Planning and Designing Microsoft Azure Storage Solutions

Course Overview
Hi everyone! My name is Tim Warner, and welcome to my course, Planning and Designing Microsoft Azure Storage Solutions. I'm a Microsoft MVP, cloud consultant, and a Pluralsight staff author. As an Azure cloud architect, you're well aware of how many services involve Azure storage. By the end of this course, you'll be able to design Azure storage solutions for both infrastructure and Platform as a Service applications with a great blend of performance, security, and economy. I hope you'll join me on this journey to design Azure cloud storage with the Planning and Designing Microsoft Azure Storage Solutions course at Pluralsight.

The Azure Storage Landscape
Hello there, and welcome to Pluralsight. Welcome to our course entitled Planning and Designing Microsoft Azure Storage Solutions. This is the first module in the course. Its title is The Azure Storage Landscape. My name is Tim Warner, and I'm happy to be your instructor. What are we going to learn in this first lesson? We're going to begin with preliminary concepts, which means understanding Azure storage terminology. Once we have the vocabulary down, we'll consider the important of Azure regions and how the different storage redundancy options work. And then we'll finish with a survey of the various first-party storage development and management tools available to you in your subscription. Let's get started.

Blob Storage
Hello there, and welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Tim Warner. And this module is entitled Blob Storage. What we're going to cover in this module is, first of all, the use cases for blob storage and exactly what blobs are in the Azure storage ecosystem. We'll spend some time with the architectural question of what type of service account or service accounts best suit your needs. And then we'll look at data transfer and security. Use cases and blob types. The traditional Azure storage account has two primary use cases. Number 1--storage for virtual machine disks if you're using the Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS scenario. Number 2--Azure storage accounts are great repositories for unstructured data. Recall that the difference between structured versus unstructured data is the presence of a data model. When you think of a relational database system, that's an extreme example of structured data. On the other hand, a document file, a media file, or a VHD, virtual hard disk, file, those are pure, unstructured document data.

Table and Queue Storage
Hello there, and welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Tim Warner, and this module is entitled Table and Queue Storage. If you've been following this course sequentially, then you know we've been taking a journey through the various services in the Azure storage account. For instance, in the previous module, we looked at the blob service. Today, we're concerned with table storage and queue storage, and I want to relate these services to the IT operations professional. For some good reasons I think many IT operators say to me, Tim, why do I need to know about queues and tables? Those are things that our developers use. And however true that is, there are some aspects of this, especially with table storage, that you're going to want to take a closer look at. So keep an open mind if you would, and let's proceed.

Relational and Non-relational Storage
Hi there, and welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Tim Warner, and this module is entitled Relational and Non-relational Storage. We're going to begin this module with some preliminary architectural questions concerning databases in your Azure-based line-of-business applications. We'll then review the database options that Azure gives us for Database as a Service breaking that down along traditional lines, that is to say relational versus non-relational. Some good content in this module. Let's get started.

Storage Backup and Recovery Solutions
Hello there, and welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Tim Warner, and this module is entitled Storage Backup and Recovery Solutions. What we're learning in this module is crucially important because more likely than not, your business has service level agreement, SLA, and/or industry regulatory compliance certifications that require you to provide evidence that you're protecting your data in the Azure cloud. How can we do this? Well we're going to start with, as I like to do always, preliminary disaster recovery terminology. And then we'll turn our attention to designing a backup strategy. We'll learn to back up Azure VMs and their associated assets, stuff like storage accounts, Azure SQL databases, and the virtual machine configuration. This is a high-end packed module, so pay close attention, and let's proceed.

Azure Storage Architecture Case Study Review
Hi there, and welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Tim Warner, and this module is entitled Azure Storage Architecture Case Study Review. What I want to do in this module is take everything we've learned in the previous five modules and put it in meaningful real-world context. We'll look at a fictional company and examine it's line-of-business application and the company's journey into the Azure cloud. And we'll focus specifically on the storage subsystem. But by definition, we'll have to hit some other Azure assets. We're going to review business requirements and technical requirements and, finally, develop a proposed solution for this customer. Let's get started. What we're doing in this module is really the work of the Azure cloud architect, so some recommended sites for your background knowledge, and in particular if you find that you're good at this, you can develop a wonderful career for yourself working as an Azure cloud architect. This is the Azure Architecture Center. You see the URL in the lower left corner of the slide. You can also find the URLs as usual in the exercise files. The Azure Architecture Center has among other things a number of Visio diagrams that give reference architectures for various Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service scenarios. Another site you should always have at your ready reference is this docs article. It's called Microsoft Azure Storage Performance and Scalability Checklist. You want to look at Azure service level agreements, SLA targets, and also you want to look at your limits per subsystem. So in this course, we're looking at Azure storage, so you'll want to know what's possible in terms of maximums and minimums, naming convention issues, etc. , for blobs, tables, queues, managed disks, unmanaged disks, etc.

New Features: Azure File Sync and Azure Data Box
Hello there, and welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Tim Warner, and this module is entitled Azure File Sync and Azure Data Box. My purpose of creating this seventh and final module in the Azure Storage Architecture course is that I want to cover some important announcements from the Microsoft Ignite 2017 Conference. To set the stage, I want to make sure that you're familiar with preview features in Azure, the difference between a public preview and a private preview for instance. Then we'll look at two storage related new features in Azure. First, there's Azure File Sync, as we already mentioned, and then something called Azure Data Box. More will be revealed. I look forward to showing these products to you. Let's get started.