When this journey started the goal was meant migrate to a proficiency with Office 365 and Modern Desktop, these being one of the routes for anyone still working with On-premise Exchange and Active Directory.
Azure Infrastructure as a Service, Virtual machines, networks and storage is the closest to Infrastructure support, however features enable you to improve security and resilience without the hardware costs of on-premise. Correct design of deployments are crucial to meet the security and resilience needs and should always be defined at the beginning of any project as Azure costs can mount quickly.
The destination for me has been Platform Services which appears to demand the largest cross-section of skills and challenges to many previous ways of working.
Agile Methodology
( A google search)
Agile is a process by which a team can manage a project by breaking it up into several stages and involving constant collaboration with stakeholders and continuous improvement and iteration at every stage. The Agile methodology begins with clients describing how the end product will be used and what problem it will solve. This clarifies the customer's expectations to the project team. Once the work begins, teams cycle through a process of planning, executing, and evaluating — which might just change the final deliverable to fit the customer's needs better. Continuous collaboration is key, both among team members and with project stakeholders, to make fully-informed decisions.
DevOps
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/what-is-devops/
A compound of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is the union of people, processes and technology to continually provide value to customers.What does DevOps mean for teams? DevOps enables formerly siloed roles – development, IT operations, quality engineering and security – to coordinate and collaborate to produce better, more reliable products. By adopting a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, teams gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build and achieve business goals faster.
These two areas can provide the largest challenges as they can usually require a change of mindset across all teams and be company specific.
A friend sent the link below a couple hours after I posted the article, however it is worth having it here as a reference.
https://dev.to/scalyr/devops-engineer-what-does-it-take-to-land-the-job-2d26
It covers the gaps Infrastructure Ops might need to fill and the same for Developers, most of all the requirement for "Soft-Skills" across the board can't be under-estimated.
Back to Technical.......
If the image above makes you laugh or sigh the journey has probably already started.
ARM Templates are based on a language called JSON (if you didn't get the meme), learning the structure of the templates and the functionality available is crucial
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-group-authoring-templates
Passing on the advice given to me Azure Quick Start Templates
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/resources/templates/
Each ARM template provide a PowerShell script to deploy into a Resource Group you create beforehand.
I also discovered a new deployment method which might also be on any of the latest training for AZ-400, however if it is not happy to share it here and if you are looking to take AZ-400 I strongly recommend taking a look at it.
In the Azure portal search Custom Deployment from here it is possible to carry out the following tasks:
Custom Template editor where you can upload an ARM Template and deploy
- Common Template
- Finally one I've only now seen from writing this, a direct connection to the 101 Quick Start Template Git repository
CI/CD - Continuous Deployment / Continuous Integration with Azure DevOps (VSTS)
Signing up for an account at http;//dev.azure.com is currently free and includes 5 user licences.
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has been used by developers for years and would have been installed on a Windows server, Azure DevOps now provide a cloud platform and the use extends out to Infrastructure deployments.
Over the past months some Infrastructure practices have been helpful, Visio is still my friend and can be yours too if you want a visual representation of the Infrastructure as code.
Pipelines (Releases) within Azure DevOps, I would say is limited mainly by imagination and time to make more complicated task sequences work.
In-line PowerShell and Azure CLI allow you to complete post deployment configuration settings not achievable in the ARM Template.
There is a complete marketplace of tasks which can be imported to the pipeline in addition to the standard resource and application deployment
My overall recommendation to anyone is try the basic templates first, get your head around the structure, however if like me you have the tendency to just jump straight in at the deep end it can be more frustrating at times trying to work out deployment errors you don't understand but who knows might be faster.