Pass Microsoft DevOps AZ-400 Exam in First Attempt Easily

Setup Azure and Azure DevOps

1. Lecture - About Azure free account

Welcome to this lecture. We are going to talk about Azure free accounts. So, what is this free account offering from Azure? Azure's free account includes free access to most popular Azure products for the first 30 days after signing up for $200 in credits. So if I sign up for an Azure free account, I can use all Azure services within that $200 limit entirely for free for the first month. So the question is, what all is required in order to create this free account? All you need is a credit card and a mobile number. Now, most people get confused as to why they need to provide their credit card details when Microsoft says that it's completely free. So Microsoft asks for a credit card just to verify that the account holders are real people, not bots or anonymous trouble makers. If they use the phone number and the credit card information for identity verification and do not charge your credit card for anything, there will be an SMS verification that happens to the registered mobile number associated with your credit card for which they will detect SMS charges. It is approximately Rs 2 in Indian currency. Other than that, it is entirely free unless and until we choose to upgrade. So how does the upgrade work? After this one-month trial period, during which all products are completely free, you will be able to upgrade directly from Azure Portal. So if I do not upgrade, my account will be disabled and we can leave it aside. But if I upgrade for the next eleven months—that is, for the next eleven months after I click on upgrade—I can use about 25 products from Azure entirely free again. But if we use anything other than these products, then we need to pay. So, after a one-month trial period in which all products are completely free, we can choose to upgrade our trial account to a pay-as-you-go subscription in which we will be charged and Microsoft will deduct money from our credit card. Even then, Microsoft offers around 25 products entirely free. So the summary is that in order to try out the things mentioned in this course, you can create an account on your own and use it for free for the first month. And after this one month, if you do not upgrade, there are no charges. And if you choose to upgrade, there are some products that you can use for free and some others that are not free. Following this one-month free trial, the Azure Portal will display a list of free products. You can go to the Azure Portal once you click Once you create an account, you can go to AzurePortal and search for free services, and it will give you the ones it lists out. The services are free even in this eleven-month pay-as-you-go period. So let me go ahead and show you how we can create a free Azure account.

2. Demo - Creating an Azure account

Welcome to this lecture on creating an Azure account. So the first thing that you should do is create a Microsoft account. So let me go to OutlookLive.com and create a Microsoft account. Click on "No Accounts." Create that option and enter an email ID that you wish to have. Allow me to enter UDT and G. Let's say [email protected] on "Next" and enter a strong password that you wish to have. Let me enter a strong password there and click on Next. So it will take you to the page where it will ask for your first name and last name. Let me enter some random values there. Click Next. You can enter your real value there. It will ask you for a country and date of birth. Let me enter my country that is India and birth date. You can enter your birthday there and click on Next. So perhaps we should fill the capture. Enter these values: k, B, Flram Click on Next, and once you click on Next, let us wait for the page to load, and Microsoft is going to create an account for us. Let me wait till the account is created. So we have the account created and you have the welcome email from Microsoft. So let me log out from this page and show you how you can create an Azure account using this Microsoft account that we just created. So let me open a new tab here, search Azure, and click on the second link. That link that you have at Azure Microsoft.com. Click on "Sign in" on the right-hand side, and then click "Login with the account that we have created. So I created an account just now at [email protected] Let me enter the credentials; we'll ask you for the password. Enter the password and click on "Sign in." So once you click on "Sign in," you will get the link to create a free Azure account. Click on that "Start Free" option in the slight yellow background. Click on that, and if you click on that, it will redirect your page where it is asking for the basic details. Basic information such as name, last name, country, email ID, and mobile number Those details will be requested. You can fill in the blanks on your own. There is nothing to show. As a demonstration of this, you need to choose your country. Let us choose India, and you can enter the remaining value site. You can enter email IDs. You can enter Phone number organization. You can fill in any value. So once that section is completed, that is the first section about you section. Once that section is completed and you click Next, you'll be automatically taken to the second section. That is an identity verification by phone, and they will ask you to enter a phone number, which you can do. It will send a six-digit code to your phone number, and you can verify it there. Once that section is completed and you click Next, you will be prompted to enter your credit card information, including EMV, expiry date, and number, among other things. So once that is completed, there is an agreement option. The fourth option is the agreement option, where it will ask you to enter a check mark. There's just an agreement button there. You can enter that and click on "Next." Once that is completed, it will be automatically redirected to the Azure Portal that is created. Nothing is there to show you and teach you so that you can do it on your own. So I'm not showing you. So let me log out and show you what the actual Azure Portal will look like. Let me go to PortalAzure.com and show you how the final product will appear in Azure Portal. Let me log in with my account. where I already have an account. [email protected]; remember, this is not the account that we just created. I've already created an Azure account. I already have an account for those who are not familiar with the Azure Portal. This is how the page loaded completely. So this is how the page will actually look like the Azure Portal. So once you have done with the agreement, the page will be automatically redirected to this page, where you can do any operations on measurements. So that's how you create an account.

3. Lecture - Azure DevOps Structure

Before we begin with Azure DevOps' initial setup, you should be very familiar with the organisation and project structure in Azure DevOps. So what is an organization? An organisation in Azure DevOps is a mechanism for organising and connecting groups of related projects. For example, we can have several business divisions, regional divisions, or other enterprise structures. And based on all these, we can have different organisations in Azure Ops. To make things simpler, let us assume that an organisation in Azure DevOps is something similar to a subscription for Azure Portal or Azure Account. Okay, then we have projects in Azure DevOps. So what is the project? Again, to make things simpler, let us assume that a project in Azure DevOps is something similar to resource groups or an Azure account that is similar to the concept of resource groups. For each subscription, we can have many resource groups. Each organisation in Azure Dogs can contain one or more projects. So a project is a separate unit in an organisation that contains all the services offered by Azure DevOps. By all the services, I mean, if you take an equivalent structure we have in Azure Portal, we have subscriptions, and under that we have resource groups. We create Azureservices in those resource groups in the same way that you all create Storage Accounts. So similar to those services, we have other services in Azure DevOps. So each project contains services such as boards and backlogs for jail planning, pipelines for continuous integration, and deployment reports for version control, et cetera. So as of now, this much understanding is enough to get started. Let me go ahead and show you how we can create an organisation and project in Azure DevOps. You.

4. Demo - Set up Azure DevOps

So in order to set up Azure DevOps, the first thing that you should do is log into Dev dot Azure.com, and let me click on Sign in on the top right-hand corner. Click on that. It will ask you for your Microsoft Account user email ID. I'm entering my email ID there. After entering the email and ID, click next. Let me enter my password there. So once you enter your password, click on SignIn, and it will take you to Azure. Okay, there's one more step to go. If you want, you can add the Microsoft mobile number verification. Let me skip that for now. So it will take you to Azure. Microsoft.com There is an option to sign into Azure. Click on that option, and for the first time, since you are creating it for the first time, there are some additional things that you should do. Click on Continue here, and it will take you through the Microsoft Azure Jobs organization. As of now, I do not have any organization. So it is asking me to create one. And the one thing that you should take care of is that the name should be globally unique in the sense that we enter a value here. Let me enter Infrastructure as a code here, and you can choose any location. Click on "Continue" So if you click on "Continue," you can see that it gives an error message stating that the given organisation name is already taken. so it should be a globally unique value. Let me make it unique by entering some other characters here. And let me click on Next. So it is going to take us to the AzureDevOps organisation with that particular name, and then it will give us a prompt to create a project. So, in Azure, an organisation is equivalent to a subscription, whereas a project is equivalent to a result. We can sort of say like that, "Let's create a new project IEC for Infrastructure has two options: public and private. Let me choose Private because only I want to see my project, and click on Create Project. So it's as simple as that. Now that the project has been created, we have an organization, and inside that, we have a project. So there can be a number of projects in an organization. As of now, I'm creating one. If you go inside the project, you can see several services. There are boards there. You have an azure apple there. You have Azure Pipelines, then Azure test plans are there, then Azure artefacts are there. So these are the different services that are offered by Microsoft Azure DevOps, and they are available inside a project. We can make use of any of them as per our requirements. And if you go to Organization Settings in the Organization window, you can apply common settings to an organization. If you have ten projects in an organization, you can apply common settings to all of them at the organisation settings level. And if you go inside a project here, in the bottom left-hand corner, you have project settings, where you can apply project-level settings. project-level settings in the sense that you can add project-level administrators there. You can add or remove services. For example, if I do not want my, let's say, artifacts, I can click on them and tag them as off, then say remove artifacts. My artefacts service will be temporarily disabled. So if you go inside the project again, you can see that only test-till-test plans are there. The artefact section is removed, and I can turn that back whenever we go. Let me go to project settings and turn that back on. Then if I just reload the page, I can see that artefact section. It backs.

5. Lecture - About Service Connections

We have created our Azure accounts. We have done an initial setup for Azure DevOps. Now, let's connect between these two. That is, we need to connect to Azure DevOpsand Azure to do the info a structured deployment. And so that's what we will use. We will use service connections. So what are these service connections from Azure DevOps? We need to physically connect to external and remote services for several purposes. For example, in our case, we need to connect to our Microsoft Azure subscription. Similarly, you might want to connect to a Docker registry for pushing your images or Jenkins for some other purpose. For all these, we can define service connections in Azure devices, specifically in Azure Pipelines, that are available for use in all of our tasks. For example, we will create a service connection called Azure Resource Manager service connection for our Azure subscriptions so that we can do our deployment. And we will use the service connection whenever we need to do a deployment to Azure. So, Azure Pipeline supports a variety of service connection types. By default, as I said, we have Azure service connections, Bit bucket Cloud Service connections, Docker Registry Service connections, Jenkins Service connections, and Kubernetes Service connections. So we have this by default in Azure DevOps. One thing to note is that service connections are created at project scope. A service connection created in one project is not visible in another project. And one more thing that you should be aware of before trying out the lecture, when we show the demo of how to create a service connection, is that before going to the lecture, you need to make sure that you need application registration permissions in Azure Active Directory. Why? Because when we create our service connection, it is going to create an application in Azure AD and assign that application a contributor role to either the subscription scope or the one we define. So, if your account does not already have these permissions, you need to get these two permissions, that is, application registration permissions in Azure Ad and assigning a contributor permission (the permission to assign a contributor owner or user administrator role in a subscription or resource group level). If you only have these two permissions, then only you will be able to create a connection between Azure DevOps and Azure. So let me go ahead and show you how we can create a service connection between Azure DevOps and Azure.

6. Demo - Create a Service Connection

So we have created our Azure account and we have set up Azure DevOps organisation and project. Now it's time for us to connect with these two. Can I create a connection between Azure, DevOps, and Azure? So the reason we need to create a connection is because we want to deploy Azure resources using Azure DevOps. So for that, what you need to do is go to the project settings. You can see several settings. Service-level settings are there. If you see bot settings are there. Repository settings are there. Pipeline settings are there. So, under Pipelines, you can see an option called Service Connection. Click on that option. So in Service Connections, there is an option to add a new service connection. You can click on "New Service Connection." It will give you a drop-down with any number of service connections. You can choose an Azure Sales Manager from there.

Now it will give you a popup where you can enter the details. You can enter any connection name you want. Let me enter a name. It's irrelevant, nothing much special about it. But what is special is where you define the access. You can either define access at subscription scope or you can define access for a single resource group. It's up to you. So if I want to add a subscription scope, I should not give any input at the low-level level. And what actually happens in the background is highlighted here. A new Azure service principle will be created, and that will be assigned a contributor role. So if it's resource group-level access, it will be assigned a contributor role at the resource group. And if you do not provide any resources, subscription-level access will be created. Click on "Okay." If you click on OK, it will prompt you for the Azure login credentials. You can login using your Azure login credentials. And, because we've granted subscription-level access, please allow me to enter my password here. Because you have given subscription-level access, a service principle is created, and that will be assigned a subscription level at Azure Portal. So basically what that means is that there is a service principle in Azure that is being used by Azure DevOps. And because the service principle is having access to having the contributor access subscription, azure DevOpsc an intend to whatever a contributor or Cando in Azure, Azure DevOps can do that. So the service connection is created. So this window basically shows how you can do all that. If you want, you can disconnect. If you want, you can update the service connection. So several options, you can refer them, explore them on your own, but what is of interest tous, but you should be aware of it. Let me show it to you. Let me open a new tab, go to Azure, and show you what actually happened in the back end.

So, as I said, if you log into Azure, the service principle that is created has a contributor role in Azure. That means because the service principle is having the contributor role. My Azure DevOps is having the contributor role and it can azure DevOps now onwards, can do anything that a contributor role can do in Azure. So go to the subscription, go inside your Azure subscription, and go to this access control tab here. And you can see that let’s go to all assignments in Azure. And if you see there is a service principle under contributor roles, you can see a service principle, UDT, and infrastructure code. And one thing to note here is that the service principle is not created. It has a structure like an organization name, a project name, and a unique identity, so that is a structure that it will follow. And here you can see the project name and the unique identifier. If you want, you can explore the other properties as well, the application ID, object ID, and properties of the service principle. or you can go inside the permissions and see the permission. So these are the kinds of things you can explore on your own. But what you should be aware of is that the only thing that you should be aware of is that at the subscription scope, if you go there and see it as a contributor role, and we can use the service principle to do anything that a contributor role can do in Azure, that is the only thing that you should be aware of.

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ARM Templates

1. Lecture - About ARM Templates

Welcome to this lecture where we talk about the Azure Resource Manager template. Before we begin, please understand that this is not an Arm template course. This course is specifically focused on using Azure DevOps for Azure deployment. Still, we are going to discuss the structure and syntax of Arm's template so that things get easier for us in the coming lectures. We know that Azure Resource Management Templates allow us to create and deploy an Azure infrastructure declaratively. When we deploy an Arm template, Azure converts the JSON-formatted template into Rest API operations, which are sent to the corresponding resource provider. You need not go into that much detail, but the thing of interest for us is how we can write a template. in this lecture. I'll tell you how. You will never need to write templates from scratch again, as there are ways within Azure where you can get ready-made templates as per your requirements. But for now, understand the structure and syntax of Arm templates. In its simplest structure, an arm template has the following elements: First, we have the schema, that is, the location of the JSON schema file that describes the version of the template language. Then there's a content version that's an aversion of the template, like 10 0. Those kinds of values are specified there. So in a normal case, you need not change the schema or content version unless there is an update from Microsoft. We'll keep them as is. Then, at the end, we have an optional section called Outputs where we specify the values that are returned after deployment. Again, as I said, it's an optional section, but the important sections are parameters, variables, and resources. So let's discuss them. Parameters are values that are provided when deployment is executed to customise resource deployment. But if these are values that we can input while deploying resources, we can give up to 256 parameters in a single template. So let me show you an example. template for better understanding. Here we have the template of an Azure storage account. As you can see, the schema and content version are at the top. Just below that, we have parameters. We have defined the name, the location, tier, kind, et cetera, as the parameters. Here, if you scroll down to the bottom, we will refer to each of these values in the Resources section. So basically, what these parameters do is that they allow us to customise our template. For example, I can use the template to create a storage account called ABC in the North Europe region. The same template can also be used to create another storage account called XYZ in a different location, say West Europe. So for that, this customization happens in the parameter section. We simply need to change the parameters in goods, such as name and location, and rerun the template each time a deployment is required. One more thing regarding parameters is that you can have a separate file for parameters, called a parameter file. So all these values, like the name, location times, tier, et cetera, can be given as a separate file, and that file can be provided along with the template at the time of deployment. So this is about parameters. Next we have next we have variables. Variables are values that are used as adjacent fragments in the template to simplify template language expressions. These are used to simplify our template by reducing complex expressions to a more manageable form. Take this example. I want to use my storage account, Name Traffic, and attach it to the resource group ID and use it at multiple places within the template. The RHS of this expression exactly does that. But instead of giving this expression everywhere, what I can do is assign it to a variable called storage name and use that variable wherever I want this expression. Thereby, we have a more manageable and easily readable version of the same expression. So that was about variables. Next we have the important section, which is the resource section. Now, this section is the core of the template where we specify the resource types that are deployed or updated. So if you see the previous example templates, you can see here that the resource type Microsoft Storage StorageAccount is what we are deploying because we are trying to create a storage account using the template. Also, please note that this section refers to the Parameters section for its values. For example, if you see the location here, it's referring to the location's parameters, which means that whatever value they give for the location in the parameter file will come and sit here and be deployed. So we have seen the syntax and structure of the template. The obvious question in your mind will be how I can write this. So I will say, never try to write templates from scratch. You need to understand how it works, what are the components, et cetera. But never try writing it from scratch. It's a complete time waste. What you need to do is get some reference templates and just modify them as per your requirements. So what we are going to discuss in the next section is the different sources from which you can get these reference templates. Thank you.

2. Demo - Finding ARM Template Sources

Hello everyone. Welcome to this lecture on finding the right erm templates. So let me log in to the Azure Portal. Using my account, we are going to see from where we can get an Arm template login with my password. So, as I mentioned in the previous lecture about Arm templates, we can either write our templates from scratch or generate them. There are several sources from which we can generate our templates. We'll investigate each of those sources. So now I have logged into the Azure Portal. Now I am going to discuss three main sources here. Come to the first one. Click on "Create a Resource." So the first source that I am trying to discuss here is at the creation time of a resource, when we can generate a template. So let me go ahead and create a keyword here. Click on "Create Keyword." It will take you to the keyword creation window. As you can see, there are several sections that we need to fill up. Let us fill the basic section first. At the time of creation, Azure allows us to download the template. So we are going to see that. But how do we download the template at the time of creation? Let us enter those group names here. You might be familiar with these things. if you are already working in Azure. It is under a keyword name. Make sure that it is a unique name, and let us keep the region as it is. If you want, you can change the pricing for tyres to Option, Standard, and Premium. And let us click on "Next." That is the access policy section. Let us not make a change, or let us make a change here. Let us take on that as your resource manager for template deployment. Just to show you the template functionality, go into the Next tab. That is a virtual network. You can allow all networks or select some networks. Allow me to keep it as all networks tax and cities remain. Click on "Review and Create." It is going to conduct a validation. As you can see, it's showing running validation. The validation has been passed. Now in the bottom right corner, you can see "Download a template for automation." So Azure is providing us with the template of the resource that we have just tried to create. Click on that and it will open a template window where you can see the template with all the parameters listed. And this is not a generated template in the sense that it is not a random template with all those junk values, which we see in an automation script. This is a perfect template, with all the parameter files and parameters and variables separated as per our agreement. So you can just download that, let me open it, and I'll show you what the template looks like. Okay, let me extract this first. Let me close this window. Go to my Downloads page. Click on "Show in Folder." Let me extract this to a folder within this download centre itself. Open the folder, and you can see two files: parameters and templates. And there are other files, like PowerShell files for deployment. If you see the template, you can see that it has parameters like name, location, the SKU access policies, etc. And then in the resources section, you can see the resource of type Microsoft Keywordvault using all those parameters. And there are no junk values at all. This is a perfectly valid template, which we can take directly and work on it. So let me open the parameter file. If you see the parameter file, there are the values that we gave input for at that time. They are already pre-filled. So if you want to change anything, you can change these parameters. If you see the enabled template for deployment, that is set to true. We asked at the time of template resource creation, "Do we take that right?" So that is the reason it is said to be true. So this is a perfect way. There is a valid template that you can use without any modification. Right away, you can use So you do not need to write the template from scratch and do all those things. Let me go back to the key vault window now. Let me create a key vault for real. I should not have closed that anyway. Let us create a keyword again. Let us add a resource group. Add a name for the keyword. As I said before, a unique name Okay, the valuation passed. Click on "next." I'm going to take that again. This is a manager for template deployment. I'll keep all networks; I'll keep the taxes; and validation is passed. Let me click on Create. So I'm just creating a keyword. You are already familiar with this process. The reason I chose "keyword is because it is easier to show the demo. This will work for any other resource. The deployment is underway. Okay, it's completed. Let us go to the resource. And in the resource window, if you just scroll down, you can see that there is an export template option. What happens if I click "export template?" Azure is going to generate a template with the current specified values. But if you see the template, you can see that there is only one parameter, which is "world's name," and all other parameters are missing. So where did all the parameters go? They are fed directly into the resource section. If you see the location and the properties, that is standard. All these are directly typed into the Resources section. So if you want to use a template from this source, you can choose to download it. But you need further modifications to parameterize the template. That's why I say the first option is a better option. So that was about the second option, the automation script. Let me show you the third option. That is an Azure Kickstart template. So, Google Azure Kickstart templates or keywords? It will show a GitHub link that is one of the keyword creators. Click on that, and see what Azure provides in this GitHub repo of kickstart templates. They have a number of reports. We have just opened the keywords report. You can see the same template here, along with all those parameter values. This is a generalised template for key voltage. But if you see here in the Resources section, there are two resources specified. That is Microsoft keywords, which is one resource, and if you see it there, it is Microsoft keyword vaults. If you scroll down, you can see one more resource, which is Microsoft Keyword Secret. So this template also adds secret resources. So if you want to use it for which don't have a secret, you need to modify. So that's it, guys.

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