Mastering Microsoft Azure: Advanced Services

Explore the cloud's role in replacing on-premises servers and cutting wasted compute by addressing the November spikes, cpu utilization, and downtime on Black Friday.

Learn how the cloud centralizes compute, networking, and storage in provider-managed data centers, offering on-demand servers and hundreds of services like AI, IoT, and Kubernetes, with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Explore the five characteristics of cloud computing—on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service—and learn how they enable scalable, cost-efficient Azure solutions.

Explain the three cloud service models—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—and how control shifts from cloud to user, with examples like virtual machines and web apps, plus a control spectrum chart.

Explore the three cloud types: public, private, and hybrid, and how they differ in access, ownership, and workload distribution, with a focus on the public cloud.

Explore cloud providers and their public services, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. See how Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud lead the market, with Azure the fastest growing.

Explore Microsoft Azure, a public cloud that began with IaaS offerings and virtual machines, grew to the second largest cloud, and now provides the broadest variety of services and regions.

Learn how Azure organizes its global infrastructure into regions and availability zones, with announced regions and paired regions, guiding geo replication and cross-region failover.

Explore Azure services and the cloud landscape, from virtual machines and databases to networks and ai algorithms with central user management, and navigate service categories to start a free account.

Create an Azure free account by verifying email and phone, providing a credit card for pre-authorization, and using the $200 free credit, then proceed to the portal tour.

Explore how to enhance VS Code with specialized extensions, such as the C# extension for dotnet core and the Azure account extension for authentication and deployments.

Azure IoT Hub serves as a secure, reliable central messaging hub for bidirectional communication with millions of IoT devices, with built-in monitoring and support for multiple messaging patterns.

Explore how IoT hub routes device messages to endpoints like event hub, service bus, storage, and custom connectors, and see a real-world flow from device to cloud to Cosmos DB.

Explore iot hub security with device authentication using SaaS token, X509 certificates, or X509 CA authentication, and secure communication via TLS to prevent unauthorized devices and data tampering.

Explore Iot Hub pricing across basic, standard, and free editions, noting cloud-to-device messaging, device twin, and 4 kilobytes per message limits with unit-based pricing.

Learn to create an azure iot hub in West Europe, select standard tier, and configure custom endpoints and routes to route error and valid device telemetry messages.

Register devices for an Azure IoT hub with unique IDs and SAS token authentication, grant only device connect permission, and connect VS Code using the primary connection string.

Install the Azure IoT Tools extension in VS Code, connect to the IoT hub with a connection string, and explore device-to-cloud messaging and routing to the fallback route.

Generate C sharp code to send device-to-cloud messages to an IoT hub, using dotnet core 3.1 and json payloads.

Configure the IoT hub to route messages to storage instead of the built-in endpoint, then validate delivery via metrics and storage containers.

Learn how to send cloud-to-device messages from the IoT Hub to devices using the service client, configure device and service connection strings, and implement code to handle C2D messaging.

Device twins use a json document stored in the IoT hub to reflect and update a device's state, enabling bidirectional state changes, reporting, and targeted queries.

Learn how to work with Azure IoT Hub device twins, update tags and properties, monitor changes via twin messages, and query devices with the IoT Explorer.

Automate device enrollment with the device provisioning service to register devices to an IoT hub and configure them via device twin, using an enrollment list.

Explains IoT Hub features, including 99.9% SLA (excluding the free tier), 4k message size, bulk import devices async via registry manager, and PrivateLink for secure VNet access and failover options.

Explore api management as a gateway that unifies access to back-end apps, enforcing rate limits, quotas, caching, security, and policies via the api gateway, azure portal, and developer portal.

Explore api management pricing across six tiers—consumption, developer, basic, standard, premium, and isolated—and compare SLA, autoscale, dev portal, and vnet options.

Create an azure api management service in the portal with a developer tier and west europe resource group, deploy a ubuntu vm weather api backend, and expose port 8080.

Create a backend app with Azure Functions, deploying a NodeJS function app in the API Management resource group, using an http trigger with anonymous access and testing a hike lookup.

Create a product in API management as a container for APIs with settings. Add hike info and weather info APIs, configure access, publish, and explore product and subscription access control.

Learn how subscriptions secure API access by issuing subscription keys to registered developers via the portal or developer portal, with scopes for a specific API, all APIs, or a product.

Learn to manage Azure API Management subscriptions, view keys, and enforce subscription requirements for APIs and products. Test access using Postman and the OCP API subscription key in headers.

Implement plug-and-play policies to alter inbound and outbound API behavior. Use them for caching validation, performance, and changing values in requests or responses, with heavy customization.

Learn to configure Azure api management policies for inbound and outbound processing, including ip restriction and cache policies to improve hike info api performance.

Show how to implement a rate limit policy that caps calls per renewal period with a rate limiter, and explain why policy order matters for enforcement.

Secure backends by enforcing API management as the exclusive gateway, blocking direct access to the Hike API and Weather API backends, and using vnet peering for VM scenarios.

Deploy api management inside a virtual network vignette, configure a network security group with https and a dedicated port 3443, and secure vm and function backends for external access.

Secure an Azure function by configuring access restrictions to allow only API management traffic from a specific virtual network subnet, using service endpoints and vnet peering.

Connect API management to secure backends by validating connectivity to a function and a virtual machine, using private IP access, service endpoints, and VNet peering while removing public exposure.

Versions define API capabilities and announce breaking changes, while revisions are non-breaking changes that can be tested and rolled back, as developers select versions via path, query string, or header.

Explore how to create and manage API versions in Azure API Management using path versioning (V1), test with Postman, and align subscriptions via products, including versioned backends and rewrite policies.

Learn how to create and test API revisions in the portal, adjust the V1 rate limit from 3 to 10, and promote a revision to current with a changelog.

Discover how monitoring API management reveals issues and health using Azure metrics, logs, and application insights, focusing on analytics and metrics for API management.

Explore monitoring API Management in the Azure portal using metrics, alerts, and analytics to track capacity, requests, and usage across APIs, products, subscriptions, and users.

Discover the developer portal in Azure API Management, a customizable, automatically generated web hub with API docs, an interactive console, and self-service registration and subscription via identity providers.

Explore how to publish and customize the developer portal for API management, subscribe to APIs, obtain a subscription key, and test endpoints using built-in code samples.

Enable Azure Active Directory sign-in for the developer portal by configuring it as an identity provider in API management, publish changes, and explore available providers and deprecation notes.

Learn how the notification hub acts as a central, scalable service for pushing notifications to Android, iOS, Windows, and Amazon devices from any backend, with cost efficiency and tag-based targeting.

Understand platform notification systems (PNS) and how a notification hub unifies cross platform pushes. See how the app communicates with APNs, FCM, and WNS via the hub to deliver notifications.

Compare free, basic, and standard notification hub tiers by pricing, SLA, and notifications; free has 1 million and no SLA, while basic and standard offer 10 million with 99.9% SLA.

Create and configure an Azure notification hub in the Azure portal, connect it to Firebase Cloud Messaging, and implement Android push notifications in Android Studio with test sends.

Learn how tags and tag expressions target push notifications to device groups via the notification hub. Register devices with tags and use tag expressions and logic operators to meet conditions.

Register the device to the tech underscore news tag in Notification Hub; test tagged messages and tag expressions to verify delivery via Android Studio breakpoints.

Learn to send notifications from code using the notification hub with a back-end app, leveraging the hub client and the send FCM native notification async method for Android devices.

Explore cognitive services, a set of apis that enable building cognitive intelligence apps using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Identify the five categories: vision, speech, language, decision, and search.

Explore cognitive services pricing by understanding transaction-based costs for face recognition and language, with tiered rates from 1 million to 10 million transactions and pay-per-use pricing.

Create and configure cognitive services from marketplace, deploy a standard tier resource, retrieve keys and endpoint, and test the sentiment API using Postman to analyze English and Hebrew texts.

Explore Louis, the language understanding service that analyzes text to extract intents and entities for bots and voice-controlled devices, with pre-built domains and no coding required.

Learn to build a LUIS powered home automation app in Azure Cognitive Services by defining intents and entities, training, and publishing a prediction API.

Convert written text to synthesized speech with cognitive services text to speech, offering multiple voices and translation options for audiobooks and assistive uses, via REST API or an SDK.

Launches an Azure text-to-speech resource in West Europe with free tier, explores voices list and ssml-based requests, and demonstrates generating and saving an mp3 audio file.

Explore Azure's computer vision API within cognitive services, covering OCR, spatial analysis for video, and image analysis, with simple REST or SDK usage, no AI knowledge required.

Set up an Azure computer vision resource from the portal, choose region and free tier, retrieve keys and endpoint, and use the API console to analyze image, faces, and objects.

Apply all learned Azure services in a case-study to design a complete cloud architecture, analyze service tiers and costs with the Azure calculator, and download a reusable architecture diagram template.

Meet my sceneries, a personal travel diary app that lets you upload travel photos, auto-notify friends of locations visited, and retrieve memories to relive trips.

define and analyze the functional and non-functional requirements for a mobile photo app, enabling uploads from mobile devices, landmark detection, landmark registrations, notifications, API-based retrieval, with high throughput and sla.

Map the system components by modeling the user, photo upload, processing, landmark detection, and data store for cloud services. Register friends and landmarks and notify them when landmarks are found.

Implement the receive photos component using iot hub's built-in event hub endpoint to handle heavy loads, starting with the basic tier for unlimited devices and 400,000 messages per day.

Explore the process photos component: Azure Functions listen to the IoT Hub event, extract landmarks with Cognitive Services, store images in hot storage, and notify friends via Notification Hub.

Register friends and landmarks component exposes a scalable web API using App Service, backed by Cosmos DB for preferences, with auto scaling and fronted by application gateway with WAF.

Describe the retrieve photos for viewing component as API fetching photos from a storage account, deployed on app services with auto scale behind a gateway and API management consumption tier.

Use the Azure calculator to estimate costs across IoT Hub, Functions, Storage, Cosmos DB, App Service, Application Gateway, API Management, and Cognitive Services, totaling 879 per month.

Download the architecture diagram to guide your azure app design, leveraging IoT Hub, Cognitive Services, Notification Hub, and API Management for scalable cloud solutions.

Review IoT Hub, API Management, Notification Hub, and Cognitive Services through practical usage and a Missionaries app case study, while highlighting cost awareness and Azure best practices.