Azure Cloud Engineering Essentials

Syllabus

Layer 1: Cloud foundations

  1. Course orientation and the system we will build — implemented
  2. Cloud responsibility: on-premises, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS — implemented
  3. How Azure organizes resources — implemented
  4. Regions, availability zones, resilience, scalability, and elasticity — planned
  5. Cost fundamentals, budgets, and cleanup discipline — planned

Layer 2: Compute

  1. Run the application locally and establish the baseline — planned
  2. Deploy the application to an Azure virtual machine — planned
  3. Host the .NET application with IIS on the VM — planned
  4. Measure the management burden introduced by IaaS — planned
  5. Deploy the same application to Azure App Service — planned
  6. Compare VM hosting with PaaS hosting — planned
  7. Scale up, scale out, health checks, and deployment slots — planned
  8. Containerize the application — planned
  9. Deploy with Azure Container Apps — planned
  10. Place AKS in the compute decision map — planned
  11. Add an Azure Functions background task — planned
  12. Choose a compute model for the workload — planned

Layer 3: Networking

  1. Follow a request from the user to the application — planned
  2. IP addresses, ports, protocols, and traffic flow — planned
  3. Azure virtual networks and address spaces — planned
  4. Subnets and workload separation — planned
  5. Network Security Groups — planned
  6. Routes and route tables — planned
  7. Azure DNS and name resolution — planned
  8. Public endpoints versus private connectivity — planned
  9. Service endpoints — planned
  10. Private endpoints and Azure Private Link — planned
  11. VNet integration for App Service — planned
  12. VNet peering — planned
  13. Load Balancer, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door — planned
  14. Web Application Firewall — planned
  15. VPN, hybrid connectivity, and ExpressRoute foundations — planned
  16. Diagnose a broken network path — planned

Layer 4: Data and storage

  1. Storage accounts and storage architecture — planned
  2. Blob, Files, Queues, Tables, and managed disks — planned
  3. Storage redundancy and access tiers — planned
  4. Add Blob Storage to the application — planned
  5. Add Azure SQL Database — planned
  6. Managed database versus a database hosted on a VM — planned
  7. Backups, retention, point-in-time restore, and recovery — planned
  8. Secure database and storage connectivity — planned

Layer 5: Identity, access, and secrets

  1. Microsoft Entra ID foundations — planned
  2. Authentication versus authorization — planned
  3. Azure role-based access control — planned
  4. Users, groups, service principals, and workload identities — planned
  5. Least privilege in practice — planned
  6. Azure Key Vault — planned
  7. Managed identities — planned
  8. Replace a connection-string secret with managed identity — planned
  9. Certificates and environment-specific configuration — planned

Layer 6: Observability and operations

  1. Azure Monitor — planned
  2. Application Insights — planned
  3. Log Analytics — planned
  4. Metrics, logs, traces, and events — planned
  5. Correlation IDs and distributed request tracing — planned
  6. Alerts, dashboards, and action groups — planned
  7. Health checks and availability tests — planned
  8. Basic KQL — planned
  9. Introduce and diagnose an application failure — planned
  10. Introduce and diagnose an infrastructure failure — planned
  11. Operational runbooks and incident response — planned

Layer 7: Automation and infrastructure as code

  1. Azure CLI fundamentals — planned
  2. Idempotence and repeatability — planned
  3. Bicep fundamentals — planned
  4. Parameters, modules, outputs, and dependencies — planned
  5. Recreate the course environment with Bicep — planned
  6. Development, test, and production configuration — planned
  7. CI/CD deployment — planned
  8. Deployment validation and rollback — planned
  9. Infrastructure drift and configuration consistency — planned

Layer 8: Governance, security, and cost

  1. Tags and naming conventions — planned
  2. Resource locks — planned
  3. Azure Policy — planned
  4. Defender for Cloud — planned
  5. Security posture and audit visibility — planned
  6. Budgets and cost alerts — planned
  7. Rightsizing and removing waste — planned
  8. Quotas, limits, and capacity — planned
  9. Shared responsibility revisited — planned
  10. Threat-model the completed workload — planned

Layer 9: Reliability and recovery

  1. High availability versus disaster recovery — planned
  2. Redundancy and fault domains — planned
  3. Retry, timeout, and circuit-breaker concepts — planned
  4. Autoscaling — planned
  5. Backup and restore — planned
  6. Recovery point and recovery time objectives — planned
  7. Regional failure and failover concepts — planned
  8. Conduct a recovery exercise — planned
  9. Confirm recovery instead of assuming it works — planned

Layer 10: Well-Architected review

  1. Introduction to the Azure Well-Architected Framework — planned
  2. Reliability review — planned
  3. Security review — planned
  4. Cost Optimization review — planned
  5. Operational Excellence review — planned
  6. Performance Efficiency review — planned
  7. Tradeoffs among the five pillars — planned
  8. Final architecture review — planned
  9. Final capstone and cleanup — planned