Azure resource management – Core Azure Architectural Components

Azure resource management

In the previous chapter, we looked at the digital transformation methodology; it is this last phase of Secure and Manage that we turn our attention to in this section.

It is important to ensure that any workloads or data running in a cloud computing environment are managed in the same governed, controlled, secure, and protected manner that they would be for a traditional computing model. The following diagram aims to visualize these aspects:

Figure 3.16 – Azure resource management

These areas to consider should include the following:

  • Availability through redundancy, replication, and traffic management
  • Protection through backup and disaster recovery
  • Security through threat protection and security posture management
  • Configuration through automation, scripting, and update management
  • Governance through access control, compliance, and cost management
  • Monitoring through the collection of security incidents, events, resource health, performance metrics, logs, and diagnostics

The foundation for all management within Azure is ARM, which is an Application Programming Interface (API) and is the management and deployment service for Azure.

All user and resource interactions pass through the ARM API; you can think of it as the brain or engine of Azure. It provides a single consistent management layer and orchestration engine processing all requests for all interactions with the Azure platform, whether via the portal, command-line interfaces, templates, Microsoft utilities, and third-party software; each of these calls the ARM API.

Governance and planning is an essential stage when creating resources in Azure. It can prevent re-work and potentially tearing down aspects that may have been implemented without fully appreciating what should be considered, understanding all options and their benefits or limitations on the desired outcome. The first aspects of planning are billing control and access control, which will shape the strategy and approach for implementing subscriptions, management groups, and resource groups.

This section introduced the concepts of Azure resource management. The following section looks at Azure management scopes.

About the author

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *