AZ-301 Links and Topics

Determine workload requirements (10-15%)

Gather Information and Requirements

• Identify compliance requirements, identity and access management infrastructure, and service-oriented architectures (e.g., integration patterns, service design, service discoverability)
• identify accessibility (e.g. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), availability (e.g. Service Level Agreement), capacity planning and scalability, deploy-ability (e.g., repositories, failback, slot-based deployment), configurability, governance, maintainability (e.g. logging, debugging, troubleshooting, recovery, training), security (e.g. authentication, authorization, attacks), and sizing (e.g. support costs, optimization) requirements
• recommend changes during project execution (ongoing)
• evaluate products and services to align with solution
• create testing scenarios

Optimize Consumption Strategy

• optimize app service, compute, identity, network, and storage costs

Design an Auditing and Monitoring Strategy

• define logical groupings (tags) for resources to be monitored
• determine levels and storage locations for logs
• plan for integration with monitoring tools
• recommend appropriate monitoring tool(s) for a solution
• specify mechanism for event routing and escalation
• design auditing for compliance requirements
• design auditing policies and traceability requirements

Design for identity and security (20-25%)

Design Identity Management

• choose an identity management approach
• design an identity delegation strategy, identity repository (including directory, application, systems, etc.)
• design self-service identity management and user and persona provisioning
• define personas and roles
• recommend appropriate access control strategy (e.g., attribute-based, discretionary access, history-based, identity-based, mandatory, organization-based, role-based, rule-based, responsibility-based)

Design Authentication

• choose an authentication approach
• design a single-sign on approach
• design for IPSec, logon, multi-factor, network access, and remote authentication

Design Authorization

• choose an authorization approach
• define access permissions and privileges
• design secure delegated access (e.g., oAuth, OpenID, etc.)
• recommend when and how to use API Keys

Design for Risk Prevention for Identity

• design a risk assessment strategy (e.g., access reviews, RBAC policies, physical access)
• evaluate agreements involving services or products from vendors and contractors
• update solution design to address and mitigate changes to existing security policies, standards, guidelines and procedures

Design a Monitoring Strategy for Identity and Security

• design for alert notifications
• design an alert and metrics strategy
• recommend authentication monitors

Design a data platform solution (15-20%)

Design a Data Management Strategy

• choose between managed and unmanaged data store
• choose between relational and non-relational databases
• design data auditing and caching strategies identify data attributes (e.g., relevancy, structure, frequency, size, durability, etc.)
• recommend Database Transaction Unit (DTU) sizing
• design a data retention policy
• design for data availability, consistency, and durability
• design a data warehouse strategy

Design a Data Protection Strategy

• recommend geographic data storage
• design an encryption strategy for data at rest, for data in transmission, and for data in use
• design a scalability strategy for data
• design secure access to data
• design a data loss prevention (DLP) policy

Design and Document Data Flows

• identify data flow requirements
• create a data flow diagram
• design a data flow to meet business requirements
• design a data import and export strategy

Design a Monitoring Strategy for the Data Platform

• design for alert notifications
• design an alert and metrics strategy

Design a business continuity strategy (15-20%)

Design a Site Recovery Strategy

• design a recovery solution
• design a site recovery replication policy
• design for site recovery capacity and for storage replication
• design site failover and failback (planned/unplanned)
• design the site recovery network recommend recovery objectives (e.g., Azure, on-prem, hybrid, Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Level Objective (RLO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO))
• identify resources that require site recovery
• identify supported and unsupported workloads
• recommend a geographical distribution strategy

Design for High Availability

• design for application redundancy, autoscaling, data center and fault domain redundancy, and network redundancy
• identify resources that require high availability
• identify storage types for high availability

Design a Data Archiving Strategy

• recommend storage types and methodology for data archiving
• identify requirements for data archiving and business compliance requirements for data archiving
• identify SLA(s) for data archiving

Design for deployment, migration, and integration (10-15%)

Design Deployments

• design a compute, container, data platform, messaging solution, storage, and web app and service deployment strategy

Design Migrations

• recommend a migration strategy
• design data import/export strategies during migration
• determine the appropriate application migration, data transfer, and network connectivity method
• determine migration scope, including redundant, related, trivial, and outdated data
• determine application and data compatibility

Design an API Integration Strategy

• design an API gateway strategy
• determine policies for internal and external consumption of APIs
• recommend a hosting structure for API management

Design an infrastructure strategy (15-20%)

Design a Storage Strategy

• design a storage provisioning strategy
• design storage access strategy
• identify storage requirements
• recommend a storage solution and storage management tools

Design a Compute Strategy

• design compute provisioning and secure compute strategies
• determine appropriate compute technologies (e.g., virtual machines, functions, service fabric, container instances, etc.)
• design an Azure HPC environment
• identify compute requirements
• recommend management tools for compute

Design a Networking Strategy

• design network provisioning and network security strategies
• determine appropriate network connectivity technologies
• identify networking requirements
• recommend network management tools

Design a Monitoring Strategy for Infrastructure

• design for alert notifications
• design an alert and metrics strategy