with notes. They can construct this comprehensive diagram during class on a whiteboard and continuously add to it in each session. This evolving visual aid can be shared with students to enhance their grasp of the subject matter. Explore Azure Course Blueprints! | Microsoft Community Hub Visio stencils Azure icons - Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Learn AZ-104 Overview of Mod 01 using Azure Course Blueprint ___ Subscribe if you want to get notified of any update like new releases or updates. My email ilan.nyska@microsoft.com LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilan-nyska/ Please consider sharing your anonymous feedback <-- Thank you for your support!Skill your team to increase performance efficiency of Azure and AI projects
The cost and performance benefits of moving your workload to the cloud are clear — reduced latency, improved elasticity, and great agility of resources — but it’s also critical to learn to manage ongoing performance efficiency beyond initial migrating to see optimal results. Best practices in performance efficiency go beyond designing your workloads so you only pay for what you need; it’s building the best of cloud computing into every design choice. Ideally, a workload should meet performance targets without overprovisioning, which makes the resources, skilling and how-to guidance offered by Azure Essentials crucial considerations for any team looking to scale efficiently. Built to provide help at your point of need, the resources available in Azure Essentials have helped clients complete their app migrations 30% faster (an average of 2.7 weeks) from normal, according to a November 2024 research study by IDC. They also experienced 73% fewer unplanned outages, leading to a 94% decrease in associated revenue losses. In this blog, we’ll review how Azure Essentials skilling, tools and frameworks can help your team build resilient, efficient workloads, and introduce self-paced training on Microsoft Learn to help you Elevate reliability, security, and ongoing performance of Azure and AI projects. Maximize Azure efficiency with free tools and expert guidance Achieving basic operational status is challenging enough— scaling introduces additional complexity that can compromise user experience and exasperate latency issues. Teams tap into free training and comprehensive guidance to improve workload performance efficiency by optimizing migration speed, operational effectiveness, and system resiliency. Azure Essentials provides all these resources in one place to accelerate efficiency and monitor workloads to optimize ongoing performance. Tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Advisor that provide continuous monitoring with real-time insights and automated recommendations, while automated testing and remediation using Azure Automation and Azure Functions proactively address performance bottlenecks. These tools collect telemetry data from workloads and their supporting resources to give architectural recommendations and performance metrics that are aligned to the guidance routed in best practices. Learn to apply efficiency principles to achieve and sustain performance Learning to monitor performance efficiency and applying them at each stage of your workload’s lifecycle are equally important. Recognizing this challenge, our Plan on Microsoft Learn titled Elevate reliability, security, and ongoing performance of Azure and AI projects offers curated skilling to help your team improve reliability, security, and performance in your Azure projects, and explore best practices for deploying Azure landing zones and designing optimized workloads. After completing the Plan, you should be able to: Use Azure Well-Architected Framework to build effective solutions that balance performance efficiency, security, reliability, cost optimization, and operational excellence and learn about the model of shared responsibility with your cloud provider. Make effective decisions about how to implement FinOps, use available Microsoft resources and solutions for FinOps, and conduct a FinOps iteration. Utilize Azure savings plans to save your organization money on compute. Purchase and use the right reserved instance for your cloud needs and perform basic reporting on your cloud needs. Maximize workload efficiency with Azure Well-Architected Framework In the skilling modules shared here, developers learn to maximize workload performance efficiency through a comprehensive approach in the Azure Well-Architected Framework. It emphasizes scalability planning and resource optimization, enabling applications to handle increased demands while maintaining cost effectiveness. Rather than treating performance as an afterthought, the framework integrates it into the early design process, allowing developers to build optimization directly into their applications. This approach balances performance with other critical factors like cost, reliability, and security to create well-rounded solutions that meet business needs. The framework views performance efficiency as an ongoing journey, providing tools like Azure Advisor and Well-Architected Review for continuous assessment and improvement. By establishing clear performance targets based on business requirements and promoting regular testing and monitoring, it ensures applications maintain their efficiency as they evolve. This systematic approach helps your team create and maintain high-performing workloads that adapt to changing business demands while optimizing resource usage. Scale your workloads with a design checklist and assessment In addition to the curated lessons in our Plan on Microsoft Learn, we also created an Azure Quickstart guide with additional learning resources to help you build a comprehensive strategy for performance efficiency, including: > Performance efficiency design principles Get crucial insight on establishing realistic performance targets and designing for capacity requirements to ensure sustained performance. This document explores optimization strategies, including dedicated cycles for performance enhancement and the utilization of monitoring tools for trend analysis. You’ll also learn the importance of technology adoption in driving performance improvements and the mitigation of adverse effects from updates, enabling you to construct resilient and high-performing cloud solutions. > Design review checklist for performance efficiency This checklist helps you scale your system to meet growing workload demands while maintaining efficient performance. When designing for performance, consider how cost, complexity, new requirements, technical debt, reporting, and operational work affect your system's efficiency. > Performance efficiency tradeoffs When setting performance targets and designing for efficiency, it’s important to consider how your decisions affect other architectural pillars. Performance optimizations may enhance some aspects while requiring tradeoffs in others. This article lists example tradeoffs you might encounter when designing for performance efficiency, including: Reliability: Optimizing for performance efficiency can compromise reliability by reducing redundancy and increasing complexity. Security: Security controls may be weakened by performance optimizations that reduce security measures, expand the attack surface, or decrease segmentation. Cost optimization: Cost saving measures like avoiding overprovisioning, managing the cost of added components, and ensuring investments align with functional requirements can limit efficiency. Operational excellence: Performance optimizations can reduce observability, increase operational complexity, and create culture stress. Azure Well-Architected Review assessment This Microsoft Assessment helps you examine the performance efficiency of your workloads through the lens of the Azure Well-Architected Review Framework. The self-guided assessment takes about an hour to complete, after which you will receive pragmatic recommendations based on your specific needs. Ensure a positive user experience while optimizing resources Performance efficiency is crucial when developing workloads as it directly impacts user experience and operational costs. You’ll find all of the Azure Essentials resources you need to get started in the Azure Essentials resource kit. Ready to get started? Begin the Plan on Microsoft Learn to Elevate reliability, security, and ongoing performance of Azure and AI projects, and ensure your applications scale effectively while maintaining responsiveness and optimizing resource utilization.
Cross-Region Resiliency for Ecommerce Reference Application
Authors: Radu Dilirici (radudilirici@microsoft.com) Ioan Dragan (ioan.dragan@microsoft.com) Ciprian Amzuloiu (camzuloiu@microsoft.com) Introduction The initial Resilient Ecommerce Reference Application demonstrated the best practices to achieve regional resiliency using Azure’s availability zones. Expanding on this foundation, in the current article we aim to achieve cross-region resiliency, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery capabilities across multiple geographic regions. This article outlines the enhancements made to extend the application into a cross-region resilient architecture. The app is publicly available on GitHub and can be used for educational purposes or as a starting point for developing cross-region resilient applications. Overview of Cross-Region Enhancements The main architectural change needed to extend the application to a cross-region approach was to replicate the existing zonal resilient setup across multiple Azure regions and enable failover mechanisms for seamless operation during regional outages. Below is a visual representation of the new architecture: Component Details Networking Architecture The networking architecture has been extended to support cross-region traffic management. Azure Front Door serves as the global entry point, routing traffic to the primary region. In case of a disaster, the traffic is redirected to the secondary region. Global Virtual Network Peering is used to link together the virtual networks of the two regions. This enables the Redis Caches and SQL Databases to communicate with each other, keeping them in sync and allowing them to perform the switchover procedure. This change allowed us to remove the previous DNS zone groups. Service Endpoints provide secure and direct connectivity with the Azure Virtual Network for the SQL Databases and Key Vault. They allow access to these services without exposing them to the public internet, reducing the attack surface and enhancing security. Storage Architecture Azure SQL Database, Azure Cache for Redis and Azure Container Registry now employ geo-replication to ensure data availability across regions. Azure Key Vault is cross-region resilient by default as it automatically replicates the data to the Azure paired region. Read more about geo-replication for Azure SQL and Azure Cache for Redis. Compute Architecture The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters are deployed across multiple regions , with each cluster running in a minimum of three Availability Zones. The autoscaling and load distribution mechanisms from the original setup are retained, ensuring optimal performance and high availability. Read more about multi-region AKS clusters. The application supports both Active-Active and Active-Passive states, determined by the AKS configuration. In an Active-Active state, the secondary AKS is always running, providing a faster switchover at the cost of higher expenses. Conversely, in an Active-Passive state, the secondary AKS is deployed but not started, reducing costs but resulting in a slower switchover. Additionally, the secondary AKS can be configured with fewer resources for further cost savings. Failover The failover procedure consists of migrating the compute, storage and networking services to the secondary region. Firstly, the AKS cluster is started in the secondary region. In an Active-Active configuration, this step is skipped as the cluster is already running. Then, the SQL Database and Redis Cache are synced with their replicas and the secondary instances are elevated to the primary role. The traffic is reconfigured through the Front Door profile to hit the services in the new region. Controlled failover is crucial for keeping systems running smoothly during a disaster. When things go wrong, an on-call engineer can start the failover process to quickly move operations to a backup system, minimizing any potential issues. Follow this guide to start experimenting with failover over the reference application.Empowering Disaster Recovery for Azure VMs with Azure Site Recovery and Terraform
Discover how to ensure business continuity and achieve disaster recovery for your Azure Virtual Machines with ease. Learn how to integrate seamlessly with Azure Site Recovery using Terraform, providing a simple, secure, and cost-effective way to replicate VMs across regions. Stay prepared for any outage with a failover process that keeps your apps running, all while paying only for storage and traffic to the secondary region. Don't miss this opportunity to fortify your VM infrastructure and maintain uninterrupted operations!Demystifying Azure OpenAI Networking for Secure Chatbot Deployment
Embark on a technical exploration of Azure's networking features for building secure chatbots. In this article, we'll dive deep into the practical aspects of Azure's networking capabilities and their crucial role in ensuring the security of your OpenAI deployments. With real-world use cases and step-by-step instructions, you'll gain practical insights into optimizing Azure and OpenAI for your projects.Availability Zone Resiliency on Ecommerce Reference Application
The Resilient Ecommerce Reference Application is a synthetic workload that mirrors a simple, bare-bones, e-commerce platform. The purpose of it is to demonstrate how to use Azure Resiliency best practices to achieve availability during zonal outages or components outages.Announcing comprehensive guidance for AI adoption and architecture
The pace of AI innovation is moving incredibly fast with new models and solutions emerging regularly. To meet the pace of technological advancements, organizations are striving to meet the demand for scalable, efficient AI solutions. The rapidity of change places enormous pressure on organizations to scale quickly while also ensuring reliability, security, performance and cost-efficiency needs are met along the way. According to Rand Research, over 80% of early AI adoptions fail because customers miss critical steps in preparing their organizations to consider all aspects of building and running AI workloads. Microsoft is committed to helping organizations successfully navigate this journey of cloud and AI transformation. Over the past 18 months, Microsoft has published design patterns, baseline reference architectures, application landing zones, and a variety of Azure service guides for Azure OpenAI workloads. We have also developed specific financial best practices, as well as pricing and cost management features to make it easier to optimize AI investments. This guidance and features have been pulled together within Azure Essentials. Azure Essentials brings together curated best practices and product experiences from customers and partners along with reference architectures, skilling, tools, and resources into a single destination to help you maximize the value of your cloud investments. The Azure Essentials resource kit includes detailed guidance tailored to specific use cases and business scenarios including achieving secure migration, activating your data for AI innovation, and building and modernizing AI applications. As you prepare to adopt AI at scale, the guidance within the Azure Essentials resource kit helps you become AI-ready. This week, we are excited to announce industry-leading guidance for AI adoption and architectural design. This guidance ties together all of the content from the past 18 months into a comprehensive methodical approach that sets up the organization for AI success, while ensuring that AI workloads are well-architected. Through thousands of customer engagements focused on AI adoption, teams of Microsoft cloud solution architects, product engineers and content developers have developed specific guidance for the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) and Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF). As a result, all of the recommendations and best practices are based on customer-proven experience that future customers can count on. New: Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) – AI scenario The AI scenario within the Cloud Adoption Framework provides prescriptive guidance that prepares organizations to adopt AI at scale. Over the past nine months, we’ve had over 100 Microsoft’s solution architects contribute their AI adoption knowledge to this guidance. The result of this collaboration is a roadmap comprised of checklists that are segmented for “Startups” or “Enterprises”. These checklists make it possible to start your adoption at any phase, while also double-checking that you haven’t missed anything along the way. One hallmark of this guidance is the technology strategy decision tree. It provides very succinct and consumable logic to decide which AI technology works best for your specific AI strategy. To see the full tree, click on this link. Most (if not all) customers want to implement and adopt AI responsibly. The ramifications and risk of not doing so are just too costly. Thus, the CAF methodologies have also been adapted to Responsible AI principles so organizations can build an AI foundation that supports the design, governance, and ongoing management of responsible AI workloads. It helps users with everything from developing an adoption strategy through managing AI workloads in production. NEW: Well-Architected Framework (WAF) – AI workloads The AI workload guidance within the Azure Well-Architected Framework is a new set of best practices that allows AI architects to meet the functional and non-functional requirements for reliability, security, performance efficiency, operational excellence, and cost optimization. Designed to instill confidence in workload teams to make intelligent decisions when designing their AI workloads, the new WAF guidance for AI workloads takes a broader view covering architectural considerations at all levels of the stack, including infrastructure, data layers, and application logic. Thus, you’ll find guidance about each of the WAF pillars blended into all levels. The WAF AI enhancements we’re announcing this week build upon the Azure Well-Architected Framework refresh we launched last year. We’ve added checklists and tradeoffs to all pillars which helps make the guidance more actionable for workload teams, including solution architects, DevOps engineers, and data scientists. And the WAF components are more actionable through workload designs, reference architectures, assessments, Azure Advisor recommendations, and Azure service guides. The WAF AI workload guidance also covers both traditional machine learning and generative AI architectures – ensuring comprehensive support for your AI projects. Prepare to scale your AI adoption We are confident that this comprehensive guidance will support your organization in building and deploying AI solutions responsibly and effectively. Stay tuned for more updates and resources to help you on your AI adoption journey. The CAF and WAF AI adoption and architecture guidance makes it possible to adopt AI at scale while fully aligning to Trustworthy AI principles. This guidance is also embedded within Azure Essentials which provides detailed step-by-step guidance through the AI adoption journey, thus providing organizations with a clear path to maximize the value of their AI investment. As you prepare to become AI-ready, these are some great resources to get you started. Access the Cloud Adoption Framework for AI scenario documentation to get the guidance you need to ensure you’re ready to adopt AI at scale. Leverage the Azure Well-Architected Framework for AI workloads documentation to obtain the necessary guidance to securely design, build and manage your AI workloads. Discover comprehensive skilling with free, self-paced Azure AI Plans on Learn to further develop your Azure adoption skills so you can begin your AI adoption journey with confidence. Learn more about Azure Innovate and Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Essentials to understand how they can help you accelerate AI adoption and drive innovation in your business. Ready to take action? Connect with Microsoft Azure sales or reach out to a qualified partner. If you have a Unified Contract with Microsoft Support, there are multiple engagements opportunities that are based on CAF and WAF to help you accelerate your Azure and AI deployments.
