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How do you ensure that your resources stay compliant? Can you be alerted if a resource’s configuration has changed?

Azure Policy is a service in Azure that enables you to create, assign, and manage policies that control or audit your resources. These policies enforce different rules across your resource configurations so that those configurations stay compliant with corporate standards.

How does Azure Policy define policies?

Azure Policy enables you to define both individual policies and groups of related policies, known as initiatives. Azure Policy evaluates your resources and highlights resources that aren’t compliant with the policies you’ve created. Azure Policy can also prevent noncompliant resources from being created.

Azure Policies can be set at each level, enabling you to set policies on a specific resource, resource group, subscription, and so on. Additionally, Azure Policies are inherited, so if you set a policy at a high level, it will automatically be applied to all of the groupings that fall within the parent. For example, if you set an Azure Policy on a resource group, all resources created within that resource group will automatically receive the same policy.

Azure Policy comes with built-in policy and initiative definitions for Storage, Networking, Compute, Security Center, and Monitoring. For example, if you define a policy that allows only a certain size for the virtual machines (VMs) to be used in your environment, that policy is invoked when you create a new VM and whenever you resize existing VMs. Azure Policy also evaluates and monitors all current VMs in your environment, including VMs that were created before the policy was created.

In some cases, Azure Policy can automatically remediate noncompliant resources and configurations to ensure the integrity of the state of the resources. For example, if all resources in a certain resource group should be tagged with AppName tag and a value of “SpecialOrders,” Azure Policy will automatically apply that tag if it is missing. However, you still retain full control of your environment. If you have a specific resource that you don’t want Azure Policy to automatically fix, you can flag that resource as an exception – and the policy won’t automatically fix that resource.

Azure Policy also integrates with Azure DevOps by applying any continuous integration and delivery pipeline policies that pertain to the pre-deployment and post-deployment phases of your applications.

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icrosoft Purview is a family of data governance, risk, and compliance solutions that helps you get a single, unified view into your data. Microsoft Purview brings insights about your on-premises, multicloud, and software-as-a-service data together.

With Microsoft Purview, you can stay up-to-date on your data landscape thanks to:

• Automated data discovery
• Sensitive data classification
• End-to-end data lineage

Two main solution areas comprise Microsoft Purview: risk and compliance and unified data governance.

Microsoft Purview risk and compliance solutions

Microsoft 365 features as a core component of the Microsoft Purview risk and compliance solutions. Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Exchange are just some of the Microsoft 365 services that Microsoft Purview uses to help manage and monitor your data. Microsoft Purview, by managing and monitoring your data, is able to help your organization:

• Protect sensitive data across clouds, apps, and devices.
• Identify data risks and manage regulatory compliance requirements.
• Get started with regulatory compliance.

Unified data governance

Microsoft Purview has robust, unified data governance solutions that help manage your on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service data. Microsoft Purview’s robust data governance capabilities enable you to manage your data stored in Azure, SQL and Hive databases, locally, and even in other clouds like Amazon S3.

Microsoft Purview’s unified data governance helps your organization:

• Create an up-to-date map of your entire data estate that includes data classification and end-to-end lineage.
• Identify where sensitive data is stored in your estate.
• Create a secure environment for data consumers to find valuable data.
• Generate insights about how your data is stored and used.
• Manage access to the data in your estate securely and at scale.

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Azure Monitor is a platform for collecting data on your resources, analyzing that data, visualizing the information, and even acting on the results. Azure Monitor can monitor Azure resources, your on-premises resources, and even multi-cloud resources like virtual machines hosted with a different cloud provider.

On the left is a list of the sources of logging and metric data that can be collected at every layer in your application architecture, from application to operating system and network.

In the center, the logging and metric data are stored in central repositories.

On the right, the data is used in several ways. You can view real-time and historical performance across each layer of your architecture or aggregated and detailed information. The data is displayed at different levels for different audiences. You can view high-level reports on the Azure Monitor Dashboard or create custom views by using Power BI and Kusto queries.

Additionally, you can use the data to help you react to critical events in real time, through alerts delivered to teams via SMS, email, and so on. Or you can use thresholds to trigger autoscaling functionality to scale to meet the demand.

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Microsoft Azure provides a global cloud solution to help you manage your infrastructure needs, reach your customers, innovate, and adapt rapidly. Knowing the status of the global Azure infrastructure and your individual resources may seem like a daunting task. Azure Service Health helps you keep track of Azure resource, both your specifically deployed resources and the overall status of Azure. Azure service health does this by combining three different Azure services:

• Azure Status is a broad picture of the status of Azure globally. Azure status informs you of service outages in Azure on the Azure Status page. The page is a global view of the health of all Azure services across all Azure regions. It’s a good reference for incidents with widespread impact.
• Service Health provides a narrower view of Azure services and regions. It focuses on the Azure services and regions you’re using. This is the best place to look for service impacting communications about outages, planned maintenance activities, and other health advisories because the authenticated Service Health experience knows which services and resources you currently use. You can even set up Service Health alerts to notify you when service issues, planned maintenance, or other changes may affect the Azure services and regions you use.
• Resource Health is a tailored view of your actual Azure resources. It provides information about the health of your individual cloud resources, such as a specific virtual machine instance. Using Azure Monitor, you can also configure alerts to notify you of availability changes to your cloud resources.

By using Azure status, Service health, and Resource Health, Azure Service Health gives you a complete view of your Azure environment-all the way from the global status of Azure services and regions down to specific resources. Additionally, historical alerts are stored and accessible for later review. Something you initially thought was a simple anomaly that turned into a trend, can readily be reviewed and investigated thanks to the historical alerts.

Finally, in the event that a workload you’re running is impacted by an event, Azure Service Health provides links to support.

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Azure Advisor evaluates your Azure resources and makes recommendations to help improve reliability, security, and performance, achieve operational excellence, and reduce costs. Azure Advisor is designed to help you save time on cloud optimization. The recommendation service includes suggested actions you can take right away, postpone, or dismiss.

The recommendations are available via the Azure portal and the API, and you can set up notifications to alert you to new recommendations.

When you’re in the Azure portal, the Advisor dashboard displays personalized recommendations for all your subscriptions. You can use filters to select recommendations for specific subscriptions, resource groups, or services. The recommendations are divided into five categories:

• Reliability is used to ensure and improve the continuity of your business-critical applications.
• Security is used to detect threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to security breaches.
• Performance is used to improve the speed of your applications.
• Operational Excellence is used to help you achieve process and workflow efficiency, resource manageability, and deployment best practices.
• Cost is used to optimize and reduce your overall Azure spending.

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Azure resources for Azure AI Speech

To use Azure AI Speech in an application, you must create an appropriate resource in your Azure subscription. You can choose to create either of the following types of resource:

• A Speech resource – choose this resource type if you only plan to use Azure AI Speech, or if you want to manage access and billing for the resource separately from other services.
• An Azure AI services resource – choose this resource type if you plan to use Azure AI Speech in combination with other Azure AI services, and you want to manage access and billing for these services together.

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Microsoft Azure offers speech recognition and synthesis capabilities through Azure AI Speech service, which supports many capabilities, including:

• Speech to text
• Text to speech
• Speech translation

Speech to text

You can use Azure AI Speech to text API to perform real-time or batch transcription of audio into a text format. The audio source for transcription can be a real-time audio stream from a microphone or an audio file.

Azure AI’s Speech to text API is based on Microsoft’s Universal Language Model. The data for the model is Microsoft-owned and deployed to Azure. The model is optimized for two scenarios, conversational and dictation. You can also create and train your own custom models including acoustics, language, and pronunciation if the prebuilt models from Microsoft don’t provide what you need.

Real-time transcription: Real-time speech to text allows you to transcribe audio streams to text. You can use real-time transcription for presentations, demos, or any other scenario where a person is speaking.

In order for real-time transcription to work, your application needs to be listening for incoming audio from a microphone, or other audio input source such as an audio file. Your application code streams the audio to the service, which returns the transcribed text.

Batch transcription: Not all speech to text scenarios are real time. You might have audio recordings stored on a file share, a remote server, or even on Azure storage. You can point to audio files with a shared access signature (SAS) URI and asynchronously receive transcription results.

Batch transcription should be run in an asynchronous manner because the batch jobs are scheduled on a best-effort basis. Normally a job starts executing within minutes of the request but there’s no estimate for when a job changes into the running state.

Text to speech

The text to speech API enables you to convert text input to audible speech, which can either be played directly through a computer speaker or written to an audio file.

Speech synthesis voices: When you use the text to speech API, you can specify the voice to be used to vocalize the text. This capability offers you the flexibility to personalize your speech synthesis solution and give it a specific character.

The service includes multiple predefined voices with support for multiple languages and regional pronunciation, including neural voices that leverage neural networks to overcome common limitations in speech synthesis with regard to intonation, resulting in a more natural sounding voice. You can also develop custom voices and use them with the text to speech API.

Speech translation

Azure Speech Translation is a feature of the Azure AI Speech service. Azure Speech Translation enables real-time translation of spoken language by taking inputs of audio streams and returning text in a specified language. It works by first converting speech to text using automatic speech recognition (ASR), then translating the recognized text into one or more target languages using machine translation. The service supports a wide range of source and target languages and can deliver translations as text or synthesized speech. Developers can integrate this functionality into applications using REST APIs or SDKs. These applications work well in scenarios like multilingual meetings, live event captioning, or global customer support.

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Speech recognition takes the spoken word and converts it into data that can be processed – often by transcribing it into text. The spoken words can be in the form of a recorded voice in an audio file, or live audio from a microphone. Speech patterns are analyzed in the audio to determine recognizable patterns that are mapped to words. To accomplish this, the software typically uses multiple models, including:

• An acoustic model that converts the audio signal into phonemes (representations of specific sounds).
• A language model that maps phonemes to words, usually using a statistical algorithm that predicts the most probable sequence of words based on the phonemes.

The recognized words are typically converted to text, which you can use for various purposes, such as:

• Providing closed captions for recorded or live videos
• Creating a transcript of a phone call or meeting
• Automated note dictation
• Determining intended user input for further processing

Speech synthesis is concerned with vocalizing data, usually by converting text to speech. A speech synthesis solution typically requires the following information:

• The text to be spoken
• The voice to be used to vocalize the speech

To synthesize speech, the system typically tokenizes the text to break it down into individual words, and assigns phonetic sounds to each word. It then breaks the phonetic transcription into prosodic units (such as phrases, clauses, or sentences) to create phonemes that will be converted to audio format. These phonemes are then synthesized as audio and can be assigned a particular voice, speaking rate, pitch, and volume.

You can use the output of speech synthesis for many purposes, including:

• Generating spoken responses to user input
• Creating voice menus for phone systems
• Reading email or text messages aloud in hands-free scenarios
• Broadcasting announcements in public locations, such as railway stations or airports

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The management infrastructure includes Azure resources and resource groups, subscriptions, and accounts. Understanding the hierarchical organization will help you plan your projects and products within Azure.

Azure resources and resource groups

A resource is the basic building block of Azure. Anything you create, provision, deploy, etc. is a resource. Virtual Machines (VMs), virtual networks, databases, cognitive services, etc. are all considered resources within Azure.

Resource groups are simply groupings of resources. When you create a resource, you’re required to place it into a resource group. While a resource group can contain many resources, a single resource can only be in one resource group at a time. Some resources may be moved between resource groups, but when you move a resource to a new group, it will no longer be associated with the former group. Additionally, resource groups can’t be nested, meaning you can’t put resource group B inside of resource group A.

Resource groups provide a convenient way to group resources together. When you apply an action to a resource group, that action will apply to all the resources within the resource group. If you delete a resource group, all the resources will be deleted. If you grant or deny access to a resource group, you’ve granted or denied access to all the resources within the resource group.

When you’re provisioning resources, it’s good to think about the resource group structure that best suits your needs.

For example, if you’re setting up a temporary dev environment, grouping all the resources together means you can deprovision all of the associated resources at once by deleting the resource group. If you’re provisioning compute resources that will need three different access schemas, it may be best to group resources based on the access schema, and then assign access at the resource group level.

There aren’t hard rules about how you use resource groups, so consider how to set up your resource groups to maximize their usefulness for you.

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Throughout your journey with Microsoft Azure, you’ll hear and use terms like Regions, Availability Zones, Resources, Subscriptions, and more. This module focuses on the core architectural components of Azure. The core architectural components of Azure may be broken down into two main groupings: the physical infrastructure, and the management infrastructure.

Physical infrastructure

The physical infrastructure for Azure starts with datacenters. Conceptually, the datacenters are the same as large corporate datacenters. They’re facilities with resources arranged in racks, with dedicated power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.

As a global cloud provider, Azure has datacenters around the world. However, these individual datacenters aren’t directly accessible. Datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions or Azure Availability Zones that are designed to help you achieve resiliency and reliability for your business-critical workloads.

Regions

A region is a geographical area on the planet that contains at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network. Azure intelligently assigns and controls the resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced.

When you deploy a resource in Azure, you’ll often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed.

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