Hands-On Azure Labs: Applying Practical Real-World Skills

In this section, you will build the foundational network infrastructure for the cloud environment by deploying a resource group, virtual networks, subnets, and NAT gateways. These components will serve as the backbone for all subsequent deployments, ensuring proper organization, security, and scalability.

Azure resource groups allow for efficient management and organization of cloud resources. In this lab, you will create and configure a dedicated resource group to house all the infrastructure for the multi-region deployment.

You’ll learn how to create a Virtual Network (vNet) in the West US region, along with subnets that will allow for segmented network traffic and enhanced security.

To ensure multi-region availability, you will mirror the vNet deployment in the East US region, preparing for redundancy and failover capabilities.

Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateways provide secure outbound internet access. In this lab, you'll configure a NAT Gateway to control egress traffic and prevent unnecessary public IP exposure.

Similar to the previous lecture, this lab will guide you in deploying a NAT Gateway in the East US region to ensure consistent networking policies across both regions.

Now that you’ve completed this section, let’s take a moment to review what you’ve accomplished and the key skills you’ve developed.

In this lab, you’ll configure vNet peering to establish connectivity between the virtual networks that you deployed in the West US and East US regions. This setup will allow seamless and secure communication between resources in both regions without requiring VPN gateways, public IP addresses, or additional networking appliances. By implementing vNet peering, the virtual networks will function as a single, unified network while maintaining separate network policies and resource boundaries.

In this lab, you’ll deploy Azure Bastion to establish a secure, fully managed remote access solution for virtual machines in your cloud environment. By implementing Bastion, you’ll eliminate the need for public IP addresses on virtual machines, reducing exposure to external threats while enabling browser-based RDP and SSH access through the Azure portal. This deployment ensures that all remote management activities occur within Azure’s private network, enhancing security and simplifying administrative access.

Now that you’ve completed this section, let’s take a moment to review what you’ve accomplished and the key skills you’ve developed.

In this section, you’ll deploy and configure two public Azure Load Balancers—one in the West US region and one in the East US region. These load balancers will distribute incoming traffic across the virtual machines in their respective regions, ensuring that requests are handled efficiently and reliably.

In this lab, you’ll deploy and configure a public load balancer in the West US region to distribute incoming web traffic across multiple virtual machines that will be deployed later. This load balancer will ensure that requests are evenly distributed, improving the performance, availability, and fault tolerance of the web application. By implementing a load balancer, the infrastructure will be better equipped to handle traffic fluctuations while preventing service disruptions in the event of a virtual machine failure.

In this lab, you’ll deploy and configure a public load balancer in the East US region to distribute incoming web traffic across multiple virtual machines that will be deployed later. This load balancer will ensure that requests are evenly distributed, improving the performance, availability, and fault tolerance of the web application. By implementing a load balancer, the infrastructure will be better equipped to handle traffic fluctuations while preventing service disruptions in the event of a virtual machine failure.

Now that you’ve completed this section, let’s review what you accomplished and the key skills you developed.

In this section, you’ll deploy and configure two West US virtual machines that will serve as two of the four web servers for your distributed web application. As part of this deployment, you’ll install Internet Information Services on them remotely and add them to the backend pool of the LB-West load balancer.

In this lab, you’ll deploy and configure a Windows Server 2019 virtual machine named WEST01 in the West US region. This virtual machine will be placed within an availability set to enhance redundancy and fault tolerance. It will serve as one of the backend instances for the load-balanced web application, ensuring that incoming traffic can be distributed efficiently. This deployment is a crucial step in building a scalable and resilient cloud infrastructure.

In this lab, you’ll install Internet Information Services on the WEST01 virtual machine using the Run Command feature in the Azure portal. This allows remote installation without requiring direct RDP access, providing a secure and efficient way to configure web services. Installing Internet Information Services on WEST01 is a crucial step in setting up the web infrastructure for the distributed cloud-based application.

In this lab, you’ll deploy and configure a Windows Server 2019 virtual machine named WEST02 in the West US region. This virtual machine will be placed within an availability set to enhance redundancy and fault tolerance, and it will serve as one of the backend instances for the load-balanced web application, ensuring that incoming traffic can be distributed efficiently.

In this lab, you’ll install Internet Information Services on the WEST02 virtual machine using the Run Command feature in the Azure portal. This allows remote installation without requiring direct RDP access, providing a secure and efficient way to configure web services. Installing Internet Information Services on WEST02 is a crucial step in setting up the web infrastructure for the distributed cloud-based application.

Now that you’ve completed this section, let’s take a moment to review what you’ve accomplished and the key skills you’ve developed.

In this lab, you’ll deploy and configure a Windows Server 2019 virtual machine named EAST01 in the East US region. This virtual machine will be placed within an availability set to enhance redundancy and fault tolerance. It will serve as one of the backend instances for the load-balanced web application, ensuring that incoming traffic can be distributed efficiently. This deployment is a crucial step in building a scalable and resilient cloud infrastructure.

In this lab, you’ll install Internet Information Services on the EAST01 virtual machine using the Run Command feature in the Azure portal. This allows remote installation without requiring direct RDP access, providing a secure and efficient way to configure web services. Installing Internet Information Services on EAST01 is a crucial step in setting up the web infrastructure for the distributed cloud-based application.

In this lab, you’ll install Internet Information Services on the EAST02 virtual machine using the Run Command feature in the Azure portal. This allows remote installation without requiring direct RDP access, providing a secure and efficient way to configure web services. Installing Internet Information Services on EAST02 is a crucial step in setting up the web infrastructure for the distributed cloud-based application.

In this lab, you’ll configure the private IP addresses of all deployed virtual machines to use static allocation. This ensures that each virtual machine retains a consistent private IP address, preventing potential disruptions to networking configurations.

In this lab, you’ll test the load balancing functionality of LB-West to ensure that traffic is properly distributed between the WEST01 and WEST02 virtual machines. This verification process involves confirming that incoming requests are routed to both virtual machines and simulating a failure scenario to observe how the load balancer automatically redirects traffic when one of the VMs becomes unavailable.

In this lab, you’ll test the load balancing functionality of LB-East to ensure that traffic is properly distributed between the EAST01 and EAST02 virtual machines. This verification process involves confirming that incoming requests are routed to both virtual machines and simulating a failure scenario to observe how the load balancer automatically redirects traffic when one of the VMs becomes unavailable.

In this lab, you’ll deploy a storage account in the West US region to serve as part of a repository for website images. This storage account will contain a blob container and will later be integrated with Azure Front Door CDN to optimize content delivery. By setting up this storage account and enabling anonymous access at the container level, you’ll ensure that website images can be accessed efficiently without requiring authentication. This step is essential for building a scalable and highly available web infrastructure.

In this lab, you’ll deploy a storage account in the East US region to serve as part of a repository for website images. This storage account will contain a blob container and will later be integrated with Azure Front Door CDN to optimize content delivery.

In this lab, you’ll configure Azure Blob Storage object replication to ensure that all website images stored in the images container of the surfcitywest999 storage account are continuously synchronized to the images container in the surfcityeast999 storage account. This replication process allows for automatic synchronization of all images between the two storage accounts, ensuring that the web application maintains consistent content across regions without requiring manual file transfers.

In this lab, you’ll deploy and configure an Azure Front Door CDN profile named WebsiteImages to serve as the primary content distribution network for website images. Instead of virtual machines retrieving images directly from storage accounts, this setup ensures that all images are delivered through a globally optimized endpoint. This approach improves performance, reduces latency, and minimizes direct storage access costs by leveraging Azure’s content delivery network.

In this lab, you’ll enhance the Azure Front Door CDN configuration by adding surfcityeast999 as a second origin in the default origin group. This adjustment ensures redundancy for website images, allowing traffic to be routed to an alternate storage account if the primary origin, surfcitywest999, becomes unavailable. By configuring multiple origins, the CDN will provide seamless failover protection, improving the overall resilience and availability of content delivery.

In this lab, you’ll configure img.surfcityboats.com as a custom domain for Azure Front Door CDN while keeping the primary surfcityboats.com domain managed in GoDaddy DNS. This setup ensures that all website images are delivered through a single, optimized CDN endpoint, improving performance, reducing latency, and ensuring global availability. By delegating the subdomain to Azure DNS, you gain control over DNS resolution for img.surfcityboats.com while maintaining the rest of the domain within GoDaddy’s DNS management.

In this lab, you’ll create and configure an Azure Traffic Manager profile to manage global traffic distribution for the web application. You’ll configure two endpoints and you’ll use performance-based routing to ensure users hit your website using the endpoint with the lowest latency.

In this lab, you’ll test the functionality of Azure Traffic Manager to verify that it routes users to your website. You’ll also simulate a failure scenario to confirm that Traffic Manager seamlessly redirects traffic in the event of a regional outage, demonstrating its ability to provide fault tolerance and high availability.

In this lab, you’ll configure DNS settings to create a CNAME record in GoDaddy DNS that maps a custom subdomain to the Azure Traffic Manager profile. This setup ensures that users can use a recognizable URL to access boat quotes, and that those requests are routed through Traffic Manager, allowing for global traffic distribution and failover protection. After configuring the DNS record, you’ll test name resolution by verifying that the subdomain successfully directs traffic to your test page on a backend virtual machine.