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Managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments can rapidly get complicated. Azure provides a host of tools to provision, configure, and monitor Azure resources. What about the on-premises resources in a hybrid configuration or the cloud resources in a multi-cloud configuration?

In utilizing Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Arc lets you extend your Azure compliance and monitoring to your hybrid and multi-cloud configurations. Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform.

Azure Arc provides a centralized, unified way to:

• Manage your entire environment together by projecting your existing non-Azure resources into ARM.
• Manage multi-cloud and hybrid virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they are running in Azure.
• Use familiar Azure services and management capabilities, regardless of where they live.
• Continue using traditional ITOps while introducing DevOps practices to support new cloud and native patterns in your environment.
• Configure custom locations as an abstraction layer on top of Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters and cluster extensions.

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To get the most out of Azure, you need a way to interact with the Azure environment, the management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, resources, and so on. Azure provides multiple tools for managing your environment, including the:

• Azure portal
• Azure PowerShell
• Azure Command Line Interface (CLI)

What is the Azure portal?

The Azure portal is a web-based, unified console that provides an alternative to command-line tools. With the Azure portal, you can manage your Azure subscription by using a graphical user interface. You can:

• Build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud deployments
• Create custom dashboards for an organized view of resources
• Configure accessibility options for an optimal experience

The Azure portal is designed for resiliency and continuous availability. It maintains a presence in every Azure datacenter. This configuration makes the Azure portal resilient to individual datacenter failures and avoids network slowdowns by being close to users. The Azure portal updates continuously and requires no downtime for maintenance activities.

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he 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.

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To create and use Azure services, you need an Azure subscription. When you’re working with your own applications and business needs, you need to create an Azure account, and a subscription will be created for you. After you’ve created an Azure account, you’re free to create additional subscriptions. For example, your company might use a single Azure account for your business and separate subscriptions for development, marketing, and sales departments. After you’ve created an Azure subscription, you can start creating Azure resources within each subscription.

If you’re new to Azure, you can sign up for a free account on the Azure website to start exploring at no cost to you. When you’re ready, you can choose to upgrade your free account. You can also create a new subscription that enables you to start paying for Azure services you need beyond the limits of a free account.

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Azure is a continually expanding set of cloud services that help you meet current and future business challenges. Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

What does Azure offer?

Limitless innovation. Build intelligent apps and solutions with advanced technology, tools, and services to take your business to the next level. Seamlessly unify your technology to simplify platform management and to deliver innovations efficiently and securely on a trusted cloud.

• Bring ideas to life: Build on a trusted platform to advance your organization with industry-leading AI and cloud services.
• Seamlessly unify: Efficiently manage all your infrastructure, data, analytics, and AI solutions across an integrated platform.
• Innovate on trust: Rely on trusted technology from a partner who’s dedicated to security and responsibility.

What can I do with Azure?

Azure provides more than 100 services that enable you to do everything from running your existing applications on virtual machines to exploring new software paradigms, such as intelligent bots and mixed reality.

Many teams start exploring the cloud by moving their existing applications to virtual machines (VMs) that run in Azure. Migrating your existing apps to VMs is a good start, but the cloud is much more than a different place to run your VMs.

For example, Azure provides artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) services that can naturally communicate with your users through vision, hearing, and speech. It also provides storage solutions that dynamically grow to accommodate massive amounts of data. Azure services enable solutions that aren’t feasible without the power of the cloud.

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A resource lock prevents resources from being accidentally deleted or changed.

Even with Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) policies in place, there’s still a risk that people with the right level of access could delete critical cloud resources. Resource locks prevent resources from being deleted or updated, depending on the type of lock. Resource locks can be applied to individual resources, resource groups, or even an entire subscription. Resource locks are inherited, meaning that if you place a resource lock on a resource group, all of the resources within the resource group will also have the resource lock applied.

Types of Resource Locks

There are two types of resource locks, one that prevents users from deleting and one that prevents users from changing or deleting a resource.

• Delete means authorized users can still read and modify a resource, but they can’t delete the resource.
• ReadOnly means authorized users can read a resource, but they can’t delete or update the resource. Applying this lock is similar to restricting all authorized users to the permissions granted by the Reader role.

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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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