New book: Exam Ref 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions, Second Edition

We’re happy to announce the availability of Exam Ref 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions, Second Edition (ISBN 9781509304592), by Zoiner Tejada, Michele Leroux Bustamante, and Ike Ellis.

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Overview

Prepare for Microsoft Exam 70-532—and help demonstrate your real-world mastery of the skills needed to develop Microsoft Azure solutions. Designed for experienced IT professionals ready to advance their status, Exam Ref focuses on the critical thinking and decision-making acumen needed for job success.

Focus on the expertise measured by these objectives:
• Create and manage Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines
• Design and implement a storage and data strategy
• Manage identity, application, and network services
• Design and implement Azure PaaS compute, web, and mobile services

This Microsoft Exam Ref:
• Organizes its coverage by exam objectives
• Features strategic, what-if scenarios to challenge you
• Assumes you have experience designing, programming, implementing, automating, and monitoring Microsoft Azure solutions, and are proficient with tools, techniques, and approaches for building scalable, resilient solutions

Contents at a glance

CHAPTER 1   Create and manage virtual machines
CHAPTER 2   Design and implement a storage and data strategy
CHAPTER 3   Manage identity, application and network services
CHAPTER 4   Design and implement Azure PaaS compute and web and mobile services

Introduction

The 70-532 exam focuses the skills necessary to develop software on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. It covers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings like Azure VMs and Platform as-a Service (PaaS) offerings like Azure Storage, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Active Directory, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hub, Azure App Services, Azure Service Fabric, Azure Functions and other relevant marketplace applications. This book will help get started with these and other features of Azure so that you can begin developing and deploying Azure applications.

This book is geared toward cloud application developers who focus on Azure as the target host environment. It covers choosing from Azure compute options for IaaS and Paas, incorporating storage and data platforms. It will help you choose when to use features such as Web Apps, API Apps, API Management, Logic Apps and Mobile Apps. It will explain your data storage options between Azure CosmosDB, Azure Redis Cache, Azure Search, and Azure SQL Database. It also covers how to secure applications with Azure Active Directory using B2C and B2B features for single sign-on based on OpenID Connect, OAuth2 and SAML-P protocols, and how to use Azure Vault to protect secrets.

This book covers every major topic area found on the exam, but it does not cover every exam question. Only the Microsoft exam team has access to the exam questions, and Microsoft regularly adds new questions to the exam, making it impossible to cover specific questions. You should consider this book a supplement to your relevant real-world experience and other study materials. If you encounter a topic in this book that you do not feel completely comfortable with, use the “Need more review?” links you’ll find in the text to find more information and take the time to research and study the topic. Great information is available on MSDN, TechNet, and in blogs and forums.

Organization of this book

This book is organized by the “Skills measured” list published for the exam. The “Skills measured” list is available for each exam on the Microsoft Learning website: https://aka.ms/examlist. Each chapter in this book corresponds to a major topic area in the list, and the technical tasks in each topic area determine a chapter’s organization. If an exam covers six major topic areas, for example, the book will contain six chapters.

Preparing for the exam

Microsoft certification exams are a great way to build your resume and let the world know about your level of expertise. Certification exams validate your on-the-job experience and product knowledge. Although there is no substitute for on-the-job experience, preparation through study and hands-on practice can help you prepare for the exam. We recommend that you augment your exam preparation plan by using a combination of available study materials and courses. For example, you might use the Exam ref and another study guide for your ”at home” preparation, and take a Microsoft Official Curriculum course for the classroom experience. Choose the combination that you think works best for you.

Note that this Exam Ref is based on publicly available information about the exam and the author’s experience. To safeguard the integrity of the exam, authors do not have access to the live exam.

About the authors

ZOINER TEJADA has more than 18 years of experience in the software industry as a software architect, CTO, and start-up CEO, with particular expertise in cloud computing, big data, analytics, and machine learning. He was among the first to receive a Microsoft Azure MVP (“Most Valuable Professional”) designation and has since been awarded the MVP for six consecutive years, and most recently a dual MVP award for Azure and Data Platform. Additionally, he was recently recognized by Microsoft as a Microsoft Regional Director.

MICHELE LEROUX BUSTAMANTE is cofounder / CIO of Solliance, a Microsoft Regional Director and Azure MVP, has been awarded Azure Elite and Azure Insider status as well as the ASP.NET Insider designation. Michele is a respected technology executive / thought leader, who builds high performance teams and infrastructure. With over 20 years of experience Michele has held senior executive positions, assembled software development teams and implemented processes for all aspects of the software development lifecycle, and actively facilitated large-scale enterprise application deployments. Michele is a recognized expert in many fields including distributed systems architecture, cloud computing and identity and access management – the latter, an area with very few deep technical experts. Today, Michele specializes in delivering cloud-enabled solutions at scale, cloud migration, security, compliance, and micro-services platforms.

IKE ELLIS is a data architect who stays current on many database technologies. He specializes in the Microsoft Data Platform, including DocumentDB, Azure SQL Datawarehouse, and Azure Data Lake. He also loves visualizing data using Microsoft tools like Power BI, SQL Server Reporting Services, and mobile dashboarding. Ike is a current Microsoft MVP for the data platform team.