What this book covers
Chapter 1, Azure and Cloud Fundamentals, recaps some of the fundamentals of cloud computing and some important concepts of Azure, providing a sound foundation for the rest of the book.
Chapter 2, Implementing IaaS Solutions, builds on the topics discussed in the previous chapter by exploring Infrastructure as a Service solutions, including virtual machines and ARM templates, finishing with containers and their associated Azure solutions.
Chapter 3, Creating Azure App Service Web Apps, covers one of the most used services in Azure development, Azure App Service. This chapter introduces App Service and goes into detail about authentication and authorization within App Service, networking features, and app settings and logging within App Service.
Chapter 4, Implementing Azure Functions, starts with an introduction to Azure Functions, including hosting, scaling, and binding options. We explore developing, testing, and deploying functions, along with stateful durable functions.
Chapter 5, Developing Solutions That Use Cosmos DB Storage, explores NoSQL solutions hosted in Azure, including coverage of Azure Table storage and its features and leveraging service from the code. This chapter also provides a deep dive into Cosmos DB, explaining Cosmos DB scaling, high availability, consistency, and recovery features. It demonstrates querying from the Azure portal and the SDK.
Chapter 6, Developing Solutions That Use Azure Blob Storage, covers Azure Blob Storage and its role in supporting deployed applications and services in Azure. You will learn about the features of the Azure Blob Storage service and study cases where Azure Blob Storage can help to host web applications.
Chapter 7, Implementing User Authentication and Authorization, is where, after a detailed introduction to the Microsoft identity platform, we implement authentication with the Microsoft Authentication Library. Building on this, we explore Microsoft Graph and demonstrate making calls to it within code. We then finish with a detailed look at shared access signatures for authorizing access to storage resources in Azure.
Chapter 8, Implementing Secure Cloud Solutions, is where we explore using Azure Key Vault to secure application secrets, including authorization and authentication with Key Vault. This leads us on to the topic of managed identities, including options and best practices. The final topic of this chapter is Azure App Configuration, for centrally and securely managing your application configuration settings and feature flags.
Chapter 9, Integrating Caching and Content Delivery within Solutions, starts with an introduction to dynamic content caching with Azure Cache for Redis and continues to explore static content caching with Azure CDN, including different caching patterns, high availability, pricing models, and integration with Azure platform services such as Azure App Service and Azure Blob Storage.
Chapter 10, Troubleshooting Solutions by Using Metrics and Log Data, explores a variety of telemetry and monitoring topics, including troubleshooting crashes with Application Insights, monitoring web logs with Azure Monitor, and creating live dashboards and workbooks using Kusto queries.
Chapter 11, Implementing API Management, is all about web APIs, Swagger, and the API Management service, with a deep dive into advanced configuration using policies.
Chapter 12, Developing Event-Based Solutions, explores a variety of the event-based services available in Azure, including Event Hubs for ingesting big data, Event Grid for reactive programming, IoT Hub for telemetry monitoring, and Azure Relay for hyper-cloud communication.
Chapter 13, Developing Message-Based Solutions, is all about the implementation of messaging patterns. We will introduce messaging services in Azure, starting with Azure Storage and then moving on to Azure Service Bus. We provide guidelines for reliable content delivery with message-based services. We finish with an introduction into the concept of DevOps and some examples of DevOps practices.
Chapter 14, Mock Exam Questions, is a mock exam to build your familiarity with the types of questions you might be presented with in the exam. We introduce the different types of exam questions and timings and then get straight into the mock exam questions.
