Microsoft Azure
Planning, Deploying, and Managing the Cloud
2nd ed.
Thank you to my family—Priscilla, Jasmine, and Makayla—for their continued support and all the great people I have had the honor to learn from, especially my co-authors and friends—Marshall Copeland, Anthony Puca, and Micheleen Harris. I also dedicate this book to those using technology to make the world a better place.
—Julian
Thank you to Angela Copeland, my wife, and I’m so happy every day. Thank you to Tara Larson for your friendship and continued support and guidance. Thanks to Keith Olinger and Mark Ghazai for their insight. Thank you to my fellow authors and friends—Julian Soh, Anthony Puca, and Micheleen Harris.
—Marshall
Writing a book requires a lot more time and effort than one would imagine. What made this effort unique was the life challenges that were underway while I did this. I would like to thank my lovely wife, Laura, for her patience, starting many dinners alone through, “I’m almost at a stopping point.” The compounding of life, work, and loved ones makes the little free time one has all that much more valuable.
Special thanks go out to the other authors: Julian Soh, Marshall Copeland, and Micheleen Harris. Without them, this book would not have been completed. Each one of them stepped up at various times to make sure we stayed on track and kept moving forward. Their unique insights into the various aspects of Microsoft’s Azure solutions provides an eloquent summary of some very complex technologies. Special thanks to our conductor, Julian, who kept this train on track!
Working at Microsoft for almost ten years has exposed me to a slew of clients, their challenges, and some of the brightest and most passionate IT professionals I have ever met. Thank you to Pete Luongo and Javier Vasquez for the Specialist teams they’ve built. A talented pool of individuals who continuously keep me and each other on their toes. Thank you to my Account Teams: PJ Kemp, Matt Chong, Chris Peacock, Matt Holzmann, Wole Moses, Jay Bhalodia, David Axinn, Gunnar Pribadi, Kent Cunningham, Susie Adams, and Angela Altimont. This group keeps the customers’ business needs and challenges in the foreground and reminds me of the value these things provide to the customers and public.
—Anthony
Thank you to Rob Callaway, my fiancé, for always providing support and encouragement to keep me going—looking forward to our life together. Thank you to Marie and Steve Harris, my parents, for setting me down the road of science. Thank you to Rachelle Moore, Jessica Faulkner, Jennifer Flannery, and Jeremy Reynolds for your friendship and support. A big thanks to the reviewers, especially Priyanshi Singh, for their excellent work. Thank you to Apress and especially, Shrikant Vishwakarma, for all the tireless guidance and getting us to the finish line. Last, but not least, thank you to my co-authors—Julian Soh, Marshall Copeland, and Anthony Puca—for the partnership and amazing support.
—Micheleen
Since the launch of the first edition of this book in 2015, Microsoft Azure, and cloud computing in general, has come a long way. This second edition is completely rewritten and updated, with more than 70% of the book containing brand-new topics and trends. In the first edition, we focused on managing a data center in the cloud, as reflected by the subtitle we chose at that time. Since then, Microsoft Azure is more than just your data center in the cloud. It is where you adopt advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning, and handle vast amounts of data to help make data-driven decisions. With the focus on these new capabilities in Microsoft Azure, this second edition is all about adopting the intelligent cloud.
There are many resources online and by other authors that focus on all the topics covered in this book. But we found that there is a lack of updated material that goes into more than just an introduction of all the main technologies in Microsoft Azure. Thus, we wanted a book that ambitiously strives to give readers a strong foundation in all the important aspects of Microsoft Azure. If you are new to Microsoft Azure and cloud computing in general, Parts I and II of this book should give you a solid overview of Azure’s capabilities and the business and environmental trends, including planning and adopting strategies. For the more seasoned readers, Parts III through VII cover the different categories of Azure services (IaaS, PaaS, data, cloud-based software development, and AI/ML). Although we tried to build the hands-on exercises in such a way that they are interrelated throughout the book, you can read any part in any order and still gain the benefits of the content without getting lost.
Due to the rapidly changing nature of technology, we have also incorporated a GitHub repository that is dedicated to updating the hands-on exercises and provide more content than we were able to fit within the physical constraints of these pages. We hope that you benefit greatly from this book as much as we enjoyed working on it. We wish you all the best in your quest for knowledge and making a difference in technology.
Special acknowledgment to Kurtis Carlson, a true professional and a great technical resource. Thank you to Priyanshi Singh and Daren Child for being such great colleagues and your willingness to help make this book a reality. Thank you to Shrikant Vishwakarma and the Apress team; we are so thankful for your dedication to this publication.
is a solutions engineer and works at Microsoft, where he helps customers incorporate AI into software solutions, adopt modern data strategies, and use advanced analytics. A mechanical engineer by training with a background in information science, his career has primarily been in IT working with public, private, and nonprofit organizations in the United States and Asia. Find him at https://juliansoh.github.io/ and on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/juliansoh .
is a Microsoft Alumni cloud security architect focused on cyber defenses in public cloud architecture using both cloud-native services and third-party risk management solutions. His work focuses on application and network security in hybrid deployments, secure Kubernetes design, and cloud security blueprints for training teams to enhance “blue team hunting” in the cloud. Find him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/marshallcopeland/.
is a director of Azure apps and infrastructure in Microsoft’s US Federal Government division. Anthony has been consulting with US federal government departments and agencies on private, public, and hybrid cloud technologies for the last three years.
is a data scientist and technical program manager at Microsoft, where she focuses on AI and machine learning. She has been a developer for over ten years and was a bioinformatician before that. With a passion for learning, she has designed and delivered many courses and given workshops and talks at large conferences, such as Microsoft /build and ODSC West. She is the co-founder of the Seattle Artificial Intelligence Workshops meetup. Her personal website is https://michhar.github.io , and she can be followed on Twitter at @rheartpython.
Kurtis is on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/kurtis-carlson/ and his website is at http://KurtisCarlson.com/ .
is a data scientist by training and a data enthusiast by nature. She specializes in machine learning techniques applied to predictive analytics, computer vision, and natural language processing. She has a master’s degree in data science from New York University. Priyanshi is a cloud solution architect at Microsoft, where she helps the public sector transform citizen services with artificial intelligence. She also leads a meetup community based out of New York to help educate public sector employees via hands-on labs and discussions. Apart from her passion for learning new technologies and innovating with AI, she is a sports enthusiast, a great badminton player, and enjoys playing billiards.
is a lifelong data professional with experience as a data architect in Fortune 100 companies, world financial organizations, and research organizations. Daren joined Microsoft as a government data architect in 2016. Since then, he has been involved in data transformation and aiding government organizations with developing a data culture. Daren is a fan of storage-based data access patterns and has taken on a personal initiative to revive enterprise data warehouses across US government organizations.