Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305)

Core Azure Architecture

• Understand Azure’s physical and management infrastructure.
• Explore compute options including VMs, containers, functions, and hosting services.
• Configure networking: virtual networks, VPNs, ExpressRoute, and DNS.
• Work with Azure storage services, redundancy, migration, and file movement.
• Manage identity, access, and security with Microsoft Entra ID, Conditional Access, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Cloud Adoption & Governance

• Apply the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework to plan, migrate, modernize, govern, and secure workloads.
• Use the Azure Well-Architected Framework to guide reliable, secure, cost-optimized, and high-performance solutions.
• Design governance models using management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, tags, policies, and RBAC.

Security, Authentication & Authorization

• Plan and implement IAM solutions with Microsoft Entra ID, B2B/B2C, conditional access, identity protection, and managed identities.
• Secure secrets with Azure Key Vault.
• Apply Zero Trust and defense-in-depth strategies.

Monitoring, Logging, and Operations

• Design solutions using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Workbooks, and Network Watcher.
• Establish operational excellence with DevOps culture, automation, observability, and safe deployment practices.

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

• Plan HA/DR strategies using RTO/RPO guidelines.
• Implement backup and recovery for VMs, files, blobs, SQL databases, and hybrid workloads.
• Design for resiliency and recovery across IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid scenarios.

Data Solutions & Integration

• Design non-relational and relational storage with redundancy, performance, and security considerations.
• Implement Azure SQL Database, Managed Instance, Cosmos DB, Blob, Files, and managed disks.
• Plan data integration with Azure Data Factory, Data Lake, Databricks, Synapse Analytics, and Stream Analytics.

Azure Well-Architected Framework Deep Dive

• Reliability: Design for resilience, recovery, and operational stability.
• Security: Protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
• Cost Optimization: Reduce waste and maximize ROI.
• Operational Excellence: Standardize practices, automate, and monitor effectively.
• Performance Efficiency: Scale to demand and optimize resource usage.