AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Questions and Answers

Before you upload a Windows virtual machine (VM) from on-premises to Azure, you must prepare the virtual hard disk (VHD or VHDX).

Scenario: WebApp1 has a web tier that uses Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and a database tier that runs Microsoft SQL Server 2016. The web tier and the database tier are deployed to virtual machines that run on Hyper-V.

References:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/a zure/active-directory/hybrid/how-to-connect-health-operations

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Directory synchronization between Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and corp.fabrikam.com must not be affected by a link failure between Azure and the on-premises network. (This requires domain controllers in Azure)

Users on the on-premises network must be able to authenticate to corp.fabrikam.com if an Internet link fails. (This requires domain controllers on-premises)

Box 1: Yes

Any new deployments to Azure must be redundant in case an Azure region fails.

Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct client requests to the most appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method and the health of the endpoints. An endpoint is any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure. Traffic Manager provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models. Traffic Manager is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

Box 2: Yes

Recent changes in Azure brought some significant changes in autoscaling options for Azure Web Apps (i.e. Azure App Service to be precise as scaling happens on App Service plan level and has effect on all Web Apps running in that App Service plan).

Box 3: No

Traffic Manager provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models. Traffic Manager is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

https://docs.microsoft. com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/long-term-retention-overview

In Azure SQL Database, you can configure a database with a long-term backup retention policy (LTR) to automatically retain the database backups in separate Azure Blob storage containers for up to 10 years

Box 1: Azure AD Identity Protection

Azure AD Identity Protection helps you manage the roll-out of Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) registration by configuring a Conditional Access policy to require MFA registration no matter what modern authentication app you are signing in to.

Scenario: Users that manage the production environment by using the Azure portal must connect from a hybrid Azure AD-joined device and authenticate by using Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

Box 2: Sign-in risk policy...

Scenario: The Litware.com tenant has a conditional access policy named capolicy1. Capolicy1 requires that when users manage the Azure subscription for a production environment by using the Azure portal, they must connect from a hybrid Azure AD-joined device.

Identity Protection policies we have two risk policies that we can enable in our directory.

Sign-in risk policy

User risk policy

Box 1: 3

Scenario: App1 must meet the following requirements:

Be hosted in an Azure region that supports availability zones.

Maintain availability if two availability zones in the local Azure region fail.

A host group is a resource that represents a collection of dedicated hosts. You create a host group in a region and an availability zone, and add hosts to it.

Use Availability Zones for fault isolation

Availability zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. A host group is created in a single availability zone. Once created, all hosts will be placed within that zone. To achieve high availability across zones, you need to create multiple host groups (one per zone) and spread your hosts accordingly.

Box 2: 1

Scenario: App1 must meet the following requirements:

Be hosted on Azure virtual machines that support automatic scaling.

An Azure virtual machine scale set can automatically increase or decrease the number of VM instances that run your application. This automated and elastic behavior reduces the management overhead to monitor and optimize the performance of your application.

Scenario: All Azure SQL databases in the production environment must have Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled.

Step 1: Create an Azure policy definition that uses the deployIfNotExists identity.

The first step is to define the roles that deployIfNotExists and modify needs in the policy definition to successfully deploy the content of your included template.

Step 2: Create an Azure policy assignment

When creating an assignment using the portal, Azure Policy both generates the managed identity and grants it the roles defined in roleDefinitionIds.

Step 3: Invoke a remediation task

Resources that are non-compliant to a deployIfNotExists or modify policy can be put into a compliant state through Remediation. Remediation is accomplished by instructing Azure Policy to run the deployIfNotExists effect or the modify operations of the assigned policy on your existing resources and subscriptions, whether that assignment is to a management group, a subscription, a resource group, or an individual resource.

During evaluation, the policy assignment with deployIfNotExists or modify effects determines if there are non-compliant resources or subscriptions. When non-compliant resources or subscriptions are found, the details are provided on the Remediation page.

Box 1: The Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator estimates the cost savings you can realize by migrating your workloads to Azure.

Note: The TCO Calculator recommends a set of equivalent services in Azure that will support your applications. Our analysis will show each cost area with an estimate of your on-premises spend versus your spend in Azure. There are several cost categories that either decrease or go away completely when you move workloads to the cloud.

Box 2: Azure Hybrid Benefit

Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps you to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud. It works by letting you use your on-premises Software Assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure. And now, this benefit applies to RedHat and SUSE Linux subscriptions, too.

Scenario:

Litware identifies the following security and compliance requirements:

Once App1 is migrated to Azure, you must ensure that new data can be written to the app, and the modification of new and existing data is prevented for a period of three years.

On-premises users and services must be able to access the Azure Storage account that will host the data in App1.

Access to the public endpoint of the Azure Storage account that will host the App1 data must be prevented.

All Azure SQL databases in the production environment must have Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled.

App1 must not share physical hardware with other workloads.

Box 1: SQL Managed Instance

Scenario: Once migrated to Azure, DB1 and DB2 must meet the following requirements:

Maintain availability if two availability zones in the local Azure region fail.

Fail over automatically.

Minimize I/O latency.

The auto-failover groups feature allows you to manage the replication and failover of a group of databases on a server or all databases in a managed instance to another region. It is a declarative abstraction on top of the existing active geo-replication feature, designed to simplify deployment and management of geo-replicated databases at scale. You can initiate a geo-failover manually or you can delegate it to the Azure service based on a user-defined policy. The latter option allows you to automatically recover multiple related databases in a secondary region after a catastrophic failure or other unplanned event that results in full or partial loss of the SQL Database or SQL Managed Instance availability in the primary region.

Box 2: Business critical

SQL Managed Instance is available in two service tiers:

General purpose: Designed for applications with typical performance and I/O latency requirements.

Business critical: Designed for applications with low I/O latency requirements and minimal impact of underlying maintenance operations on the workload.

Scenario: The Network Contributor built-in RBAC role must be used to grant permissions to the network administrators for all the virtual networks in all the Azure subscriptions.

RBAC roles must be applied at the highest level possible.

Private Endpoint securely connect to storage accounts from on-premises networks that connect to the VNet using VPN or ExpressRoutes with private-peering.

Private Endpoint also secure your storage account by configuring the storage firewall to block all connections on the public endpoint for the storage service.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/expressr oute/expressroute-faqs#microsoft-peering

Scenario: Once App1 is migrated to Azure, you must ensure that new data can be written to the app, and the modification of new and existing data is prevented for a period of three years.

As an administrator, you can lock a subscription, resource group, or resource to prevent other users in your organization from accidentally deleting or modifying critical resources. The lock overrides any permissions the user might have.

Box 1: Standard general-purpose v2

Standard general-purpose v2 supports Blob Storage.

Azure Storage provides data protection for Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

Scenario:

Litware identifies the following security and compliance requirements:

Once App1 is migrated to Azure, you must ensure that new data can be written to the app, and the modification of new and existing data is prevented for a period of three years.

On-premises users and services must be able to access the Azure Storage account that will host the data in App1.

Access to the public endpoint of the Azure Storage account that will host the App1 data must be prevented.

All Azure SQL databases in the production environment must have Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled.

App1 must NOT share physical hardware with other workloads.

Box 2: NFSv3

Scenario: Plan: Migrate App1 to Azure virtual machines.

Blob storage now supports the Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol. This support provides Linux file system compatibility at object storage scale and prices and enables Linux clients to mount a container in Blob storage from an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) or a computer on-premises.

With Cosmos DB's novel multi-region (multi-master) writes replication protocol, every region supports both writes and reads. The multi-region writes capability also enables:

Unlimited elastic write and read scalability.

99.999% read and write availability all around the world.

Guaranteed reads and writes served in less than 10 milliseconds at the 99th percentile.

Scenario: To access the resources in Azure, App1 must use the managed identity of the virtual machines that will host the app.

Managed identities provide an identity for applications to use when connecting to resources that support Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication. Applications may use the managed identity to obtain Azure AD tokens.

Use Azure File Sync to centralize your organization's file shares in Azure Files, while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of an on-premises file server. Azure File Sync transforms Windows Server into a quick cache of your Azure file share.

You need an Azure file share in the same region that you want to deploy Azure File Sync.

Azure Cosmos DB Table API has

Single-digit millisecond latency for reads and writes, backed with <10-ms latency reads and <15-ms latency writes at the 99th percentile, at any scale, anywhere in the world.

Automatic and complete indexing on all properties, no index management.

Turnkey global distribution from one to 30+ regions. Support for automatic and manual failovers at any time, anywhere in the world.

Azure Container Instances (ACI) lets you quickly deploy container instances without additional infrastructure overhead. When you connect with AKS, ACI becomes a secured, logical extension of your AKS cluster. The virtual nodes component, which is based on Virtual Kubelet, is installed in your AKS cluster that presents ACI as a virtual Kubernetes node. Kubernetes can then schedule pods that run as ACI instances through virtual nodes, not as pods on VM nodes directly in your AKS cluster.

Your application requires no modification to use virtual nodes. Deployments can scale across AKS and ACI and with no delay as cluster autoscaler deploys new nodes in your AKS cluster.

Note: AKS clusters can scale in one of two ways:

The cluster autoscaler watches for pods that can't be scheduled on nodes because of resource constraints. The cluster then automatically increases the number of nodes.

The horizontal pod autoscaler uses the Metrics Server in a Kubernetes cluster to monitor the resource demand of pods. If an application needs more resources, the number of pods is automatically increased to meet the demand.

Requirements: Identity Requirements

Contoso identifies the following requirements for managing Fabrikam access to resources:

Every month, an account manager at Fabrikam must review which Fabrikam users have access permissions to App1. Accounts that no longer need permissions must be removed as guests.

The solution must minimize development effort.

Box 1: The Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM)

When should you use access reviews?

Too many users in privileged roles: It's a good idea to check how many users have administrative access, how many of them are Global Administrators, and if there are any invited guests or partners that have not been removed after being assigned to do an administrative task. You can recertify the role assignment users in Azure AD roles such as Global Administrators, or Azure resources roles such as User Access Administrator in the Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) experience.

Box 2: Access reviews

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) access reviews enable organizations to efficiently manage group memberships, access to enterprise applications, and role assignments. User's access can be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure only the right people have continued access.

Scenario: App1 has the following data requirements:

Each instance will write data to a data store in the same availability zone as the instance.

Data written by any App1 instance must be visible to all App1 instances.

Azure Cosmos DB: Each partition across all the regions is replicated. Each region contains all the data partitions of an Azure Cosmos container and can serve reads as well as serve writes when multi-region writes is enabled.

Box 1: Azure Files

Scenario: App2 has the following file storage requirements:

Save files to an Azure Storage account.

Replicate files to an on-premises location.

Ensure that on-premises clients can read the files over the LAN by using the SMB protocol.

Box 2: Azure File Sync

Use Azure File Sync to centralize your organization's file shares in Azure Files, while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of an on-premises file server. Azure File Sync transforms 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.

Scenario: Security Requirement

All secrets used by Azure services must be stored in Azure Key Vault.

Services that require credentials must have the credentials tied to the service instance. The credentials must NOT be shared between services.

Box 1: A service principal

A service principal is a type of security principal that identifies an application or service, which is to say, a piece of code rather than a user or group. A service principal's object ID is known as its client ID and acts like its username. The service principal's client secret acts like its password.

Note: Authentication with Key Vault works in conjunction with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), which is responsible for authenticating the identity of any given security principal.

A security principal is an object that represents a user, group, service, or application that's requesting access to Azure resources. Azure assigns a unique object ID to every security principal.

Box 2: A role assignment

You can provide access to Key Vault keys, certificates, and secrets with an Azure role-based access control.