AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam

Recommend a messaging architecture

Modern applications often need to decouple components so that each part can scale and fail independently. A messaging architecture uses a message broker to pass information between services without direct connections. This approach helps prevent tight coupling and allows services to run and update on their own schedule.

When choosing a messaging service in Azure, you can consider:

• Azure Service Bus for enterprise messaging with advanced features like topics and sessions.
• Azure Queue Storage for simple, cost-effective queuing.
• Azure Event Grid for lightweight reactive event routing.
• Azure Event Hubs for high-throughput telemetry and streaming.

Key factors in designing a messaging solution include message ordering, delivery guarantees, and throughput requirements. For example, use sessions in Service Bus to preserve order, or choose Event Hubs for millions of events per second.

Finally, patterns such as publish/subscribe, message queue, and competing consumers help control processing flow. By selecting the right service and pattern, you can ensure your application remains reliable, scalable, and loosely coupled.

Recommend an event-driven architecture

An event-driven architecture (EDA) allows components to react to changes or events as they occur, rather than relying on scheduled polling. This model improves responsiveness and reduces latency, making it ideal for real-time data processing. In Azure, you can build EDA using services that generate, route, and consume events.

Events typically flow through:

• Producers that generate events when something happens (e.g., a file upload).
• Event routers like Event Grid or Event Hubs that deliver events to subscribers.
• Consumers that perform work in response, such as triggering a function or updating a database.

Designing EDA involves choosing the right delivery semantics. You might need at-least-once delivery for critical operations or at-most-once delivery when duplicates can be tolerated. You also consider filtering and routing to reduce noise and deliver only relevant events.

With EDA, applications gain flexibility and scalability. Components can be added or removed without impacting the overall flow, and you can handle peak loads by scaling consumers independently.

Recommend a solution for API integration

APIs help applications communicate with external systems, partner services, or internal microservices. An effective API integration solution in Azure ensures secure, reliable, and manageable connections. You can use Azure API Management (APIM) as a single pane for all your APIs.

Key features of APIM include:

• Security: Protect APIs with OAuth, JWT validation, and IP filtering.
• Throttling and quotas: Control usage to prevent overload.
• Analytics: Monitor traffic and performance with built-in dashboards.

Besides APIM, you can use Azure Logic Apps for workflows that call REST or SOAP APIs in sequence. Logic Apps provide a visual designer and prebuilt connectors, simplifying complex integrations. When latency matters most, consider Azure Functions behind an API Gateway for a serverless, event-driven approach.

By combining these services, you can achieve a robust integration layer that supports versioning, policy enforcement, and developer onboarding seamlessly.

Recommend a caching solution for applications

Caching improves performance by storing frequently accessed data closer to the application layer. Azure offers Azure Cache for Redis, a fully managed, in-memory data store that delivers sub-millisecond response times. This service supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, and sets.

When designing a caching strategy, consider:

• Cache-aside: Application fetches data from cache first, then updates cache on a miss.
• Write-through: Writes go through cache, which updates the underlying store.
• Read-through: Cache retrieves data directly from the store on a miss, reducing application complexity.

Redis supports features like replication, persistence, and failover, ensuring high availability. You can also partition data across shards to handle large datasets and maintain low latency under heavy load. By offloading reads to the cache, you reduce pressure on databases and improve user experience.

Recommend an application configuration management solution

A consistent and secure configuration management solution keeps applications adaptable across environments (development, test, production). Azure App Configuration centralizes settings and feature flags, making it easy to manage application behavior without redeployment. You can store secrets and connection strings securely in Azure Key Vault and reference them in App Configuration.

With these services, you benefit from:

• Dynamic configuration: Update settings at runtime without restarting services.
• Feature management: Turn features on or off per environment or user segment.
• Access control: Use Azure AD to grant fine-grained permissions.

Versioning in App Configuration helps roll back changes quickly if a new setting causes issues. Integration with Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions automates the release of configuration changes, ensuring traceability and auditability. This approach improves both security and agility in modern application deployments.

Recommend an automated deployment solution for applications

Automated deployment pipelines reduce human error and accelerate releases. In Azure, you can use Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitHub Actions to build, test, and deploy applications. Both solutions support continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) practices.

Key steps in an automated pipeline include:

• Build: Compile code and run unit tests.
• Package: Create artifacts such as Docker images or ZIP files.
• Release: Deploy artifacts to Azure App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, or Azure Functions.

You can add gates and approvals to enforce policies, such as security scans or manual verification. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like ARM templates, Terraform, or Bicep ensure consistent environments. By automating deployments, you achieve repeatability, speed, and reliability across your application lifecycle.

Conclusion

In this section on designing an application architecture, we covered six core areas. We saw how a messaging architecture decouples services and supports different delivery patterns. An event-driven architecture improves responsiveness by reacting to events in real time. For API integration, Azure API Management and Logic Apps provide secure and manageable interfaces.

We examined caching with Azure Cache for Redis to boost performance and reduce load on data stores. Configuration management using App Configuration and Key Vault helps maintain security and flexibility. Finally, automated deployment with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions ensures fast, reliable releases. Together, these recommendations form a comprehensive approach to building scalable, resilient, and maintainable Azure applications.