Answer:  

Topic 4, Lucerne Publishing

Background

Overview

Lucerne Publishing creates, stores, and delivers online media for advertising companies.

This media is streamed to computers by using the web, and to mobile devices around the world by using native applications. The company currently supports the iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8.1 platform.

Lucerne Publishing uses proprietary software to manage its media workflow. This software has reached the end of its lifecycle. The company plans to move its media workflows to the cloud. Lucerne Publishing provides access to its customers, who are third-party companies, so that they can download, upload, search, and index media that is stored on

Lucerne Publishing servers.

Apps and Applications

Lucerne Publishing develops the applications that customers use to deliver media. The company currently provides the following media delivery applications:

Lucerne Media W - a web application that delivers media by using any browser

Lucerne Media M - a mobile app that delivers media by using Windows Phone 8.1

Lucerne Media A - a mobile app that delivers media by using an iOS device

Lucerne Media N - a mobile app that delivers media by using an Android device

Lucerne Media D - a desktop client application that customer's install on their local computer

Business Requirements

Lucerne Publishing's customers and their consumers have the following requirements:

Access to media must be time-constricted once media is delivered to a consumer.

The time required to download media to mobile devices must be minimized.

Customers must have 24-hour access to media downloads regardless of their location or time zone.

Lucerne Publishing must be able to monitor the performance and usage of its customer-facing app.

Lucerne Publishing wants to make its asset catalog searchable without requiring a database redesign.

Customers must be able to access all data by using a web application. They must also be able to access data by using a mobile app that is provided by Lucerne

Publishing.

Customers must be able to search for media assets by key words and media type.

Lucerne Publishing wants to move the asset catalog database to the cloud without formatting the source data.

Other Requirements

Development

Code and current development documents must be backed up at all times. All solutions must be automatically built and deployed to Azure when code is checked in to source control.

Network Optimization

Lucerne Publishing has a .NET web application that runs on Azure. The web application analyzes storage and the distribution of its media assets. It needs to monitor the utilization of the web application. Ultimately, Lucerne Publishing hopes to cut its costs by reducing data replication without sacrificing its quality of service to its customers. The solution has the following requirements:

Optimize the storage location and amount of duplication of media.

Vary several parameters including the number of data nodes and the distance from node to customers.

Minimize network bandwidth.

Lucerne Publishing wants be notified of exceptions in the web application.

Technical Requirements

Data Mining

Lucerne Publishing constantly mines its data to identify customer patterns. The company plans to replace the existing on-premises cluster with a cloud-based solution. Lucerne Publishing has the following requirements:

Virtual machines:

The data mining solution must support the use of hundreds to thousands of processing cores.

Minimize the number of virtual machines by using more powerful virtual machines.

Each virtual machine must always have eight or more processor cores available.

Allow the number of processor cores dedicated to an analysis to grow and shrink automatically based on the demand of the analysis.

Virtual machines must use remote memory direct access to improve performance.

Task scheduling:

The solution must automatically schedule jobs. The scheduler must distribute the jobs based on the demand and available resources.

Data analysis results:

The solution must provide a web service that allows applications to access the results of analyses.

Other Requirements

Feature Support

Ad copy data must be searchable in full text.

Ad copy data must indexed to optimize search speed.

Media metadata must be stored in Azure Table storage.

Media files must be stored in Azure BLOB storage.

The customer-facing website must have access to all ad copy and media.

The customer-facing website must automatically scale and replicate to locations around the world.

Media and data must be replicated around the world to decrease the latency of data transfers.

Media uploads must have fast data transfer rates (low latency) without the need to upload the data offline.

Security

Customer access must be managed by using Active Directory.

Media files must be encrypted by using the PlayReady encryption method.

Customers must be able to upload media quickly and securely over a private connection with no opportunity for internet snooping.

19. HOTSPOT - (Topic 4) 

The company has two corporate offices. Customers will access the websites from datacenters around the world. 

You need to architect the global website strategy to meet the business requirements. Use the drop-down menus to select the answer choice that answers each question. 

Answer: C 

Explanation: * Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of user traffic to your specified endpoints, which can include Azure cloud services, websites, and other endpoints. Traffic Manager works by applying an intelligent policy engine to Domain Name System (DNS) queries for the domain names of your Internet resources. Your Azure cloud services or websites can be running in different datacenters across the world. 

* Scenario: 

Virtual machines: 

. The data mining solution must support the use of hundreds to thousands of processing cores. . Minimize the number of virtual machines by using more powerful virtual machines. Each virtual machine must always have eight or more processor cores available. . Allow the number of processor cores dedicated to an analysis to grow and shrink automatically based on the demand of the analysis. . Virtual machines must use remote memory direct access to improve performance. 

Task scheduling: 

The solution must automatically schedule jobs. The scheduler must distribute the jobs based on the demand and available resources. 

Reference: https://azure.microsoft.com/sv-se/documentation/articles/traffic-manager-overview/ 

Answer: C 

Explanation: Scenario: The customer-facing website must automatically scale and replicate to locations around the world. Azure ExpressRoute enables you to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure that’s on your premises or in a colocation environment. ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public Internet, and offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security than typical connections over the Internet. In some cases, using ExpressRoute connections to transfer data between on-premises and Azure can also yield significant cost benefits. 

Reference: ExpressRoute, Experience a faster, private connection to Azure 

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/ 

Topic 5, Northwind traders

Background

Overview

Northwind Electric Cars is the premier provider of private, low-cost transportation in Denver. Northwind drivers are company employees who work together as a team. The founding partners believe that by hiring their drivers as employees, their drivers focus on providing a great customer experience. Northwind Electric Cars has a reputation for offering fast, reliable, and friendly service, due largely to their extensive network of drivers and their proprietary dispatching software named NorthRide.

Northwind Electric Cars drivers depend on frequent, automatic updates for the NorthRide mobile app. The Northwind management team is concerned about unplanned system downtime and slow connection speeds caused by high usage. Additionally, Northwind's inhouse data storage solution is unsustainable because of the new influx of customer data that is retained. Data backups are made periodically on DVDs and stored on-premises at corporate headquarters.

Apps

NorthRide App

Northwind drivers use the NorthRide app to meet customer pickup requests. The app uses a GPS transponder in each Northwind vehicle and Bing Maps APIs to monitor the location of each vehicle in the fleet in real time. NorthRide allows Northwind dispatchers to optimize their driver coverage throughout the city.

When new customers call, the dispatcher enters their pickup locations into NorthRide.

NorthRide identifies the closest available driver. The dispatcher then contacts the driver with the pick-up details. This process usually results in a pick-up time that is far faster than the industry average.

Drivers use NorthRide to track the number of miles they drive and the number of customers they transport. Drivers also track their progress towards their established goals, which are measured by using key performance indicators (KPIs).

NorthRide App 2.0

Northwind Electric Cars is growing quickly. New callers often wait for their calls to be answered because the dispatchers are contacting their drivers to arrange pickups for other customers.

To support the growth of the business, Northwind's development team completes an overhaul of the NorthRide system that it has named NorthRide 2.0. When a dispatcher enters a customer's pickup location, the address and driving directions are automatically sent to the driver who is closest to the customer's pickup location.

Drivers indicate their availability on the NorthRide mobile app and can view progress towards their KPI's in real time. Drivers can also record customer ratings and feedback for each pickup.

Business Requirements

Apps

NorthRideFinder App

Northwind Electric Cars needs a customer-facing website and mobile app that allows customers to schedule pickups. Customers should also be able to create profiles that will help ensure the customer gets a ride faster by storing customer information.

Predictor App

Northwind Electric Cars needs a new solution named Predictor. Predictor is an employeefacing mobile app. The app predicts periods of high usage and popular pickup locations and provides various ways to view this predictive data. Northwind uses this information to better distribute its drivers. Northwind wants to use the latest Azure technology to create this solution.

Other Requirements

On-premises data must be constantly backed up.

Mobile data must be protected from loss, even if connectivity with the backend is lost.

Dispatch offices need to have seamless access to both their primary data center and the applications and services that are hosted in the Azure cloud.

Connectivity needs to be redundant to on-premises and cloud services, while providing a way for each dispatch office to continue to operate even if one or all of the connection options fail.

The management team requires that operational data is accessible 24/7 from any office location.

Technical Requirements

Apps and Website

NorthRide / NorthRideFinder Apps:

The solution must support on-premises and Azure data storage.

The solution must scale as necessary based on the current number of concurrent users.

Customer pickup requests from NorthRideFinder must be asynchronous.

The customer pickup request system will be high in volume, and each request will have a short life span.

Data for NorthRideFinder must be protected during a loss of connectivity.

NorthRide users must authenticate to the company's Azure Active Directory.

Northwind Public Website

The customer website must use a WebJob to process profile images into thumbnails

The customer website must be developed with lowest cost and difficulty in mind.

The customer website must automatically scale to minimize response times for customers.

Other Requirements

Data Storage:

The data storage must interface with an on-premises Microsoft SQL backend database.

A disaster recovery system needs to be in place for large amounts of data that will backup to Azure.

Backups must be fully automated and managed the Azure Management Portal.

The recovery system for company data must use a hybrid solution to back up both the on-premises Microsoft SQL backend and any Azure storage.

Predictive Routing:

An Azure solution must be used for prediction systems.

Predictive analytics must be published as a web service and accessible by using the REST API.

Security:

The NorthRide app must use an additional level of authentication other than the employee's password.

Access must be secured in NorthRide without opening a firewall port.

Company policy prohibits inbound connections from internet callers to the onpremises network.

Customer usernames in NorthRideFinder cannot exceed 10 characters.

Customer data in NorthRideFinder can be received only by the user ID that is associated with the data.

25. - (Topic 5) 

You need to recommend a solution that meets the requirements for data storage for the NorthRide app. 

What should you include in the recommendation? 

A. Azure Remote App 

B. Azure Service Bus 

C. Azure Connect 

D. Azure SQL Database 

Answer:  

Answer: C 

Explanation: * Scenario: The NorthRide app must use an additional level of authentication other than the employee's password. 

* Azure Multi-Factor Authentication is the multi-factor authentication service that requires users to also verify sign-ins using a mobile app, phone call or text message. It is available to use with Azure Active Directory, to secure on-premise resources with the Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Server, and with custom applications and directories using the SDK. 

Reference: What is Azure Multi-Factor Authentication? 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/multi-factor-authentication/ 

Reference: Azure Active Directory Pricing 

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/active-directory/ 

Answer: D 

Explanation: Service Bus queues are part of a broader Azure messaging infrastructure 

that supports queuing as well as publish/subscribe, Web service remoting, and integration 

patterns. 

Service Bus Queue support Push-style API (while Azure Queue messaging does not). 

Incorrect: 

Not A: Notification Hub is only used to push notification, not for processing requests. 

Not B As a solution architect/developer, you should consider using Azure Queues when: 

* 

Your application must store over 80 GB of messages in a queue, where the messages have a lifetime shorter than 7 days. 

* 

Your application wants to track progress for processing a message inside of the queue. This is useful if the worker processing a message crashes. A subsequent worker can then use that information to continue from where the prior worker left off. 

You require server side logs of all of the transactions executed against your queues. 

Not C: To process the messages we do not need push notification. 

Reference: Azure Queues and Service Bus Queues - Compared and Contrasted 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/hh767287.aspx 

Topic 6, Mix Questions

31. - (Topic 6) 

Contoso, Ltd., uses Azure websites for public-facing customer websites. The company has a mobile app that requires customers sign in by using a Contoso customer account. 

Customers must be able to sign on to the websites and mobile app by using a Microsoft, Facebook, or Google account. All transactions must be secured in-transit regardless of device. 

You need to configure the websites and mobile app to work with external identity providers. 

Which three actions should you perform? Each correct answer presents part of the solution. 

A. Request a certificate from a domain registrar for the website URL, and enable TLS/SSL. 

B. Configure IPsec for the websites and the mobile app. 

C. Configure the KerberosTokenProfile 1.1 protocol. 

D. Configure OAuth2 to connect to an external authentication provider. 

E. Build an app by using MVC 5 that is hosted in Azure to provide a framework for the underlying authentication. 

Answer: B 

Explanation: The Service Bus relay service enables you to build hybrid applications that run in both an Azure datacenter and your own on-premises enterprise environment. The Service Bus relay facilitates this by enabling you to securely expose Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services that reside within a corporate enterprise network to the public cloud, without having to open a firewall connection, or require intrusive changes to a corporate network infrastructure. 

Reference: How to Use the Service Bus Relay Service 

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/service-bus-dotnet-how-to-use-relay/ 

Answer:  

Topic 3, Contoso, Ltd

Background

Overview

Contoso, Ltd., manufactures and sells golf clubs and golf balls. Contoso also sells golf accessories under the Contoso Golf and Odyssey brands worldwide.

Most of the company's IT infrastructure is located in the company's Carlsbad, California, headquarters. Contoso also has a sizable third-party colocation datacenter that costs the company USD $30,000 to $40,000 a month. Contoso has other servers scattered around the United States.

Contoso, Ltd., has the following goals:

Move many consumer-facing websites, enterprise databases, and enterprise web services to Azure.

Improve the performance for customers and resellers who are access company websites from around the world.

Provide support for provisioning resources to meet bursts of demand.

Consolidate and improve the utilization of website- and database-hosting resources.

Avoid downtime, particularly that caused by web and database server updating.

Leverage familiarity with Microsoft server management tools.

Infrastructure

Contoso's datacenters are filled with dozens of smaller web servers and databases that run on under-utilized hardware. This creates issues for data backup. Contoso currently backs up data to tape by using System Center Data Protection Manager. System Center Operations Manager is not deployed in the enterprise.

All of the servers are expensive to acquire and maintain, and scaling the infrastructure takes significant time. Contoso conducts weekly server maintenance, which causes downtime for some of its global offices. Special events, such as high-profile golf tournaments, create a large increase in site traffic. Contoso has difficulty scaling the webhosting  environment fast enough to meet these surges in site traffic.

Contoso has resellers and consumers in Japan and China. These resellers must use applications that run in a datacenter that is located in the state of Texas, in the United States. Because of the physical distance, the resellers experience slow response times and downtime.

Business Requirements

Management and Performance

Management

Web servers and databases must automatically apply updates to the operating system and products.

Automatically monitor the health of worldwide sites, databases, and virtual machines.

Automatically back up the website and databases.

Manage hosted resources by using on-premises tools.

Performance

The management team would like to centralize data backups and eliminate the use of tapes.

The website must automatically scale without code changes or redeployment.

Support changes in service tier without reconfiguration or redeployment.

Site-hosting must automatically scale to accommodate data bandwidth and number of connections.

Scale databases without requiring migration to a larger server.

Migrate business critical applications to Azure.

Migrate databases to the cloud and centralize databases where possible.

Business Continuity and Support

Business Continuity

Minimize downtime in the event of regional disasters.

Recover data if unintentional modifications or deletions are discovered.

Run the website on multiple web server instances to minimize downtime and support a high service level agreement (SLA).

Connectivity

Allow enterprise web services to access data and other services located onpremises.

Provide and monitor lowest latency possible to website visitors.

Automatically balance traffic among all web servers.

Provide secure transactions for users of both legacy and modern browsers.

Provide automated auditing and reporting of web servers and databases.

Support single sign-on from multiple domains.

Development Environment

You identify the following requirements for the development environment:

Support the current development team's knowledge of Microsoft web development and SQL Service tools.

Support building experimental applications by using data from the Azure deployment and on-premises data sources.

Mitigate the need to purchase additional tools for monitoring and debugging.

System designers and architects must be able to create custom Web APIs without requiring any coding.

Support automatic website deployment from source control.

Support automated build verification and testing to mitigate bugs introduced during builds.

Manage website versions across all deployments.

Ensure that website versions are consistent across all deployments.

Technical Requirement

Management and Performance

Management

Use build automation to deploy directly from Visual Studio.

Use build-time versioning of assets and builds/releases.

Automate common IT tasks such as VM creation by using Windows PowerShell workflows.

Use advanced monitoring features and reports of workloads in Azure by using existing Microsoft tools.

Performance

Websites must automatically load balance across multiple servers to adapt to varying traffic.

In production, websites must run on multiple instances.

First-time published websites must be published by using Visual Studio and scaled to a single instance to test publishing.

Data storage must support automatic load balancing across multiple servers.

Websites must adapt to wide increases in traffic during special events.

Azure virtual machines (VMs) must be created in the same datacenter when applicable.

Business Continuity and Support

Business Continuity

Automatically co-locate data and applications in different geographic locations.

Provide real-time reporting of changes to critical data and binaries.

Provide real-time alerts of security exceptions.

Unwanted deletions or modifications of data must be reversible for up to one month, especially in business critical applications and databases.

Any cloud-hosted servers must be highly available.

Enterprise Support

The solution must use stored procedures to access on-premises SQL Server data from Azure.

A debugger must automatically attach to websites on a weekly basis. The scripts that handle the configuration and setup of debugging cannot work if there is a delay in attaching the debugger.

14. HOTSPOT - (Topic 3) 

You need implement tools at the client's location for monitoring and deploying Azure resources. 

Which tools should you use? To answer, select the appropriate on-premises tool for each task in the answer area. 

Answer: C 

Explanation: * Scenario: Predictive Routing: 

/ An Azure solution must be used for prediction systems. 

/ Predictive analytics must be published as a web service and accessible by using the 

REST API. 

* Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is a collaborative visual development environment that enables you to build, test, and deploy predictive analytics solutions that operate on your data. The Machine Learning service and development environment is cloud-based, provides compute resource and memory flexibility, and eliminates setup and installation concerns because you work through your web browser. 

Reference: What is Azure Machine Learning Studio? 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/machine-learning-what-is-ml-studio/ 

Answer: C 

Explanation: A point-to-site VPN would meet the requirements. 

Reference: Configure a Point-to-Site VPN connection to an Azure Virtual Network 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vpn-gateway-point-to-site-create/