Deploy and Manage Compute Resources
This domain covers Azure compute options from virtual machines to containers and platform services. You will configure availability, scaling, and automated deployment, and choose the right service for a workload. The core skill is matching compute needs to the correct level of management and resiliency.
Virtual Machines and Availability
Azure virtual machines are infrastructure-as-a-service compute where you manage the operating system. To keep applications available, you distribute VMs across fault and update domains using availability sets, which protect against rack-level and maintenance failures within one datacenter. Availability zones go further by placing VMs in physically separate datacenters within a region, protecting against a full datacenter outage. Choosing zones over sets gives stronger resiliency when a region supports them.
Virtual Machine Scale Sets
A virtual machine scale set manages a group of identical VMs and can automatically scale the instance count in or out based on metrics such as CPU or on a schedule. This provides elasticity for workloads with variable demand and integrates with load balancing to distribute traffic. Scale sets differ from availability sets, which hold a fixed number of manually managed VMs. Autoscale rules define the thresholds and limits for adding and removing instances.
ARM Templates and Bicep
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are declarative JSON files that define infrastructure so deployments are repeatable and idempotent. Bicep is a more concise domain-specific language that compiles to ARM JSON, offering cleaner syntax and better authoring. Using infrastructure-as-code lets you version, review, and redeploy environments consistently. This contrasts with imperative scripts or manual portal work, which are harder to reproduce reliably.
App Service
Azure App Service is a managed platform-as-a-service for hosting web applications and APIs without managing the underlying OS or servers. It provides features like deployment slots for staging, autoscaling, custom domains, and integrated authentication. Because Azure handles the platform, App Service reduces operational overhead compared to running web servers on VMs. It is a strong choice when you want to focus on the application rather than infrastructure.
Containers: ACI and AKS
Azure Container Instances (ACI) runs individual containers quickly without managing servers or orchestration, ideal for simple, short-lived, or bursting tasks. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes platform for orchestrating many containers with scaling, self-healing, and rolling updates, suited to complex microservice workloads. Choosing between them depends on whether you need full orchestration or just a lightweight container runtime. Both let you avoid managing VM infrastructure directly.