AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure

Background

VanArsdel, Ltd. is a global office supply company. The company is headquartered in Canada and has retail store locations around the world. The company is building several cloud-based solutions to support its stores, distributors, suppliers, and delivery services.

Current environment

Corporate website

The company has a public website at http://www.vanarsdelltd.com. The website includes a React JavaScript user interface, HTML, CSS, image assets, and several APIs hosted in Azure Functions.

Retail Store Locations

The company supports thousands of store locations globally. Store locations send data every hour to an Azure Blob storage account to support inventory, purchasing and delivery services. Each record contains a location identifier and sales transaction information.

Requirements

The application components must meet the following requirements:

Corporate website

• Secure the website by using SSL.
• Minimize costs for data storage and hosting.
• Implement native GitHub workflows for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
• Distribute the website content globally for local use.
• Implement monitoring by using Application Insights and availability web tests, including SSL certificate validity and custom header value verification.
• The website must have 99.95 percent uptime.

Retail store locations

• Azure Functions must process data immediately when data is uploaded to Blob storage. Azure Functions must update Azure Cosmos DB by using native SQL language queries.
• Audit store sale transaction information nightly to validate data, process sales financials, and reconcile inventory.

Delivery services

• Store service telemetry data in Azure Cosmos DB by using an Azure Function. Data must include an item id, the delivery vehicle license plate, vehicle package capacity, and current vehicle location coordinates.
• Store delivery driver profile information in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) by using an Azure Function called from the corporate website.

Inventory services

The company has contracted a third-party to develop an API for inventory processing that requires access to a specific blob within the retail store storage account for three months to include read-only access to the data.

Security

• All Azure Functions must centralize management and distribution of configuration data for different environments and geographies, encrypted by using a company-provided RSA-HSM key.
• Authentication and authorization must use Azure AD and services must use managed identities where possible.

Issues

Retail Store Locations

• You must perform a point-in-time restoration of the retail store location data due to an unexpected and accidental deletion of data.
• Azure Cosmos DB queries from the Azure Function exhibit high Request Unit (RU) usage and contain multiple, complex queries that exhibit high point read latency for large items as the function app is scaling.