Building cloud solutions can be a complex process, especially when trying to build for large enterprises. One option when first developing your cloud adoption is to fully define and build your management tooling upfront; however, this can take some time and delay your ability to realize the cost benefits.
Another approach is to build a core baseline of services – decide what is most important and must be implemented before you can begin your cloud journey. This is a minimal viable product (MVP) and defines the absolute bare minimum solution.
From there, you can build upon that solution, adding new services or improving existing ones as you develop your cloud offering. Agile methodologies can help here and are ideally suited to building cloud solutions due to the modular nature of Azure’s components.
Once you have a baseline environment, you can iteratively define, design, and build your platform. Each iteration will increase security, develop your governance, bring reliability to your solutions, and increase maturity.
Summary
This chapter completes the beyond the exam topic, and the book. Whereas most of the book has focused on the skills needed to pass the AZ-304 exam, these final two chapters have been a more general look at design considerations required to create and deliver successful designs for Azure-based solutions.
Each organization is very different, and we began the chapter by exploring the differences between two extreme examples – a multi-national corporation with existing systems and governance processes, versus a newly formed start-up. Each type of organization has its own challenges and opportunities, and so we explored some of the more common examples.
Next, we learned how cost management is a critical aspect of running any solution in the cloud, especially when building dynamic systems that respond and scale to usage, rather than more traditional infrastructure whose costs are fixed.
We have seen how Azure landing zones can impact our overall designs and looked at different areas we need to consider to ensure consistency, security, and compliance on our platforms.
Finally, we discussed how an iterative approach to building out our environments can help us get up and running quicker and start realizing the benefits of cloud-based solutions.
Unlike many of the other exams, the AZ-304 exam is about the choice of technology as opposed to how to implement each technology (which is covered by the AZ-303 exam). Therefore, throughout this book, we have looked at the various design choices we must make when building and architecting solutions in Azure.
We have covered the full spectrum of components in Azure, from authentication, authorization, and security, to platform governance, scalability choices, and how to architect highly available solutions.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Functions as a Service (FaaS), and serverless options have all been discussed and their relative strengths and weaknesses highlighted.
As well as looking at each individual technology, we have seen examples of how they can be used to address different requirements.
To help prepare you for the AZ-304 exam, and architecture work in general, I would encourage you to use the examples in this book as a basis for addressing common business needs.
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