Design an application infrastructure management strategy

In this post, I will share my study notes that I took while preparing for the exam Azure AZ400 “Design an application infrastructure management strategy”.

Assess a configuration management mechanism for application infrastructure

A centralized configuration service is especially useful in microservices apps and other distributed apps. This module introduces Azure App Configuration as a service for centrally managing configuration values — specifically for feature flags. The service will ease the troubleshooting of errors that arise when configuration is deployed with an app.

App Configuration is a fully managed service that encrypts key values both at rest and in transit. Configuration values stored with it can be updated in real time without the need to redeploy or restart an app.

In an ASP.NET Core app, Azure App Configuration is registered as a configuration provider. Aside from the provider registration, the app doesn’t know about the App Configuration store. Configuration values can be retrieved from it via .NET Core’s configuration abstraction — the IConfiguration interface.

Review app configuration concepts - Learn

Azure App Configuration maintains a record of changes made to key-values. This record provides a timeline of key-value changes. You can reconstruct the history of any key-value and provide its past value at any moment within the key history period (7 days for Free tier stores, or 30 days for Standard tier stores). Using this feature, you can “time-travel” backward and retrieve an old key-value. For example, you can recover configuration settings used before the most recent deployment in order to roll back the application to the previous configuration.

Retrieve key-value pairs from a point-in-time - Azure App Configuration

In Azure App Configuration, you can use labels to define different values for the same key. For example, you can define a single key with different values for development…