Reliability pillar principles in Azure - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Implementing Azure Reliability Pillar Principles

📖 Scenario: You are working as a cloud engineer for a company that wants to improve the reliability of their Azure cloud infrastructure. They want to apply the core principles of the Azure Reliability Pillar to ensure their services stay available and recover quickly from failures.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template that demonstrates the key reliability principles by deploying a virtual machine scale set with availability zones and auto-healing settings.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a resource group variable

Define an availability zone configuration

Deploy a virtual machine scale set with zone redundancy

Add an auto-healing policy to the scale set

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use availability zones and auto-healing in Azure to keep their applications running smoothly even if some parts fail.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and architects must design reliable infrastructure using these principles to meet business uptime requirements.

1

Create a resource group variable

Create a variable called resourceGroupName and set it to the exact string ReliableAppRG.

Azure

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use var to declare the variable and assign the string 'ReliableAppRG'.

2

Define availability zones configuration

Create a variable called availabilityZones and set it to an array containing the strings '1', '2', and '3' to represent Azure availability zones.

Azure

var resourceGroupName = 'ReliableAppRG';
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create an array with the three zone strings.

3

Deploy a virtual machine scale set with zone redundancy

Write a JSON object called vmScaleSet that defines a virtual machine scale set resource with the zones property set to the availabilityZones variable. Include name as 'ReliableVMSS' and location as 'eastus'.

Azure

var resourceGroupName = 'ReliableAppRG';
var availabilityZones = ['1', '2', '3'];
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the zones property to assign the availability zones array to the scale set.

4

Add an auto-healing policy to the scale set

Add an autoHealingPolicy property inside vmScaleSet.properties with enabled set to true and gracePeriod set to 'PT5M' (5 minutes).

Azure

var resourceGroupName = 'ReliableAppRG';
var availabilityZones = ['1', '2', '3'];
var vmScaleSet = {
  type: 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets',
  apiVersion: '2022-03-01',
  name: 'ReliableVMSS',
  location: 'eastus',
  zones: availabilityZones,
  properties: {
    upgradePolicy: {
      mode: 'Automatic'
    },
    virtualMachineProfile: {
      storageProfile: {
        imageReference: {
          publisher: 'MicrosoftWindowsServer',
          offer: 'WindowsServer',
          sku: '2019-Datacenter',
          version: 'latest'
        }
      },
      osProfile: {
        computerNamePrefix: 'vmss',
        adminUsername: 'azureuser',
        adminPassword: 'Password123!'
      },
      networkProfile: {
        networkInterfaceConfigurations: [
          {
            name: 'nicConfig',
            properties: {
              primary: true,
              ipConfigurations: [
                {
                  name: 'ipConfig',
                  properties: {
                    subnet: {
                      id: '/subscriptions/your-subscription-id/resourceGroups/' + resourceGroupName + '/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/yourVnet/subnets/default'
                    }
                  }
                }
              ]
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
    // Your code here
  }
};

Need a hint?

Add the autoHealingPolicy inside properties with the specified settings.