Azure management and governance

1. Azure management and governance

Hi, and welcome to this course on Azure management and governance. My name is Maarten, and I will be your instructor for this course.

2. Microsoft Azure

To begin, we will review some of the main features of Microsoft Azure, as covered in the Introduction to Azure course. Azure is an online cloud computing platform by Microsoft. It can be used for, among others, data storage, application development, and web hosting. Azure is flexible and scalable, and it is able to integrate with other Microsoft services like Power BI.

3. Azure services vs. resources

Before we dive deeper into management and governance, we first need to discuss two important concepts in Azure: services and resources. These are both core building blocks of Azure, but there are important differences between both. A service is a set of features or functionality provided by Azure. It typically consists of a combination of components that work together to provide a specific capability. Examples are Azure Monitor for monitoring, Azure Resource Manager for resource management, and Microsoft Cost Management for cost management. A resource, on the other hand, is a specific product or object of a service. It is any manageable item within Azure. Examples are a database, web application, or a virtual machine. You'll see both concepts come up often while we discuss the ins and outs of management and governance in Azure further.

4. Management and governance in Azure

At its core, management and governance is about maintaining business applications and the resources that support them. To do this, we make use of different services that Azure offers. We can distinguish the following four broad uses for management and governance in Azure: cost management, policy and standards implementation, resource management, and monitoring.

5. Management and governance use cases

Now that we know more about what management and governance is about, for what kind of tasks can we use Azure in practice? Typical use cases for management and governance in Azure are: managing resources supporting business applications, pro-active management of costs to avoid going over budget, ensuring data protection standards are implemented and enforced, and monitoring the performance and availability of both your applications and resources. Throughout the course, we'll discuss several use cases in more detail as we learn more about the different management and governance tools provided in Azure.

6. Example use case: dashboard performance

Suppose you're hosting a dashboard containing sales data that can be interactively explored. With the help of Azure, you can support the dashboard with the appropriate resources. For example, you can ensure that the dashboard can handle varying levels of traffic dynamically, be it peak usage or low demand. You can also make sure there is continuity and disaster recovery with data replication across Azure regions.

7. Example use case: dashboard performance

There is more you can do to support and improve your dashboard. Using Azure services, you can also collect all sorts of performance metrics related to the dashboard and analyze them to improve usage experience. For example, you could analyze how users interact with the dashboard and use this to add or remove features.

8. Let's practice!

This was only one example of a use case; we'll discuss many more throughout the course! For now, let's practice what you've learned!

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