Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition

by Iain Foulds

Overview

Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition, is a tutorial on writing, deploying, and running applications in Azure. In it, you’ll work through 21 short lessons that give you real-world experience. Each lesson includes a hands-on lab so you can try out and lock in your new skills.

Summary
You can be incredibly productive with Azure without mastering every feature, function, and service. Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition gets you up and running quickly, teaching you the most important concepts and tasks in 21 practical bite-sized lessons. As you explore the examples, exercises, and labs, you'll pick up valuable skills immediately and take your first steps to Azure mastery! This fully revised new edition covers core changes to the Azure UI, new Azure features, Azure containers, and the upgraded Azure Kubernetes Service.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the technology
Microsoft Azure is vast and powerful, offering virtual servers, application templates, and prebuilt services for everything from data storage to AI. To navigate it all, you need a trustworthy guide. In this book, Microsoft engineer and Azure trainer Iain Foulds focuses on core skills for creating cloud-based applications.

About the book
Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition, is a tutorial on writing, deploying, and running applications in Azure. In it, you’ll work through 21 short lessons that give you real-world experience. Each lesson includes a hands-on lab so you can try out and lock in your new skills.

What's inside

Understanding Azure beyond point-and-click
Securing applications and data
Automating your environment
Azure services for machine learning, containers, and more

About the reader
This book is for readers who can write and deploy simple web or client/server applications.

About the author
Iain Foulds is an engineer and senior content developer with Microsoft.

Table of Contents

PART 1 - AZURE CORE SERVICES

1 Before you begin

2 Creating a virtual machine

3 Azure Web Apps

4 Introduction to Azure Storage

5 Azure Networking basics

PART 2 - HIGH AVAILABILITY AND SCALE

6 Azure Resource Manager

7 High availability and redundancy

8 Load-balancing applications

9 Applications that scale

10 Global databases with Cosmos DB

11 Managing network traffic and routing

12 Monitoring and troubleshooting

PART 3 - SECURE BY DEFAULT

13 Backup, recovery, and replication

14 Data encryption

15 Securing information with Azure Key Vault

16 Azure Security Center and updates

PART 4 - THE COOL STUFF

17 Machine learning and artificial intelligence

18 Azure Automation

19 Azure containers

20 Azure and the Internet of Things

21 Serverless computing

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617297625
Publisher:	Manning
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	7.38(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Iain Foulds is a senior content developer with Microsoft, writing for Azure. He spent over a decade as an engineer building and running virtualization environments and delivering training in Azure.

Table of Contents

Preface xv

Acknowledgments xvi

About this book xvii

About the author xxi

Part 1 Azure Core Services 1

1 Before you begin 3

1.1 Is this book for you? 3

1.2 How to use this book 4

The main chapters 4

Try it now 5

Hands-on labs 5

Source code and supplementary materials 5

1.3 Creating your lab environment 5

Creating a free Azure account 5

Bonus lab exercise: Creating a free GitHub account 7

1.4 A little helping hand 7

1.5 Understanding the Azure platform 8

Visualization in Azure 10

Management took 11

2 Creating a virtual machine 14

2.1 Virtual machine configuration basics 15

Regions and availability options 15

VM images 16

VM sizes 17

Azure storage 18

Virtual networking 19

2.2 Creating an SSH key pair for authentication 20

2.3 Creating a VM from your web browser 22

2.4 Connecting to the VM and installing the web server 24

Connecting to the VM with SSH 24

Installing the web server 26

2.5 Allowing web traffic to reach the VM 27

Creating a rule to allow web traffic 28

Viewing the web server in action 28

2.6 Lab: Creating a Windows VM 29

2.7 Cleaning up resources 30

2.8 Houston, we have a problem 31

3 Azure Web Apps 33

3.1 Azure Web Apps overview and concepts 34

Supported languages and environments 34

Staging different versions with deployment slots 35

App service plans 35

3.2 Creating a web app 37

Creating a basic web app 37

Deploying a sample HTML site 39

3.3 Viewing diagnostic logs 42

3.4 Lab: Creating and using a deployment slot 44

Introduction to Azure Storage 47

4.1 Managed Disks 47

OS disks 48

Temporary disks and data disks 49

Disk-caching options 50

4.2 Adding disks to a VM 50

4.3 Azure Storage 52

Table storage 53

Queue storage 55

Storage availability and redundancy 56

4.4 Lab: Exploring Azure Storage 57

VM-focused 57

Developer-focused 57

5 Azure Networking basics 58

5.1 Virtual network components 58

Virtual networks and subnets 59

Virtual network interface cards 61

Public IP address and DNS resolution 62

5.2 Securing and controlling traffic with network security groups 64

Creating a network security group 64

Associating a network security group with a subnet 66

Creating network security group filtering rules 67

5.3 Building a sample web application with secure traffic 68

Creating remote access network connections 68

Creating VMs 69

Using the SSH agent to connect to your VMs 70

5.4 Lab: Installing and testing the LAMP web server 72

Part 2 High Availability and Scale 73

6 Azure Resource Manager 75

6.1 The Azure Resource Manager approach 75

Designing around the application lifecycle 76

Securing and controlling resources 78

Protecting resources with locks 79

Managing and grouping resources with tags 80

6.2 Azure Resource Manager templates 81

Creating and using templates 82

Creating multiples of a resource type 84

Tools to build your own templates 85

Storing and using templates 87

6.3 Lab: Deploying Azure resources from a template 87

7 High availability and redundancy 90

7.1 The need for redundancy 90

7.2 Infrastructure redundancy with Availability Zones 92

Creating network resources across an Availability Zone 94

Creating VMs in an Availability Zone 95

7.3 VM redundancy with Availability Sets 96

Fault domains 96

Update domains 97

Distributing VMs across an Availability Set 98

View distribution of VMs across an Availability Set 101

7.4 Lab: Deploying highly available VMs from a template 102

8 Load-balancing applications 106

8.1 Azure load-balancer components 106

Creating a frontend IP pool 108

Creating and configuring health probes 110

Defining traffic distribution with load-balancer rules 112

Routing direct traffic with Network Address Translation rules 114

Assigning groups of VMs to backend pools 116

8.2 Creating and configuring VMs with the load balancer 119

8.3 Lab: Viewing templates of existing deployments 122

9 Applications that scale 124

9.1 Why build scalable, reliable applications? 124

Scaling VMs vertically 125

Scaling web apps vertically 127

Scaling resources horizontally 128

9.2 Virtual machine scale sets 129

Creating a virtual machine scale set 131

Creating autoscale rules 133

9.3 Scaling a web app 136

9.4 Lab: Installing applications on your scale set or web app 139

Virtual machine scale sets 139

Web apps 140

10 Global databases with Cosmos DB 141

10.1 What is Cosmos DB? 141

Structured (SQL) databases 142

Unstructured (NoSQL) databases 142

Scaling databases 143

Bringing it all together with Cosmos DB 144

10.2 Creating a Cosmos DB account and database 145

Creating and populating a Cosmos DB database 145

Adding global redundancy to a Cosmos DB database 149

10.3 Accessing globally distributed data 152

10.4 Lab: Deploying a web app that uses Cosmos DB 156

11 Managing network traffic and routing 158

11.1 What is Azure DNS? 158

11.2 Delegating a real domain to Azure DNS 160

11.3 Global routing and resolution with Traffic Manager 162

Creating Traffic Manager profiles 164

Globally distributing traffic to the closest instance 167

11.4 Lab: Deploying web apps to see Traffic Manager in action 174

12 Monitoring and troubleshooting 175

12.1 VM boot diagnostics 175

12.2 Performance metrics and alerts 178

Viewing performance metrics with the VM diagnostics extension 178

Creating alerts for performance conditions 181

12.3 Azure Network Watcher 182

Verifying IP flows 183

Viewing effective NSG rules 184

Capturing network packets 186

12.4 Lab: Creating performance alerts 188

Part 3 Secure by Default 189

13 Backup, recovery, and replication 191

13.1 Azure Backup 191

Policies and retention 193

Backup schedules 196

Restoring a VM 198

13.2 Azure Site Recovery 201

13.3 Lab: Configuring a VM for Site Recovery 204

14 Data encryption 206

14.1 What is data encryption? 206

14.2 Encryption at rest 208

14.3 Storage Service Encryption 209

14.4 VM encryption 211

Storing encryption keys in Azure Key Vault 211

Encrypting an Azure VM 213

14.5 Lab: Encrypting a VM 214

15 Securing information with Azure Key Vault 216

15.1 Securing information in the cloud 216

Software vaults and hardware security modules 217

Creating a key vault and secret 219

15.2 Managed identities for Azure resources 221

15.3 Obtaining a secret from within a VM with managed identity 224

15.4 Creating and injecting certificates 229

15.5 Lab: Configuring a secure web server 232

16 Azure Security Center and updates 234

16.1 Azure Security Center 234

16.2 Just-in-time access 237

16.3 Azure Update Management 241

Combined Azure management services 243

Reviewing and applying updates 245

16.4 Lab: Enabling JIT and updates for a Windows VM 249

Part 4 The cool stuff 251

17 Machine learning and artificial intelligence 253

17.1 Overview and relationship of AI and ML 254

Artificial intelligence 254

Machine learning 255

Bringing AI and ML together 256

Azure ML tools for data scientists 257

17.2 Azure Cognitive Services 259

17.3 Building an intelligent bot to help with pizza orders 260

Creating an Azure web app bot 260

Language and understanding intent with LUIS 261

Building and running a web app bot with LUIS 264

17.4 Lab: Adding channels for bot communication 267

18 Azure Automation 269

18.1 What is Azure Automation? 269

Creating an Azure Automation account 271

Azure Automation assets and runbooks 272

18.2 Azure Automation sample runbook 274

Running and viewing output from a sample runbook 276

18.3 PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) 278

Defining and using PowerShell DSC and an Azure Automation pull server 280

18.4 Lab: Using DSC with Linux 282

9 Azure containers 284

19.1 What are containers? 284

19.2 The microservices approach to applications 287

19.3 Azure Container Instances 289

19.4 Azure Kubernetes Sendee 293

Creating a cluster with Azure Kubernetes Services 294

Running a basic website in Kubernetes 295

19.5 Lab: Scaling your Kubernetes deployments 298

20 Azure and the Internet of Things 300

20.1 What is the Internet of Things? 300

20.2 Centrally managing devices with Azure IoT Hub 303

20.3 Creating a simulated Raspberry Pi device 306

20.4 Streaming Azure IoT hub data into Azure web apps 309

20.5 Azure IoT component review 315

20.6 Lab: Exploring use cases for IoT 316

21 Serverless computing 317

21.1 What is serverless computing? 317

21.2 Azure messaging platforms 319

Azure Event Grid 320

Azure Event Hubs and Service Bus 321

Creating a service bus and integrating it with an IoT hub 322

21.3 Creating an Azure logic app 325

21.4 Creating an Azure function app to analyze IoT device data 328

21.5 Don't stop learning 332

Additional learning materials 333

GitHub resources 333

One final thought 333

Index 335