AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam

Venture into the world of Azure Infrastructure, where design meets functionality. Harness your skills and gain mastery over complex cloud structures to ace the AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam!

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Recommend a virtual machine-based solution

Design compute solutions

Select Appropriate VM Series and Sizes

Evaluating Workload and Performance Requirements

To choose the right Azure Virtual Machine (VM), you must first analyze the resource demands of your application. Workloads require different balances of CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network throughput to run efficiently. Azure categorizes its hardware into families to meet these specific needs:

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A decision tree that branches based on workload resource demands to recommend the appropriate Azure VM family, such as General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, or GPU-accelerated.

General Purpose VMs offer a balanced mix of compute, memory, and storage, making them ideal for testing, development, or small databases.
Compute Optimized VMs provide a high CPU-to-memory ratio, which suits web servers, network appliances, and batch processing.
Memory Optimized VMs feature a high memory-to-CPU ratio to support large databases, in-memory caches, and analytics.
GPU-accelerated VMs use specialized hardware to handle heavy mathematical tasks like artificial intelligence, deep learning, and video rendering.

Optimizing Costs and Licensing

Balancing performance with budget requires selecting the right pricing tier and commitment model. For workloads that can handle interruptions, Spot instances offer steep discounts in exchange for allowing Azure to evict the VM when capacity is needed elsewhere. If a workload sits idle most of the time but needs to handle sudden spikes in traffic, Burstable VMs provide a cost-effective choice by accumulating performance credits during quiet periods. To lower long-term costs, organizations can commit to Reserved Instances for predictable workloads or use Azure Hybrid Benefit to reuse existing on-premises licenses in the cloud.

Designing for Availability and Security

High-availability planning ensures that virtual machines survive physical hardware failures or datacenter outages. Deploying virtual machines across availability sets protects them from local hardware failures within a single datacenter, while availability zones protect them from entire datacenter outages by separating them geographically. Security at the hardware level is managed by enabling Trusted Launch during VM creation. This feature guards the boot pathway of the VM against rootkits and malware by utilizing secure boot and a virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM).

Assessment and Sizing Tools

Before deploying, several tools help validate the virtual machine selection and cost model. Architects consult the Sizes Table to compare the exact specifications, disk limits, and network limits of different VM families. The Pricing Calculator estimates the monthly cost of the selected VM configurations, accounting for storage, networking, and regional pricing differences. For migration projects, the Azure Migrate Assessment tool analyzes existing on-premises workloads to recommend the ideal Azure VM sizes based on real-world performance history.

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Specify components of a compute solution based on workloadrequirements Recommend a container-based solution

AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam

Recommend a virtual machine-based solution

Select Appropriate VM Series and Sizes

Evaluating Workload and Performance Requirements

Azure VM Family Selection Decision Tree

Optimizing Costs and Licensing

Designing for Availability and Security

Assessment and Sizing Tools

Select Appropriate VM Series and Sizes

Evaluating Workload and Performance Requirements

Optimizing Costs and Licensing

Designing for Availability and Security

Assessment and Sizing Tools