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SoftwareArchitect.ca

Author: Scott Duffy

  • Get Certified as MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure with this Azure Course Bundle

  • Azure PaaS vs IaaS vs SaaS

    Azure PaaS vs IaaS vs SaaS

    Today a student in my 70-532 course, Pankaj, asked about the difference between Paas, IaaS, and SaaS within Azure. Specifically he wanted some examples, so let me list a few.

    I found this helpful diagram that might set up this discussion.

    This comes from Microsoft.

    To translate the above.

    • IaaS means that Microsoft takes care of the data center as a building, networking, firewalls, security, servers, storage, backup and recovery.
    • PaaS means that Microsoft takes care of maintaining the operating system, provides development tools, handles database management, and provides tools for business analytics. With IaaS, you’d be responsible for all of that.
    • SaaS covers the above plus Microsoft provides the application that you are just one customer (one tenant) inside.

     

    Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS

    One example of IaaS is any Virtual Machine product. Anything that gives you control of a piece of “hardware” (it’s not really control of hardware because a VM is virtual). Anything found under the Compute menu of Azure Portal can be counted as IaaS. Also networking pieces like VNets and storage pieces like Azure Storage.

    Examples include:

    • Virtual Machines
      • Windows Server 2016 Datacenter
      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
      • Ubuntu Server
      • Data Science Virtual Machine
      • SQL Server 2016 SP1 Enterprise on Windows Server 2016
      • Miscellaneous firewall and third-party network products
    • Virtual networks and subnets
    • Public IP
    • Load balancers
    • Traffic Manager
    • Azure Blob Storage
    • Azure File Storage

    These are the fundamental pieces of any network (self-hosted or cloud), and nothing else.

    Platform as a Service – PaaS

    Best known as the core Azure App Services, which is web apps, mobile apps, API apps, logic apps and function apps. If you think of what a “platform” means though, it means you can build your application on top of it. PaaS often runs inside an App Service Plan or an App Service Environment, but not always. But when you’re creating one of these, it’s clear you are creating an “app” and have to give it an “app name”.

    When working with platform as a service, you are creating your own “instance” of these services. You give them names, and you can start and stop them.

    • Web App
    • Web App + SQL
    • Mobile App
    • API App
    • Logic App
    • Function App
    • WordPress Web App
    • SiteCore Web App
    • Joomla! Web App

    Software as a Service – SaaS

    Finally, software as a service is an application which Microsoft Azure provides to you, which you can configure, but is a fully functioning application that you cannot modify the core features of. Often these have special and unique features. You are an tenant in these multi-tenant applications and are not running your own version of this.

    • Azure Search
    • SQL Database
    • HDInsight
    • Cosmos DB
    • Azure Active Directory

    Service Fabric

    I’ve seen Service Fabric described as PaaS.

    Basically, it’s a set of servers that you can provision but Microsoft provides a ton of functions on top of that to automatically management deployment and balancing of microservices, to give it automatic healing, etc. The Service Fabric is a platform on which you deploy your applications. You don’t control those servers and cannot remote into them.

    Hope that clears it up. Let me know if you have any questions.

     

  • Become an Enterprise Architect Through Udemy for Business

    Become an Enterprise Architect Through Udemy for Business

    Hundreds of companies provide their employees access to Udemy as part of their employee training benefits. Is yours one?

    If so, you already have access to my Enterprise Architecture and Microsoft Azure courses for free!

    All you need to do is log in to your company’s Udemy portal, and search for TOGAF or Azure using Udemy’s search tool. You’ll be shown a selection of my courses where you can sign up at no cost to you – since your employer already pays to be part of that program.

    But clicking the “sign up” button doesn’t teach you the skill. (We’re not in The Matrix yet. “I know Kung Fu.”)

    You will need to watch the videos and practice the skills, and this can be done a little at a time. Perhaps the smartest thing you can do is book yourself a meeting in your Office calendar every week where nobody else is able to reserve that time away from you. Whether it’s 30 minutes, or an hour, or more. Book yourself a meeting, and devote that time to taking some training such as my TOGAF courses that will help you attain the certification that can advance your skills and advance your career.

    Over 800 companies have this as a company benefit, and yours might be one of them. So check with HR on what training platforms you have available.

    And if you don’t see my courses on the training platform you have (whatever it is), do me a favor and ask that training platform to get in touch with me and get my courses there.

    Scott

     

  • Why Should You Get Azure Certified?

    Why Should You Get Azure Certified?

    As you know, cloud computing has quickly grown over the past 5-10 years to be one of the hottest in-demand skills in the industry.

    It’s true that you can learn Azure, use it in your job, be very successful with it, and move up in your career without ever answering a single multiple-choice test or analyzing a single case study.

    So what are the benefits of getting Azure certified?

    Well over my career, I’ve pursued about a dozen certifications from various vendors. From the early days, I was Java Certified within the first year that it came out. I had an IBM certification, and some of the early Microsoft ones (remember Microsoft FrontPage?).

    Over that time, I’ve come to feel that there are three main benefits to getting certified, and it’s certainly true with Microsoft Azure.

    The three benefits are:​

    1. Certification is like an amulet, it gives an experience boost

    Just like in those games where you wear a special ring, and get some type of small but useful extra power, having a certification attached to your resume gives you a small boost in perceived skill.

    When you’re looking for a job, and lack extensive experience in something, having a certification tells the interviewer that you have been trained on it and passed a test. This gives you a leg up on anyone who claims to know it, but cannot demonstrate that experience.

    I often say that certification substitutes for 1 year of experience when you need it.

    Of course, as you gain more real world experience, the benefit of certification is small compared to the real-world projects and experiences you can talk about in an interview.​

    So if you’re trying to gain real-world experience but don’t have the opportunity at your job at the moment, getting certified gives you credibility in that regard.

    2. Even if you have years of experience the topic, certification forces you to learn everything​

    One thing I’ve always discovered is that certification is a learning process! You actually are forced to poke about into the dark corners of the technology and learn the things ​you might not use on a day-to-day basis.

    Take for instance the Microsoft 70-534 certification, on architecting a Microsoft Azure application. That certification is difficult and extensive. It covers 100 distinct topics having to do with Azure – everything from load balancing, to traffic manager, to application gateway, to networking​, to virtual machines. Not exaggerating to say it’s 100 topics. And it may be that you only work with 20 or 30 of those things in your job. 

    So even if you’re experienced with some parts of Azure, very few of us are experienced with all. So getting certified actually exposes you to way more than you may have even known existed.

    And the third benefit is…​

    [thrive_leads id=’6447′]​

    3. Learning the Microsoft way​

    And finally, we all should admit that with any complex technology, the first time we go to implement a solution using it, it won’t be done in an efficient or ideal fashion. We will use tools in ways they were not intended, and patch together a solution using duct-tape and string to make it work on-time and on-budget.

    That’s a natural way of operating, although many would shudder to think about the applications that are important to our lives being developed in such a fragile fashion.

    For instance, I worked at a company that used Drupal for several of their websites. They had maybe 10 sites developed in Drupal.

    But when talking with the developers and architects, I was told “Oh these sites here were developed when we didn’t know what we were doing. From this point forward, we developed them using the Drupal way.”

    There is a “way” to develop cloud applications.

    So it’s important as an architect (and developers of course) that we understand how to best use tools in the cloud to accomplish what we want. Instead of spinning up a new VM each time we have some task we want accomplished, would it be better as a Web App? Or an Azure Function?

    Choosing the right tool for the job is an important part of constructing a solution. So while we’re learning about all of the tools that Azure has available for us (the 100 plus Azure Cloud Services), we also need to learn when to use one over another, and the limitations we will face when making certain decisions.

    Certification is relevant

    In 2017 and beyond, certification is still relevant in the tech field. While we can get jobs based on skills and experience, and certainly ​is a smart approach when hiring, it also makes sense that the teams are properly trained on the platforms they are developing solutions for.

    The cloud is this big wonderful world where hundreds of services are available to rent and use in our solutions that can cut costs, speed up development time, and reduce future maintenance headaches. And cutting the time required to be a master at that will yield better solutions and a happier overall team.

  • Nested Virtualization in Azure | Blog | Microsoft Azure

    Nested Virtualization in Azure | Blog | Microsoft Azure

    image

    We announced nested virtualization support coming to Azure with Dv3 or Ev3 series at //build session last month.

    image

    Today we are excited to announce that you can now enable nested virtualization using the Dv3 and Ev3 VM sizes. We will continue to expand support to more VM sizes in the coming months.

    For software and hardware prerequisites, configuration steps and limitations for nested virtualization please see the document here. In this blog we will discuss a couple interesting use cases and provide a short video demo for enabling a nested VM.

    Now not only you can create a Hyper-V container with Docker (see instructions here), but also by running nested virtualization, you can create a VM inside a VM. Such nested environment provides great flexibility in supporting your needs in various areas such as development, testing, customer training, demo, etc. For example, suppose you have a testing team using Hyper-V hosts on-prem today. They can now easily move their workloads to Azure by using nested VMs as virtualized test machines. The nested VM hosts will be used to replace physical Hyper-V hosts, individual testing engineer will have full control over the Hyper-V functionality on their own assigned VM Host in Azure.

    Let’s look at another example, suppose you want to run your development code, tests or applications on a machine with multiple users on it without impacting them, you can use the nested virtualization technology to spin up independent environments on demand to do that. Within nested VMs, even if you are running a chaos environment your users will not be impacted.

    Ready to try it? Please see the video below with my engineer Charles Ding setting up nested VM (here is the link to the power shell script he created and used in the video).

    We hope you enjoy using nested virtualization in Azure!

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/nested-virtualization-in-azure/

  • 70-532 70-533 VM Workloads that are Not Supported

    70-532 70-533 VM Workloads that are Not Supported

    One of the more confusing requirements of the 70-532 and 70-533 exams says, talking about Virtual Machines:

    Identify workloads that can and cannot be deployed

    Microsoft has a web page that lists some Windows software that cannot be deployed into Azure.

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2721672/microsoft-server-software-support-for-microsoft-azure-virtual-machines

    Most interesting is the list of Windows features that are not supporting inside Azure. Most make sense if you think about the on-premises specific uses or things like disk encryption which Azure has it’s own version of.

    Microsoft Windows Server Roles not supported:

    • Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Server
    • Hyper-V
    • Rights Management Services
    • Windows Deployment Services

    Microsoft Windows Server Features not supported:

    • BitLocker Drive Encryption (on the operating system hard disk, may be used on data disks)
    • Internet Storage Name Server
    • Multipath I/O
    • Network Load Balancing
    • Peer Name Resolution Protocol
    • RRAS
    • DirectAccess
    • SNMP Services
    • Storage Manager for SANs
    • Windows Internet Name Service
    • Wireless LAN Service

     

  • Study for the Microsoft 70-533 Implementing Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam With This New Course

    Study for the Microsoft 70-533 Implementing Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam With This New Course

    Check out this promo video for my new course, 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Certification, now available on Udemy.

    Check out the discount coupon embedded below the video if you want to save some money on that. Thanks for checking it out, and I hope to see you inside the course!

  • What’s the Deal with TOGAF Objectives, Approaches, and Steps?

    What’s the Deal with TOGAF Objectives, Approaches, and Steps?

    Got an interesting question in my TOGAF Part 1 course, and I thought I would share it and my answer.

    Hi Scott, Thank you for the awesome videos. It’s making life lot easier and can’t imagine how you can really make the boring subject so interesting, hats-off! Here goes my question: if I am understanding objectives correctly for preliminary phase as defining the architecture capability and establishing it by trainings or hiring and onboarding the whole team of enterprise architects. If those are the objectives, the approach should layout a roadmap of how to achieve those and the steps should detail the roadmap from beginning to end towards meeting those objectives. But here I see it totally unrelated. Objectives are only on Architecture Capability where as approach talks something entirely different and steps are even unrelated to approach and objectives. Appreciate if you could clarify. I might be totally wrong, just explained what’s running in my mind currently. Thanks G

    And here’s my answer:

    Hi G, it’s a good question. ​ I wasn’t there when the spec was written, but I’ve seen behind the scenes now as there are hundreds of people contributing to the next version of the spec, and everyone has opinions. 🙂

    The spec summarizes the preliminary phase as the “where, what, why, who, and how we do architecture”.​

    Yes, the objectives simplify this as determining and defining the architecture capability, but really it’s doing all the things that need to be in place before you even think about the problems of the enterprise and how to solve them.

    So the approach is everything from defining the enterprise, gathering the key drivers , defining principles, etc.

    So ultimately, yes, the objectives are too simplistic to all the things you need to do. But if you look at it from the “where, what, why, who, and how we do architecture” approach, hopefully you can see those elements in each of the approach and steps.​

    Scott

    It’s a good question. Why doesn’t the objectives match one-for-one with the approach and the steps? How is it that there are all sorts of activities in the approaches and steps that aren’t even mentioned as objectives?

    I don’t know why exactly. But I guess we have to look at the objective more generally. The preliminary phase, in this case, is meant to set up the architecture team for success. Not just hiring and training, but principles, definitions, and other key decisions. From that view, it makes sense.

     

  • What is a Cloud Architect?

    What is a Cloud Architect?

    I came across this slide today, and it made me think. “What is a cloud architect, really?”

    It says, “A cloud architect is an IT professional who is responsible for overseeing a company’s cloud computing strategy. This includes cloud adoption plans, cloud application design, and cloud management and monitoring.”

    Do you agree? Is a cloud architect responsible for strategy? Or does strategy come from management? And is the architect involved in operations too?

    How do you define cloud architect? Let me know in the comments.

     

     

  • New Azure Architecture Exam Practice Tests

    New Azure Architecture Exam Practice Tests

    I remember when I was studying for both of the Azure exams last year. I went through each of the topics covered in the tests thoroughly to ensure I knew everything before spending the $165 each to take them. But still, I wasn’t 100% sure of everything and I wanted to check.

    There is a place you can go to get an “official” practice test. But it was almost as much as the test itself, and you could only access it for 30 days before it would be taken away from you. It felt like the clock was ticking loudly to take the test.

    I said to myself, “I think I can do better. In fact, I know I can.”

    So I sat down this month and wrote 150 practice questions for the 70-534 Azure Architecture exam. That practice exam went live today on Udemy. I’m so thrilled to be able to offer it to you at a special launch day price.

    NEW! Three Complete Practice Tests for 70-534

    150 practice questions, divided into 3 timed exams

    List price: $100
    Today: $15

    https://www.udemy.com/70-534-architecting-microsoft-azure-solutions-practice-tests/?couponCode=SALAUNCH

     

     

    For a launch price of $15, you can get 150 original practice questions for the 70-534 exam. These questions cover ALL of the requirements of the exam. The practice questions are divided into three timed tests of 50 questions each, so you will know how ready you are to take the exam for real.

    With Udemy, you get the usual lifetime access guarantee and pay a reasonable price. The value is clear.

    If you do not have my 70-534 10-hour video course yet, the link to that is here.

    https://www.udemy.com/70534-azure/?couponCode=SA112016

     

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