AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure with SIMS!

Discover that assignments are simulations you can run, but certificates depend on watching all videos, not completing assignments; use open in new tab to access simulations and expect checkbox issues.

Set up a hands-on lab with Microsoft 365 and Azure, learn to obtain a free Office 365 E5 trial, activate Microsoft 365 E5, and explore Teams trials despite regional limitations.

Create a free Microsoft 365 and Azure account with a free email, verify by phone, and start a 30-day trial via exam lab practice; learn licensing and cancellation steps.

Learn to set up an Azure subscription with a free trial, claim $200 credit for 30 days, and access your subscription to work with Azure virtual machines.

Create Azure resource groups and deploy a Windows Server 2022 VM in vm destination, plus a storage account and a log analytics workspace in east US.

Explore AZ-305 exam content with a deep dive into design concepts, refreshing prior AZ-104 material, and introducing new hands-on topics to keep you current and prepared.

Map data sources for azure monitoring and logging, including applications and operating systems, azure resources, subscriptions, tenants, and on-prem sources, into metrics and logs. Generate insights with alerts.

Explore how Azure Monitor unifies metrics across resources, letting you select scopes, view metrics such as availability, ingress, egress, and latency, and pin insights to a dashboard.

Route logs to an Azure Log Analytics workspace using data collection rules and agents, then query with the Kusto query language to explore Windows event logs and performance data.

Learn to configure alerts in Azure Monitor by creating an alert rule, selecting signals such as virtual machine events, and sending email notifications via an action group.

Explore Azure monitor insights for a quick, thirty thousand-foot view of your resources, showing which storage accounts, networks, and virtual machines are monitorable and how to analyze performance.

Explore the Azure Advisor dashboard to get an overall score and targeted recommendations across cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance, with actionable remediation steps to strengthen your Azure environment.

Azure DDoS protection guards against distributed denial of service attacks, covering up to 100 public IPs, priced around $2,944 per month with overage, while enabling monitoring and resource protection.

Learn how to redo simulations after completing an assignment in Udemy by following simple steps. Go to summary, return to assignment, open instructions, and access the simulation link anytime.

Understand authorization in Azure and Microsoft 365 by examining licenses, roles, and resource-level access, including license assignment, role-based access control, and identity and access management for resource groups.

Explore how Azure RBAC assigns privileges by roles in Azure and Microsoft 365, compare with DAK and MAC, and apply least privilege using PIM for just-in-time access.

Discover how to implement role-based access control in Azure and Microsoft Entra, define role definitions with permissions, and assign roles to users or services, with insights on privileged identity management.

Create a custom RBAC role in Microsoft Intro ID via portal.azure.com, start from scratch, choose permissions, create, assign to a user, and manage or delete the custom role.

Learn how role-based access control applies to Azure resources from management groups to subscriptions and resources, using the IAM blade to assign roles with permissions like owner, contributor, or reader.

Explore privileged identity management (PIM) with role-based access control, just-in-time access, and time-bound approvals to enforce least privilege and audit trails in Azure AD and Microsoft 365.

Discover how to use PIM in Microsoft Entra to grant temporary, just-in-time access by activating eligible roles, approving requests, and performing access reviews.

Learn how access reviews in Azure AD support identity governance by periodically verifying guest and user access, mitigating security risks, and configuring recurring reviews for teams and groups.

Explore how Azure resources are organized in a hierarchical structure with management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups, and how role-based access control scopes from root to individual resources.

Explore managing access with management groups, sub management groups, and subscriptions using iam blades to apply role-based permissions across the hierarchy, from the management group to the resource group.

Explore administrative units in Azure Active Directory, enabling object categorization, role-based delegation of user management, and comparison with on-premises OUs, including premium licensing requirements.

Explore Microsoft Defender for Cloud as a single pane of glass for Azure security, with a security posture score, recommendations, and remediation steps to strengthen admin governance and regulatory compliance.

Use Defender for cloud to locate vulnerabilities by reviewing recommendations, severity levels, and policy definitions; remediate issues, enable MFA on read accounts, and consider vulnerability assessments for servers and databases.

Verify every authentication explicitly and assume breach to enforce zero trust across identities and endpoints, then apply just-in-time, just-enough access with least privilege for data, apps, and infrastructure.

Learn how to manage Azure key vault access using vault access policies, control via the IAM blade, and assign permissions to keys, secrets, and certificates.

Explore how to generate and manage Azure Key Vault keys, secrets, and certificates, understand standard vs premium with HSM, use access policies, soft delete, and networking basics.

Learn to rotate keys in Azure Key Vault via the rotation policy, enable auto rotate, rotate now, and generate a new key, then soft delete or disable the old key.

Configure app registrations in the Azure portal to authenticate users via Azure AD and issue access tokens for an on-prem web app hosted in an internet-facing DMZ.

Register an application in Azure Active Directory and choose accounts for single-tenant, multi-tenant, or personal Microsoft accounts, then configure endpoints and handle access tokens with your web server.

Discover how the Azure AD application proxy publishes on-premises web apps to the cloud without inbound ports, using the Azure AD connector and a cloud proxy for secure SSO.

Publish on-premise apps using the Azure application proxy, install the application connector on your internal server, and manage enterprise apps with app registrations and external URLs.

Remove unneeded resources—storage accounts and key vaults—before the next lesson; delete them, and note you may recreate components with the same or different names, mindful of unique storage account names.

Explore storage accounts as the backbone of Azure storage, detailing blobs, file shares, queues, tables, and disks, with standard general-purpose v2 options and redundancy choices.

Create a storage account in the Azure portal by selecting a resource group, unique name, region, and general purpose standard with hot or cool tiers for blobs.

Configure network access for storage accounts by managing endpoints, enabling from all networks or selected virtual networks, and choosing Microsoft network routing or internet routing for optimized performance.

Learn to authorize Azure AD users to storage accounts by using IAM role assignments, including blob data contributor and owner, with conditional access and container level controls.

Learn to interact with a storage account using Azure AD credentials and fast blob storage for web assets, while managing access with primary and secondary keys and rotation.

Understand how shared access signature (SAS) tokens grant temporary, controlled access to storage, with on the fly generation, defined permissions, expiration, and digital signatures.

Apply stored access policies to control sas token expiration and scope within a container. Learn to create, edit, and apply read-only policies for short-lived, container-specific access.

Explore Azure storage redundancy options—LRS, ZRS, GRS, GZRS—and read access, and compare synchronous versus asynchronous replication across primary and secondary regions for durability and availability.

Configure storage redundancy in Azure by creating or editing a storage account, selecting zone redundant or geo zone redundant options, and reviewing the primary and secondary locations to ensure durability.

Learn to configure object replication between Azure storage accounts by creating a replication rule, selecting source and destination containers such as images, and ensuring the destination exists.

Discover how Azure file shares in storage accounts replace traditional file servers, using SMB, port 445, and map drives, while evaluating tiers like hot, cool, transaction optimized, and premium.

Explore Azure blob storage for hosting any file type in blob containers accessible via http/https. Learn about access levels, SAS tokens, versioning, immutability, worm policies, time-based retention, and legal hold.

Explore relational databases, organized into tables of rows and columns linked by relationships; learn SQL with DDL and DML, define schemas, normalize data, and ensure ACID durability via transaction logs.

Understand database service tier sizing with dtus to balance cpu, memory, reads, and writes for performance and cost, including elastic pools and auto scaling.

Compare Azure database service tiers: basic, standard, and premium, and their backup retention and IOPS for scalable performance. Explore geo and zone redundancy across regions and elastic pool limits.

Create an azure virtual machine in portal.azure.com with sql server 2022 on windows server 2022, enable sql authentication and public connectivity, and verify sql services are running after setup.

Assign a public dns name to the azure sql vm via the portal and save LP SQL server one east us dot cloud app dot azure.com.

Install sql server management studio and connect to an azure sql vm with sql server authentication, trust the server certificate, and use the dns name from the azure portal.

Delete the unneeded SQL resources by force deleting the resource group, which removes all contained objects, and confirm the deletion to move on.

Learn how to create and connect to an Azure SQL Database and server in portal.azure.com, configure authentication and networking, and use SQL Server Management Studio to access sample data.

Set up and manage SQL database access by configuring the server firewall in the Azure portal, adding your current public IP, and understanding IP changes from ISPs.

Enable SQL auditing in Azure SQL databases to log activity, using a storage account, log analytics, or event hub, then review logs in blob container with SQL Server Management Studio.

Explore Azure's purpose-built databases, including Cosmos for NoSQL and SQL options, with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis caching, and migration paths.

Learn to authenticate a SQL database with Azure AD, set an Azure AD admin, create an Azure AD user, grant read access, and connect to the LP database.

Enable dynamic data masking in Azure SQL via the portal, selecting email masking and saving. Observe how non-privileged users see masked emails while admins retain full access.

Learn how Azure database encryption protects data at rest with BitLocker, secures in transit with TLS, and uses transparent data encryption with customer-managed keys in Key Vault or Managed HSM.

Remove the SQL content and related resource groups after object creation, deleting unused resources to streamline your Azure infrastructure project.

Enable Defender for Cloud to monitor SQL databases; learn to create a SQL database and server, review the Defender for Cloud blade, and explore recommendations, alerts, logging, and vulnerability assessments.

Explore non-relational NoSQL databases and how they store data without a fixed schema, using document, key-value, columnar, graph, time-series, and object stores, with Cosmo in Azure delivering fast, scalable performance.

Learn capacity planning for Cosmos DB in Azure, comparing provisioned throughput and serverless, with auto scaling considerations, cost implications, and handling of traffic spikes and unpredictability.

Set up an Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL in the portal, select free tier with 1000 request units and 25 gb, and review and create the account.

Create a Cosmos DB container by configuring the database ID, container ID, partition key (customer ID), and throughput, with optional indexing, unique keys, and Synapse Link support.

Enable global replication in Azure Cosmos DB to protect data across regions, manage multi-region writes, and understand the cost and status during region additions.

Explore Azure data lake storage to centrally store structured and unstructured data at scale, with Hadoop compatibility, hierarchical namespaces, and cost-efficient, secure analytics using blob storage and auto scaling.

Follow Azure portal steps to create a data lake storage account, selecting a resource group, naming, region, premium block blobs, and enabling the hierarchical namespace.

Explore Azure Databricks storage and lakehouse capabilities to process, store, secure, and analyze enterprise data within your Azure cloud, with dashboards, governance, and ai.

Explore how Azure Synapse Analytics centralizes data from Azure Data Lake, Databricks, and multiple VMs into a workspace for analytics, machine learning, Power BI, and data movement.

Register Synapse as a resource provider in the Azure portal to enable it; go to subscriptions, open resource providers, search Synapse, and click register.

Create a sql database and server for use with Synapse, configure firewall rules to permit access, and validate the connection via sql server management studio.

Create a Synapse analytics workspace and a data lake storage account in Azure, configuring resource group, unique names, admin credentials, basic networking, and the data lake file system.

Use a dedicated or serverless SQL pool in Azure Synapse to ingest and store data, index metadata with pipelines, and manage access via role-based security using Synapse Studio.

Create and configure a dedicated SQL pool in Azure Synapse Analytics to enable data ingestion and analysis, choose performance level, assess cost, and connect via SQL Server Management Studio.

Explore how Azure Data Factory orchestrates data from cloud and on-prem sources through pipelines, ETL/ELT, and data flows for centralized ingestion, transformation, and analytics.

Set up an Azure Data Factory in portal.azure.com by creating a resource group, naming the factory, selecting a region, and configuring optional git and networking.

Learn to copy data from a SQL database into an Azure Synapse Analytics SQL pool using Azure Data Factory, including creating connections, configuring source and destination, and monitoring the transfer.

Delete unused data storage resources to conserve Azure credit, focusing on removing the dedicated SQL pool and obsolete resource groups, as demonstrated in the Synapse demo.