Mustafa Toroman - Hands-On Cloud Administration in Azure: Implement, monitor, and manage important Azure services and components including IaaS and PaaS

I've been alive for more than 40 years, and I can tell you that we are lucky to live in these technologically exciting times. In a plastic or magnesium alloy, school notebook-sized box, weighing less than a bottle of juice, we have more portable power than a secret government data center would have had a few decades ago. We can run multiple operating systems on one computer at once, connect to a zillion devices wirelessly in an instant, and send messages and stream videos in a blink of an eye. Optical cables and even the air around us gives us access to an unfathomable amount of worldwide information and resources.

Around our wrists today, we wear millions of times more computing power and data storage than would have been in a computer not so long ago. What was once a huge block of buildings, connected to power plants, operating with the help of hundreds of engineers, is today a tiny piece of silicon in your pocket, with a processing power a billion times greater.

Technology is saving people's lives, allowing surgeries to be performed at a distance, empowering people with knowledge that is now more accessible than ever at just few clicks awayin the air, at sea, in the middle of nowhere.

Years ago, we waited 5 to 10 minutes for a program of just 48 kilobytes to load from a tape we got in the mail. Not email, folksyes, you have read it rightin the mailbox, the actual box that holds the papers and stuff your postman delivers. Once we got the internet, we waited minutes, often hours, just to connect to the internet because access points were rare. You reached them by dialingturning a ring or pushing plastic buttons. And once you got in, you patiently waited again to download that huge 1 megabyte document or a picture through a telephone wire. Yes, we also had operating systems that were upgraded or replaced with a new version every 5, 10, or 15 years.

Yeah, right, we were not in a hurry and had every minute between two operating system version upgrades available to learn the nuts and bolts of how that particular operating system worked and behaved.

Now well, today we attend university classes from our homes with a lecturer on a different continent; we watch condensed and fast-paced computer technology classes on a train on our way home from work. Operating systems and applications are upgraded every six months, with feature upgrades and fixes coming out every week. Microsoft Azure is evolving and getting new features, upgrades, services, and capabilities on a weekly basis.

Today, we live with an abundance of technology but march through a scarcity of time.

Mustafa and I met on one of the numerous conferences we attended and became friends through a mutual passion and love for technology, particularly Microsoft Azure. A database professional with more than 30 technical certifications, Mustafa is currently a cloud architect and system engineer responsible for architecting and managing thousands of Azure services and workloads for some of the largest Fortune 500 companies.

Through this book, Hands-On Cloud Administration in Azure, Mustafa effortlessly explains the most important pieces of the Azure puzzle, giving you grab-and-go concepts without losing so much valuable time. Beginning with cloud administration models, the book explains the pillars of Azure: virtual networks and the Infrastructure-as-a-Service model. In the second part of the book, you will make an efficient start on building advanced solutions in Azure. The book then closes with an exploration of the essential security solutions and administration tools, looking at the best tips and tricks for them.

Each Microsoft Azure service or feature could have a whole book written on it. The chapters in this book could be expanded to fill their own books as well; there is simply a lot to cover. What this book offers is a straightforward and practical approach that you can follow in the Azure portal as you are going through chaptersyou'll see the results right away, without wasting your valuable time. Jumpstarting your experience in Microsoft Azure has never been easier or more efficient, thanks to