MSDN Documentation

Key Concepts

Effective management and governance are crucial for a secure, compliant, and cost-effective Azure deployment. Azure provides a comprehensive suite of tools to achieve these goals:

• Resource Organization: Using resource groups and subscriptions to logically structure your resources.
• Access Control: Implementing granular permissions with Azure RBAC to ensure only authorized users can perform specific actions.
• Policy Enforcement: Utilizing Azure Policy to enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale.
• Monitoring and Diagnostics: Leveraging Azure Monitor for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your Azure and on-premises environments.
• Cost Optimization: Employing Azure Cost Management + Billing to understand, manage, and optimize your cloud spending.
• Automation: Using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and Azure Blueprints for consistent and repeatable deployments.
• Recommendations: Getting proactive guidance from Azure Advisor to improve performance, security, cost, and reliability.

Azure Policy

Azure Policy helps you enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale. It enables you to implement policies across your subscriptions to govern resource compliance, security, and operational requirements.

Core Features:

• Effect Definitions: Control what happens when a policy rule is matched (e.g., Audit, Deny, DeployIfNotExists, Modify).
• Policy Assignments: Apply policies to specific scopes, such as management groups, subscriptions, or resource groups.
• Initiatives (Policy Sets): Group related policies into a single logical unit for easier management and compliance reporting.
• Compliance Reporting: Monitor the compliance state of your resources against assigned policies.

Learn more about Azure Policy documentation.

Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Azure RBAC enables fine-grained access management of Azure resources. By assigning roles to users, groups, service principals, or managed identities, you can grant permissions to perform specific actions on resources.

Built-in Roles:

• Owner: Full access to all resources, including the right to delegate access to others.
• Contributor: Can create and manage all types of Azure resources but cannot grant access to others.
• Reader: Can view all Azure resources but cannot make any changes.
• User Access Administrator: Can manage user access to Azure resources.

You can also create custom roles tailored to your specific needs.

Explore Azure RBAC deep dives.

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your Azure and on-premises environments. It helps you understand performance and identify issues.

Key Components:

• Azure Monitor Metrics: Time-series data representing performance counters and metrics.
• Azure Monitor Logs: Log data collected from resources, enabling complex queries and analysis using Kusto Query Language (KQL).
• Application Insights: Application performance management service for web applications.
• Log Analytics: A tool for interactively querying log data.
• Alerts: Proactive notification when critical conditions are detected.

Get started with Azure Monitor tutorials.

Azure Cost Management + Billing

Understand, manage, and optimize your Azure costs with Azure Cost Management + Billing. Gain insights into your spending, set budgets, and identify opportunities for cost savings.

Features:

• Cost Analysis: Visualize and analyze your current and forecasted costs.
• Budgets: Set spending limits and receive alerts when costs approach or exceed these limits.
• Exports: Schedule and automate the export of cost data for further analysis.
• Recommendations: Receive actionable recommendations to reduce spending, such as right-sizing VMs or deleting unattached disks.

Dive into optimizing Azure costs.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure account.

Key Features:

• Declarative Deployment: Define the desired state of your resources, and ARM handles the creation and configuration.
• Resource Groups: Logical containers for Azure resources.
• ARM Templates: JSON files that define the infrastructure and configuration for your deployment.
• Deployment History: Track the status and details of all deployments.

Explore ARM template examples.

Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations to help you optimize your Azure resources for performance, security, cost, reliability, and operational excellence.

Recommendation Categories:

• Cost: Identify opportunities to reduce costs by right-sizing resources or purchasing reservations.
• Performance: Improve application performance by identifying underutilized or overutilized resources.
• Security: Enhance your security posture by addressing vulnerabilities and implementing best practices.
• Reliability: Increase the resilience and availability of your applications.
• Operational Excellence: Improve operational efficiency by adopting best practices for deployment, monitoring, and management.

Learn more about Azure Advisor insights.

Azure Blueprints

Azure Blueprints allow cloud architects and IT professionals to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that adhere to an organization's standards, patterns, and requirements.

Blueprints enable the fast and reliable deployment of compliant environments by including:

• Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates for deploying resources.
• Azure Policy assignments to enforce governance.
• Role assignments to grant permissions.

Understand how to use Azure Blueprints.