5 Essential skills to become an azure administrator

An azure administrator serves a large team dedicated to implementing the organization’s cloud infrastructure. Azure is a promising platform and user-friendly and the platform is helpful for those who manage cloud services that span computers, networking, storage, securities, and other cloud capabilities within Azure. There is an increase in demand for azure and the need for administrators is rapidly increasing. The certification program will boost up your CV.

What does an azure administrator do?

The azure administrator is responsible for performing various duties.

• Expert handling cloud computing and storage
• Able to restart the azure component
• Create and manage swap space on a deployed cloud system
• Support deployed cloud system and environment creating a custom script to automate support process
• Able to identify the issue at an azure level and resolve
• Deploy Azure API management service to multiple Azure regions
• Manage Azure subscriptions and profiles
• Responsible for Linux and window server installation, maintenance, monitoring, data backup, recovery, security, and administration
• Responsible for Ad setup and management along with LDAP integration
• Responsible for configuring network and security appliances
• Responsible for managing network storage

How to become an Azure administrator?

Azure is presently one of the prominent leaders in cloud computing and it is a preferred platform by businesses of all sizes. Almost 80% of companies depend on azure due to the large network of data centers and high security for private connection and storage solutions. There is a huge demand for jobs in azure specific roles in the market. One most popular jobs related to the Azure platform is an azure administrator. Since azure is expanding its collection of cloud services, companies can progress further in their digital transformation journey. Hence, IT professionals can secure their job by acquiring azure skills. If you are looking to pursue your career as an azure admin, then you have to start with the fundamentals. Candidates with professional experience in azure specific jobs could aim in improving their skills with certification. First of all, you need to start with cloud concepts without a clear idea about the job role. Then you may involve people familiar with other public clouds without azure experience. You may involve on-premise sysadmins trying to change to cloud-based roles. It is recommended to attend Microsoft azure fundamental exam with the code AZ-900. The exam preparation will help you understand the basic azure concepts and choose your career as an administrator role.

5 role-specific skills essential to becoming an Azure administrator

1. Configure networks

TCP/IP networking is beneficial for many IT professionals because the concept remains broad and deep. The complexity ramps up in azure because you will never view the hardware behind the networking stack. To succeed as an administrator you need to understand the networking task like deploying and configuring virtual networks, orchestrating routing paths in a hybrid cloud, managing public and private IP addresses for selected azure resources.

2. Monitor resource and log analytics

Individuals must learn how to use log analytics in the Azure portal to write monitor log queries. Also, the individual must have a basic understanding of how to perform the following tasks:

• Make use of log analytics to write a simple query
• Recognize the schema of your data
• Filter, sort, and group results
• Apply a time range and create a chart
• Save and load queries
• Export and share queries

3. Compute

The azure administrator identified with infrastructure as a service needs to boil down to running virtual machines in the cloud. To remain successful in this role, you need to be familiar with hypervisor platforms, Microsoft hyper-v, and VMware vSphere. Some of the VM related tasks include deploying VMs into a virtual network, configuring VM for optimum cost, performance and security, backing up VMs, and providing failover recovery. Containers represent a new way to virtualize service and docker is well represented in Azure. So one must understand how to deploy, manage, and monitor containers.

4. Implement and manage storage

Azure provides administrators limitless storage and you need space to store VM virtual hard disks, database files, application data, and potentially useful data. Furthermore, you need to study Powershell commands which will help to create and remove storage. You are responsible to make the use of Microsoft tools for the cloud computing share responsibility model. Some tasks include securing the data against unauthorized access, backing up data, and making them efficient to restore when needed, configuring long term archival storage to maintain corporate compliances.

5. Implementing security and protecting the identities

The security stake remains higher in the Azure public cloud because it stores proprietary data on someone else infrastructure. As an azure administrator, you will be responsible to make use of Microsoft manifold security controls. Also, you need to possess some representative skills like encrypting data in transit and use, safeguarding the azure active directory accounts against compromise, and reduce the attack surface of all azure resources.

There are various azure admin responsibilities they have to set up and deploy those custom-developed applications and monitor their health continuously. They need to forecast and manage the demand for the app that is hosted by the Azure platform. Finally, the admin’s primary duty is to make sure data is secured, access is secured and application and data are backed up. IT professionals need to set up and configure the application in azure using azure control panels and using technical support. Also, the app doesn’t manage itself so with an on-premise line of business application, you need to administer the code.