Understand cloud security

Introduction to the shared responsibility model

• Challenges faced by organizations:
  • Securing their datacenters
  • Recruiting and retaining security experts
  • Using many security tools
  • Keeping pace with the volume and complexity of threats
• Benefits of shifting responsibilities to Azure:
  • Provides organizations with enhanced security coverage
  • Enables organizations to move security resources and budget allocations to other business priorities

Overview of elasticity and scalability

• DevOps has completely changed the way applications are developed and maintained 
• Cloud applications typically encounter variable workloads and peaks in activity 
• You can use Azure Monitor to understand how your applications are performing 
• Azure Monitor Autoscale helps to enable the elastic scale feature of the cloud  

Understand virtualization, containers, and serverless computing

• Virtualization creates a simulated, or virtual, computing environment, as opposed to a physical environment
• Each virtual machine can then interact independently and run different operating systems or applications
• There are four main categories of virtualization:
  • Desktop virtualization
  • Network virtualization
  • Software virtualization
  • Storage virtualization
• Azure Virtual Machines lets you create and use virtual machines in the cloud for scenarios such as:
  • Testing and development
  • Running applications in the cloud
  • Extending your datacenter to the cloud
  • Disaster recovery
• A container is a modified runtime environment that prevents a program from accessing protected resources
• A container interacts directly with the host operating system (OS) and augments the containment functions
• A container does not use virtualization 
• For container management, Microsoft released Azure Container Instances in April of 2018
• You can move existing applications to container(s) and run them within Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Serverless computing is the abstraction of servers, infrastructure, and operating systems
• When you build serverless apps, you don’t need to provision and manage any servers
• Azure Functions is a serverless application platform
• Azure Logic Apps allows developers to add workflows to support their Azure functions
• Serverless computing generally encompasses three things: 
  • Abstraction of servers
  • Event-driven scale
  • Microbilling