AZ-305: Microsoft Azure Architect Design Certification Prep

Estimate total cost of ownership with the Azure cost calculator, analyze current usage, and optimize region-aware compute and storage costs via cost analysis, cost management, and Azure advisor.

Explore cost management in Azure by using virtual machine scale sets, low-priority instances, and dynamic scaling policies to match CPU and memory utilization while optimizing storage costs.

Minimize compute costs by using Azure reserved virtual machine instances to lock in 1-year or 3-year terms, achieving about 18% and up to 32% savings, via the Azure portal.

Navigate Azure Active Directory editions—free, basic, premium P1, and premium P2—covering self-service password reset, multifactor authentication, on-premises synchronization, 500,000 object limit, and pricing.

Explore cost-minimization methods across compute, identity, network, and storage, and learn how Azure monitoring, Azure Application Insights, Azure Policy, and Azure Sentinel with events, routing, and escalation reduce costs.

Explore how Azure Monitor provides a unified platform for logs, metrics, and traces, comparing application insights with native monitoring, and covering activity log, service health, alerts, and log analytics.

Explore how Azure Application Insights analyzes performance, usage, and availability, visualizes component interactions with application map, and exports diagnostic data to Azure Monitor or Event Hub.

Explore access control models—mandatory, discretionary, rule-based, and role-based—along with history-based and attribute-based dynamic security groups, including Azure conditional access and identity protection.

Discover Azure Active Directory as a cloud-based identity and access management solution, covering user and group management, B2B collaboration, single sign-on, and enterprise applications for RBAC.

Learn to monitor Azure Active Directory with security reports, activity reports, and Azure Monitor, identify risky users and risky sign-ins, and leverage log analytics for insights.

Explore the purpose of Azure AD B2C for external users, create and link a B2C tenant to your subscription, and configure applications with identity providers and user flows.

Organize subscriptions using Azure management groups to apply governance, policies, and budgets across hierarchies; inherit conditions ensure consistent access, compliance, and cost reporting for business units and teams.

Retrieve azure role definitions with PowerShell, inspect JSON attributes like name, id, description, actions, notActions, and scope, then filter results to show name, description, or actions.

Explore Azure AD password protection, focusing on banned passwords and smart lockouts to defend identities, and understand licensing for cloud native, hybrid, and customization using P1 and P2 licenses.

Learn to automate infrastructure deployment with Azure blueprints by composing repeatable artifacts, including role assignments, policies, and ARM templates, plus resource groups across multiple subscriptions.

Explore Azure Store Simple, a hybrid cloud storage platform using SSD and HDD tiers, auto tiering, on-prem appliance, encryption at rest, and geo-replication for secure backups and archival storage.

Explore how databases evolved from relational systems to non-relational stores, and how data lakes and warehouses enable analytics and business insights in the cloud.

Discover Azure data lake storage for unstructured data at petabyte scale with high throughput, and configure storage accounts, containers, pricing tiers, and network considerations for scalable data ingestion.

Learn how Azure Data Factory enables hybrid data integration by connecting on-premise and cloud sources, building pipelines with datasets to copy and transform data via triggers or schedules.

Stored access policies add a security layer by controlling shared access signatures, setting start and expiry times, permissions, enabling revocation after issuance, and binding to containers, blobs, or file shares.

Explore authorization options for Azure storage resources, including access keys, encrypted signatures in the authorization header, delegated access with time-limited signatures, and anonymous public containers or blobs for customer-facing apps.

Explore disaster recovery and business continuity concepts, including replication, backups, and recovery objectives, and learn how Azure Site Recovery enables high availability and rapid failover.

Explore archiving fundamentals, compare archiving with backup, and design cost-aware archival storage using lifecycle tiers (hot, cool, archive) to meet regulatory retention and compliance requirements.

Explore fundamentals and strategies for high availability, and learn how to design and connect data centers, services, and connectivity to ensure infrastructure and applications stay highly available.

Learn high availability concepts and how to guard against outages and faults. Design for redundancy with VM skill sets, failover groups, and load balancing, plus traffic manager and monitoring.

Explore deployment fundamentals, Asia-specific deployment approaches, and best practices, then review deployment tools and Azure services to deploy solutions in Azure.

Configure firewall rules and IP access to secure Azure SQL. Integrate Azure Active Directory for access control and enable transparent data encryption, always encrypted, and dynamic data masking.

Discover how azure data warehouse delivers inherent availability via massively parallel architecture and shard-based storage, with snapshots, restore points, and 99.9% SLA, along with security options.