My latest Pluralsight course—Architecting for High Availability in Microsoft Azure—is out!

Imagine that someone asks you to build a cloud-hosted app. So far so good. And that app should be resilient against any glitches within the data center. Um, ok. And the app should stay online even if a whole region goes offline. Wait, what? While public clouds make it easier to build highly available systems, it’s not automatic. How do you set it up? What’s your responsibility, and what does the cloud provider do for you? I answer this, and more, in my new Pluralsight course: Architecting for High Availability in Microsoft Azure.

This course is a four hour tour through the core Azure services, and how to configure each for high availability. Along the way, we discuss general resilience patterns. To prove how things work, we also build out a reference app that shows how everything works. At the end of the course, you’ll have a good idea of how to use Azure, and configure it effectively.

The six course modules are:

Patterns for High Availability in the Cloud. Here we discuss some core ideas around highly available distributed systems, and patterns you should know.

Provisioning Durable Azure Storage. In this module, we check out Azure Storage and how Blob, File, and Disk storage works.

Configuring Resilient Azure Databases. Databases can be a vulnerable part of your architecture, so you need to pay special attention here. We’ll look at Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Redis Cache, and more.

Deploying Redundant Azure Compute. This is arguably what cloud was first famous for, and here we’ll play around with Azure Virtual Machines, Azure App Service, and Azure Functions.

Scale Processing via Azure Integration Capabilities. Messaging is so hot right now! A bulletproof integration tier is critical, so we’ll dig into how to set up Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure Logic Apps for resilience.

Configuring Uninterrupted Traffic with Azure Networking. If your assets aren’t routable, it doesn’t matter how resilient they are! In this module, we explore Azure networking services like Virtual Networks, Load Balancing, App Gateway, and Traffic Manager.

I hope you watch this course and enjoy it. It took me months to put together, but the final result should be worth it!