A Review of Resiliency in Azure

So you’ve decided to study for Azure certifications and you’re interested in learning more about resiliency. Whether you’re learning about individual cloud products, or combining them together, you’ll likely come across the whitepaper Resilience on Azure.

This is a review of the whitepaper as it was published August 2019, in the context of exam studying.

There’s quite a lot to comment on regarding this whitepaper, so it will be broken down in a series

  1. Defining Resiliency for Resilience in Azure
  2. A slightly better explanation of resiliency concepts within software systems across infrastructure, data, and application development
  3. Critiquing the multi-tier sample applications in Resilience in Azure
  4. Applying failure and risk analysis to resiliency strategies
  5. A How-To guide to adopting and convincing others of resiliency strategies

This will just a high-level critique of the whitepaper.

Determine applicability of the whitepaper for your exam

There’s actually a lot of great concepts within this whitepaper, but it’s difficult to know who it’s written for. As of writing, none of the exam preparation materials reference the existence or applicability of white papers (click for AZ-900 prep, click for AZ-104 prep, click for AZ-303 prep). Comparatively, AWS provides guides for studying for the exam and lists applicable whitepapers for the exam (click here).

While Azure puts a lot more emphasis on Video Training, Hands-On Labs, and Quizzes in their Learning Path, it’s unfortunate they don’t also reference their whitepaper resources upfront.

Thoughts for future topics

  • Knowing whether the whitepaper is appropriate for you
  • Continued Reading and Education on Cloud and Resiliency
  • Meta thought - Ongoing Updates and Maintenance of Whitepapers