Showing posts with label Azure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Azure. Show all posts

Thursday, June 8, 2023

Azure administrator Associate (AZ-104) certification takeaways

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Intro

In my journey into multicloud, I started a ritual where I’d write about each certification I pass (GCP, Hashicorp) for my own use and for times when I’m asked for prep tips and takeaways.This time, Azure administrator associate exam is no exception.

Whether you're preparing for an AWS, Azure, OCI, Alibaba or GCP certification, sharing your afterthoughts around the preparation journey along with insights on training material vs exam impressions can be very powerful.
As you surf that learning curve, it becomes crucial to not only absorb the content but also pause and reflect upon each step.
These captured snapshots and highlights, can elevate your learning process to new heights.
 

The exam summary 

Table of contents

All you need to know about the exam layout can be found in the official Page, Including the exam guide. The important points to remember however are the below:

Length: 2 hours.
Questions:  50-65
Exam format: Multiple choice and multiple select
Recommended experience: Officially, 6-12 months hands-on experience, but this can be offset by the labs & online trainings.
Pass Score: 700.
Score per topic: available.
Exam center:  Pearson VUE: Microsoft 
Retake Policy: 24h after the 1st fail, 14 days waiting period imposed between all subsequent attempts (up to 5).
Pass confirmation: Instantaneous. 
Validity: 18month

Preparation time: Some say 2-3 months, Already passed the Az-900 before and used evenings and weekends, so it took me around ~90 days course/labs + exam practice spread across 9 months. I know it’s long but that’s just me as I like to take notes and had to redo labs after long interruptions.

Impressions 

After my GCP cert, I opted for this exam because AWS Solution Architect certification (SAA-C03) wasn't out yet, but this cloud platform really grew up on me along the way. If ACloudGuru subscription is too expensive, check out the 100% FREE section.

Administrator title is not a coincidence

The Azure AZ-104 exam stands out from other cloud exams as it truly reflects the role of an administrator.

  • You will not pretend to play the architect, but really act as an MS admin like the ones who are rocking it on-premises.
  • This exam focuses on the hands-on responsibilities of managing Microsoft system in-out of azure.
  • Concepts such as Active Directory, hybrid networks, and security proved to be the most challenging aspects.
  • It has a case studies and scenario questions which is unique to Microsoft exams
  • However, unlike other cloud providers like AWS or OCI, there is less emphasis on database services, and Kubernetes is not a prominent topic (unlike for GCP) .
  • While I had mixed feelings about the contrast between the training content and the actual exam questions, the overall experience was enjoyable, as I got more interest in Azure today than I was before. 

Exam guide 

The content is available in the official Microsoft certification page and you will see a lot of versions online . 
- The best resource to start with the official AZ-104 study guide (download pdf version)
- The 4 major areas that the exam focuses on are as follows (as of April 27 2023)

  • Manage Azure identities and governance (15-20%)

  • Implement and manage storage (15-20%) => increased

  • Deploy and manage Azure compute resources (20-25%) => decreased

  • Configure and manage virtual networking (20-25%) => decreased

  • Monitor and back up Azure resources (10-15%)

But basically, There are 9 objective domains modules:

  • Module 1: Identities

  • Module 2: Governance & Compliance

  • Module 3: Azure Administration

  • Module 4: Virtual Networks

  • Module 5: Intersite Connectivity

  • Module 6: Network Traffic Management

  • Module 7: Azure Storage

  • Module 8: Azure Virtual Machines

  • Module 9: Serverless Computing

  • Module 10: Data Protection

  • Module 11: Monitoring

My ultimate AZ-104 bundle notes

If you’re wondering why it took me 9 months to ace it,  it’s partly due to my notes.
This one is the most complete you can find. Chapters contains deeper descriptions to each domain module and more, and I still use it today to refresh my memory as it has tons of tips. Enjoy :)! 

  Link: https://bit.ly/45VJEPe
will also blog about some labs in the future.

Official resources Microsoft Learn

  1. Free Self paced modules easy to follow but not enough
  2. Prep videos: 30-50 minutes each (click in the pics)

Other Microsoft resources : Can also help you quickly describe GCP services grouped by domain.

  

Courses I followed

Like many, I searched for the best training materials online. While I couldn't take multiple courses due to the time commitment (30-40 hours on average), I did explore the Microsoft official Az-104 modules and videos first. 

Cloud Guru: AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Certification Prep(By Chase Dovey)

This required a subscription for which I thank my company for providing to their employees.

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  • Pros
    • Best learning platform for preparing certifications and following tailored learning paths (100s of labs)
    • Multi-cloud sandboxes for Azure, AWS, and GCP exploration ( 4hrs/session)
    • Engaging labs with Chase using az cli or PowerShell on various topics like
      • Scaling an App service plan
      • Build and run a Container using Azure ACR tasks
      • Create a WebApp from Docker Container in azure 
      • VM configuration automation using desired state configuration SDC or using ARM templates…
    • Opportunity to learn and configure Azure Firewall (my favorite)
    • These labs go beyond the initial goal and help in keeping skills updated and fresh
    • Clear and easy-to-understand explanations, such as the stateful nature of NSGs
      • ex: NSG are stateful => Allowed ingress traffic will allow egress with a return traffic  
  • Cons
    • 34 hrs, is a lot of time especially for me as I like to take notes of everything to reuse them after my exam
    • Limited content related to IAM and Azure AD user and device management (I wish  they did more more)
    • Insufficient coverage of hybrid configurations and DNS multiple setups
    • The exam practice was ok but don't closely resemble the actual exam questions
    • Unfortunately, the gap between course material and exam content,is a common issue in AZ-104 courses 

  • Pro Tip  don’t have long breaks between chapters and complement the labs with other exam practices online


Other Courses 

There’s usually tons of courses in Udemy but unlike AWS there’s not a lot of competition for azure

                                       AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Exam Prep - APR 2023 ($20-$54)                                                     Bestseller: 17 hours - 1 practice test  - 23 articles (AKS detailed)
 


100% Free resources  

  • Azure Admin Certification (AZ-104) - Full Course By @AndrewBrown

                                    

Content:

Andrew is very popular in the community (AWS community hero/GCP champion innovator), as he has a lot of free courses in YouTube beside his learning platform examPro. I didn’t follow this one but he never ceases to deliver.

He covers everything in 11hrs but the best part was the cheat sheets !:


Last tip (Time management and always Practice!)

Practice

Get your things together

  • I can’t emphasize enough on this because I made the same stupid mistake

  • When you have a certification don’t ever let long breaks creep in

  • No matter what time it takes or how busy you are at work, you need to respect your target

  • Take days off, I don’t care, but don’t slack for months halfway through (don’t be cheap).
    Otherwise this will backfire hard, trust me! been there.     


Conclusion - Certified now what?

 
   Despite my time management mistake I am glad I held until then end to secure this one out.

  • Azure's #2 cloud platform rank is no coincidence; as it's adopted by 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

  • Learning the platform could open doors to a steady career path in the cloud industry. 

  • But make no mistake, Continuous practice is crucial; without regular hands-on experience, your certification will have 0 value in the job market.

  • Solution? Spaced repetition to get better at it using labs and share it online through blogging.
    If you did a task through the console? Try it using az-cli , PowerShell, or even Terraform.

      Forgetting Curve

    • Within 1 hour, people will have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information presented.

    • Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70 percent of new information

    • Within a week, forgetting claims an average of 90 percent of it



Appendix: Full list of exam topic/skills


Manage Azure identities and governance

  • 1. Manage Azure AD objects
    • Create users and groups
    • Manage licenses in Azure AD
    • Create administrative units
    • Manage user and group properties
    • Manage device settings and device identity
    • Perform bulk updates
    • Manage guest accounts
    • Configure self-service password reset
  • 2.  Manage access control
    • Create custom role-based access control (RBAC) and Azure AD roles
    • Provide access to Azure resources by assigning roles at different scopes
    • Interpret access assignments
  • 3. Manage Azure subscriptions and governance
    • Configure and manage Azure Policy
    • Configure resource locks
    • Apply and manage tags on resources
    • Manage resource groups
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Manage costs by using alerts, budgets, and recommendations
    • Configure management groups

Implement and manage storage 

  • 1. Configure access to storage
    • Configure network access to storage accounts
    • Create and configure storage accounts
    • Generate shared access signature tokens
    • Configure stored access policies
    • Manage access keys
    • Configure Azure AD authentication for a storage account.
    • Configure storage encryption
  • 2. Manage data in Azure storage accounts
    • Create import and export jobs
    • Manage data by using Azure Storage Explorer and AzCopy
    • Implement Azure Storage redundancy
    • Configure object replication
  • 3.Configure Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage
    • Create an Azure file share
    • Configure Azure Blob Storage
    • Configure storage tiers
    • Configure blob lifecycle management

Deploy and manage Azure compute resources

  • 1. Automate deployment of resources by using templates
    • Modify an ARM template
    • Deploy a template
    • Save a deployment as an ARM template
    • Deploy virtual machine (VM) extensions
  • 2. Create and configure VMs
    • Create a VM
    • Manage images by using the Azure Compute Gallery
    • Configure Azure Disk Encryption
    • Move VMs from one resource group to another
    • Manage VM sizes
    • Add data disks
    • Configure VM network settings
    • Configure VM availability options
    • Deploy and configure VM scale sets
  • 3.Create and configure containers
    • Configure sizing and scaling for Azure Container Instances
    • Configure container groups for Azure Container Instances
    • Create and configure Azure Container Apps
    • Configure storage for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
    • Configure scaling for AKS
    • Configure network connections for AKS
    • Upgrade an AKS cluster
  • 4. Create and configure an Azure App Service
    • Create an App Service plan
    • Configure scaling settings in an App Service plan
    • Create an App Service
    • Secure an App Service
    • Configure custom domain names
    • Configure backup for an App Service
    • Configure networking settings
    • Configure deployment settings

Configure and manage virtual networking

  • 1. Configure virtual networks
    • Create and configure virtual networks and subnets
    • Create and configure virtual network peering
    • Configure private and public IP addresses
    • Configure user-defined network routes
    • Configure Azure DNS
  • 2. Configure secure access to virtual networks
    • Create and configure network security groups (NSGs) and application security groups (ASGs)
    • Evaluate effective security rules
    • Implement Azure Bastion
    • Configure service endpoints
    • Configure private endpoints
  • 3. Configure load balancing
    • Configure Azure Application Gateway
    • Configure an internal or public load balancer
    • Troubleshoot load balancing
  • 4.  Monitor virtual networking
    • Monitor on-premises connectivity
    • Configure and use Azure Monitor for networks
    • Use Azure Network Watcher
    • Troubleshoot external networking
    • Troubleshoot virtual network connectivity

Monitor and maintain Azure resources

  • 1. Monitor resources by using Azure Monitor
    • Configure and interpret metrics
    • Configure Azure Monitor Logs
    • Query and analyze logs
    • Set up alerts and actions
    • Configure monitoring of VMs, storage accounts, and networks by using VM insights
  • 2. Implement backup and recovery
    • Create an Azure Recovery Services vault
    • Create an Azure Backup vault
    • Create and configure backup policy
    • Perform backup and restore operations by using Azure Backup
    • Configure Azure Site Recovery for Azure resources
    • Perform failover to a secondary region by using Azure Site Recovery
    • Configure and review backup reports
  • 3. Configure load balancing
    • Configure Azure Application Gateway
    • Configure an internal or public load balancer
    • Troubleshoot load balancing
    • Configure custom domain names

        Note: though these titles seem unhelpful at first sight, they’re here to give an overview of what Az-104 course should contain.

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        Monday, April 17, 2023

        Azure VM Selection Made Easy: A Script Identifying Best Constrained CPU VMs for High Memory/ Low CPU Workload

                                                 Azure Constrained VCPU and how to list it
        Intro

        Are you struggling to find the most Cost-Effective Azure VMs for Database Workloads or any high memory low CPU workload? Look no further! In this blog post, we’ll introduce the concept of Azure constrained CPU along with cases where az cli displays misleading info, and finally a script that makes it easy to identify the best constrained CPU VM for your needs. This will help you to confidently select the cheapest/suitable Azure VM for your workload.

        Here’s a link to my vmsize selector script az-cli-examples/check_az_vmsize.sh but first let’s dive into some notions. 

        I. Constrained vCPU Vms

        Not everyone needs the latest and greatest in CPU power! Some users are actually looking for VM sizes that offer ample memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth without breaking the bank. And when it comes to moving a database to Azure that's licensed for 8 cores (BOYL) but needs a whopping 200GB+ of RAM, you're in for a real treat. You'll have to fork over cash for a 16Core-level VM just to match the memory specs, and say goodbye to your budget while you're at it. That’s the kinda news that makes your boss happy ain’t it?


        Azure’s response
        To fix this, Azure created Constrained vCPU VMs which allow for constraining the vCPU count to 1/2 or 1/4 of the original VM size (i.e 16=>4), while keeping the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth. This makes it an excellent choice for workloads such as databases (SQL Server, Oracle) that are not CPU-intensive but require high memory, and IO bandwidth.
        The VM series that support this feature are DS, ES, GS, and MS.

        Licensing fees charged for SQL Server for example are based on the available vCPU count.
        Constrained vCPUs will result in a 50% to 75% decrease in licensing fees & keep a high VM specs to VCPU ratio.

         
        Example

        These new VM sizes have a suffix that specifies the number of available vCPUs to make them easier to identify.
                             Naming convention: Standard_M8-2ms  => 8Core VM level specs with only 2 vCPUs 
        Hence, each vm size with  ‘-{digit}‘ in its name supports vCPU constrained feature, the digit being the actual vCPU


        II. list Problem with az cli


        The option is nice, but finding the ones available to us using a simple az cli query is even better. However, while using the Azure CLI to list the available VM sizes using az vm list-sizes, you will not find the number of constrained cores in the output, making it challenging to filter out the VM sizes based on their requirements.

        • Example with a vm size with 4 constrained vCPus , here you can see that az cli is showing 8 cores which is wrong 


        $ az vm list-sizes -l eastus --query "sort_by(@,&memoryInMb)[?numberOfCores == \`8\` \
        && (contains(name,'Standard_E8-4ds_v5'))].{name:name,NumberOfCores:numberOfCores}”
        Name      -           NumberOfCores    
        -------------------  ---------------  
        Standard_E8-4ds_v5    8  <<— not the actual vCPu      

        Several users have reported this issue on the Az CLI GitHub repo, but there has been no official solution to date. Even my shell script to list vm size based on Cpu cores never showed me the actual constrained vCPUs. Few customers started to show me E series sizes with 256GB of Ram + 8 vCPUs that I didn’t know about from my tool.


        III. Trick to show actual vCPUs

        After upvoting the GitHub issue, I ought to find a workaround to show the real vCPUs for these constrained Series

        Since vm size name had a suffix specifying the number of available vCPUs I leveraged it in the below query 

        $  az vm list-sizes -l eastus --query "sort_by(@,&memoryInMb)[?numberOfCores == \`32\` && (contains(name,'E') && contains(name,'-8'))].{name: name, numberOfCores: numberOfCores, memoryInMb: memoryInMb, ConstrainedNumberOfCores: '8'}"

        Name                  NumberOfCores    MemoryInMb    ConstrainedNumberOfCores
        --------------------  ---------------  ------------  --------------------------
        Standard_E32-8s_v4    32 <- default    262144        8  <-  actual  
        Standard_E32-8ds_v5   32               262144        8
        Standard_E32-8s_v5    32               262144        8
        ...

        I just added a virtual column that matches the filter I chose for the vm-size [name=> E series VM, with 32 original cores and 8 constrained vCPUs] “-8”. 


        Version2: here I leveraged jquery to make the Constrained value dynamic no matter what is filtered

        $ az vm list-sizes -l eastus --query "sort_by(@,&memoryInMb)[?contains(name,'E32') && contains(name,'-8')]" -o json| jq '.[] | . + {ConstrainedNumberOfCores: .name | capture("-(?\\d+)") | .digit}'

        {
  "maxDataDiskCount": 32,
  "memoryInMb": 262144,
  "name": "Standard_E32-8s_v4",
  "numberOfCores": 32,     <<----- default number
  "osDiskSizeInMb": 1047552,
  "resourceDiskSizeInMb": 0,
  "ConstrainedNumberOfCores": "8"   <<--- actual number
}
        ...


        IV. Cleaner solution (list-skus)


        These tweaks weren't giving the clean output I wanted in my check_az_vmsize script. But then I spotted a second az cli query based on "az vm list-skus". It had all the metadata on VM size capabilities that I was looking for! And to top it off, I finally found that missing piece of information I had been searching for - the number of constrained vCPUs. It was so seamless, it was almost like finding a diamond in a pile of trash.


        Here is the final query based on the same query filter (E32, 8 Constrained vCPU)

        $ az vm list-skus -z --resource-type  virtualMachines --size "E32" -l eastus --query "[?capabilities[?name==\`vCPUsAvailable\`].value|[0] == '8'].{name:name,VCPU:capabilities[?name==\`vCPUs\`].value|[0],ActualVCPU:capabilities[?name==\`vCPUsAvailable\`].value|[0],MemoryGB:capabilities[?name==\`MemoryGB\`].value|[0]} | reverse(sort_by(@,&name))" -o table
        Name                  VCPU    ActualVCPU    MemoryGB
--------------------  ------  ------------  ----------
Standard_E32-8s_v5    32      8             256
Standard_E32-8s_v4    32      8             256
Standard_E32-8s_v3    32      8             256
Standard_E32-8ds_v5   32      8             256
Standard_E32-8ds_v4   32      8             256
Standard_E32-8as_v5   32      8             256
Standard_E32-8as_v4   32      8             256
Standard_E32-8ads_v5  32      8             256

         After checking the JSON construct of the source, I picked the info through
                            capabilities[vCPUsAvailable].Value


        V. The Ultimate Bundle Script: Azure Constrained CPU VM Selector


        We've finally reached the end of our quest to uncover the secrets of Constrained CPU VMs. But why stop there when we can take it one step further?

        Here’s a shell-based tool that's so intuitive, you'll think it's reading your mind!  
        Try it: Download the script here >> az-cli-examples/check_az_vmsize.sh 

        • See demo below

        az_vmsize_final_lightOptimized2

        With this tool, you'll have the ability to filter through:

        • Number of vCPU

        • VM compute series

        The output has 2 sections:
        a) VM sizes with exact vCPU count entered in the prompt

        b) All VMs constrained or not containing the vCPU count matching the value entered in the prompt

         

           CONCLUSION 

          • This post helps better understand the concept of Azure constrained CPU and how it can be leveraged to save costs on high memory and low CPU workloads.

          • We have explored cases where az cli can display misleading information about it and track the metadata containing the actual vCPU value

          • By using my simple shell tool, you’ll be able to identify the best VM that meets your specific requirements, allowing you to save money without sacrificing performance.

          • It also saves you hours of searching through Azure website

          • With just 2 prompts, you'll have all the information you need to make an informed decision about your VM selection. 
            So, give it a try and see how much time and money you can save!

        Thank you for reading, and happy cost-saving!

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