Becoming a Cloud Expert - Microsoft Azure IaaS - Level 3

Explore traffic load balancing in cloud deployments, learn what a load balancer does and why it’s needed, and compare Azure Load Balancer with application gateway.

Explore how a load balancer distributes traffic across a cluster of virtual machines behind a single public IP, enabling scalability and improving performance, availability, and resiliency.

Compare network load balancers and application load balancers (Layer 7), highlighting fast, low-latency routing based on IP and port numbers, versus flexible content-based routing with more latency and complex configuration.

Explore how public and internal load balancers distribute web traffic across front and web servers to content database servers within a multi-tier application.

Explore Azure load balancer as a network load balancer at layer 3/4, delivering low latency and high throughput, with public or internal options, health probes, and automatic configuration.

Set up a web servers cluster on Azure by creating a resource group, virtual network, and security group, then deploy two Linux VMs with Apache and a load balancer.

Discover how to set up a public Azure load balancer, configure a backend pool with two virtual machines, and implement HTTP health probes and a balancing rule.

Learn how availability sets boost the availability of virtual machines within a datacenter, reducing the impact of hardware failures and outages, while balancing SLA, business requirements, and cost.

Learn how resiliency and availability drive cloud reliability by avoiding single points of failure and adding redundancy across servers, networks, data centers, and regions to reduce downtime.

Compare Azure redundancy options from a single virtual machine to availability sets, availability zones, and site recovery across regions, and understand SLA implications for uptime, downtime, and cost.

Learn how to configure Azure IaaS availability sets to distribute virtual machines across fault and update domains, ensuring redundancy during planned maintenance and hardware failures.

Configure and use Azure availability sets to distribute virtual machines across fault and update domains, create new VMs within the set, and plan for load balancing to improve resiliency.

Explore horizontal scaling in Azure with virtual machine scale set to balance capacity and performance. Learn vertical and automatic scaling for capacity adjustments and review the Microsoft Edge skill set.

Learn to monitor health and performance using telemetry data, analyze metrics and logs, and dynamically adjust capacity through vertical and horizontal scaling to optimize cloud resource use.

Discover how vertical and horizontal scaling balance performance and cost, when to scale up or out, their limitations and non-linear costs, and the role of automation and load balancing.

Implement automatic scaling to dynamically allocate resources, scaling out or in based on telemetry metrics and thresholds such as CPU utilization and schedules.

Deploy and manage a load-balanced cluster of identical virtual machines with Azure scale sets, using manual or automatic scaling based on telemetry like CPU, memory, and network traffic.

Provision a source virtual machine, install and configure a web server and application, generalize and capture the VM as an image, then use it to scale with a skill set.

Create a virtual machine scale set from a custom image, configure credentials and instances, attach a load balancer with a public IP, and set up CPU-based auto-scaling rules.

Demonstrates testing an Azure IaaS scale set by triggering scale-out and scale-in with CPU utilization, validating load balancer updates, and generating load via a stress tool on remote VMs.

Explain how a traffic load balancer distributes traffic across a cluster of virtual machines to improve performance, resiliency, and scalability, and summarize network versus application load balancers and scale sets.