Azure Policy is a service provided by Microsoft Azure that can be used to create, assign and manage policies across a given Azure environment. These policies can enforce different rules and effects over Azure resources, ensuring compliance of the Azure environment with specific business requirements, industry standards, and corporate policies.
Azure Policy plays a vital role when it comes to the governance of Azure, particularly when dealing with SAP workloads on Azure where ensuring general compliance across a wide range of systems and services is critical. In the context of the AZ-120 Planning and Administering Azure for SAP Workloads exam, understanding how to design and implement governance and compliance through Azure Policy is essential.
Understanding Azure Policy
Azure Policy is a governance tool that enforces and audits resource properties during the deployment. With Azure Policy, organizations can ensure their workloads meet specific compliance requirements. The strength of Azure Policy lies in its flexibility. Policies are customizable and can be assigned to various scopes: management groups, individual subscriptions, resource groups, or even specific resources.
A policy definition expresses what to evaluate and what action to take. For example, you can create a policy that ensures all virtual machines in your Azure environment have the latest patch updates for specific software packages like SAP.
Consider the following example policy definition:
{
“properties”: {
“displayName”: “Audit VMs without the latest patch updates for SAP”,
“policyType”: “BuiltIn”,
“mode”: “All”,
“description”: “This policy audits any VMs that do not have the latest patch update for SAP.”,
“metadata”: {
“category”: “General”
},
“parameters”: { },
“policyRule”: {
“if”: {
“allOf”: [
{
“field”: “type”,
“equals”: “Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines”
},
{
“not”: {
“field”: “Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/extensions.name”,
“like”: “SAPUpdate”
}
}
]
},
“then”: {
“effect”: “audit”
}
}
}
}
In this case, the “if” statement checks if the resource type is a virtual machine and that it does not have an extension named “SAPUpdate”. When a resource matches these criteria, the “audit” effect happens, and a warning is provided in the Azure Policy compliance summary.
Implementing Azure Policy for SAP Workloads
When it comes to SAP workloads, Azure Policy becomes an indispensable tool, allowing you to adhere to best practices for your Azure environment. Here are a few recommendations:
- Use Built-in Policies: Azure Policy comes with several built-in policies that focus specifically on SAP on Azure. For instance, policies that ensure the deployment of SAP NetWeaver on specific VM sizes, or that SAP HANA databases are only deployed on allowed Azure VM types.
- Policy Initiatives: You can combine several related policies into an initiative, which will make it easier to manage and assign them together. For instance, you could group several policies that deal with SAP workload performance, security, and cost management and assign them to your SAP resource groups.
- Continuous Monitoring: Policies in Azure are continuously enforced, providing real-time compliance evaluations and warnings when any resource falls out of compliance.
Overall, Azure Policy plays a critical role in any Azure environment that utilizes SAP. It ensures compliance and governance by continually keeping a check on your Azure resources and runs as per the policies you defined, reducing the chances of human error and improving efficiency. Remembering these key points when preparing for the AZ-120 exam should give you a solid understanding of designing and implementing governance in Azure with Azure Policy.
Practice Test
Azure Policy helps in allowing, denying, or auditing actions in Azure.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Policy is a service that helps you manage and prevent IT issues with policy definitions that enforce rules and effects for your resources.
Which among these are helper services that Azure Policy offers? (Multiple Select)
- Azure Automation
- Azure Cloud Shell
- Azure Resource Graph
- Azure Identity and Access Management
Answer: Azure Automation, Azure Cloud Shell, Azure Resource Graph.
Explanation: These services are helper services of Azure Policy that assist in managing your resources and policies.
Sap workloads need a special type of policy settings in Azure.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: SAP workloads in Azure don’t need any special policies. Standard Azure policies can be applied to these workloads like any other resource in Azure.
Azure policy does not support the creation of custom policies?
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure policy provides options to create and manage custom policies for specific needs of your resources.
Azure Policy can audit using tags.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Policy also offers an audit using tags feature that is setting up policies to scan tags and checking compliance with your tagging strategy.
Azure Initiatives are group of policies that assist in managing multiple policies as one unit.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Initiatives manages and coordinates policies together, making it easier to manage and assign multiple policies as a single unit.
Azure Policies can prevent unwanted changes to system configurations.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Policies are designed to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance at scale.
Azure Policies are not able to enforce rules for resource consistency.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Policies helps in enforcing rules for resource consistency, regulatory compliance, security, cost, and management.
The ‘deny’ effect in Azure policy blocks resource creation.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: In Azure Policy, the ‘deny’ effect blocks the resource operation from occurring.
The ‘audit’ effect of Azure Policy logs the violation to the activity log only.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: While the ‘audit’ effect does log the violation to the activity log, it does not stop the action.
Azure Policy does not supply a default set of policy definitions.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Policy does provide a set of default policy definitions that represent typical needs of an organization.
A policy assignment is a policy definition that has been designated to take place within a specific scope.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: A policy assignment is a policy that has been assigned to take place within a specific scope.
Azure Policy can prevent VMs from being deployed into specific location.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Using Azure Policy, we can enforce rules such as preventing VMs from being deployed into a specific location.
You cannot assign a policy to management groups in Azure.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: In Azure, you can assign a policy to a management group to ensure compliance on all resources within that group.
Azure policy service is free of cost in all types of subscriptions.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Yes, Azure Policy is a free service provided by Azure to every subscription type.
Interview Questions
1. Question: How does Azure Policy help in governance and compliance within Azure for SAP workloads?
Answer: Azure Policy helps define business strategies, standards, and service levels to guide resource creation. It also helps enforce organizational and regulatory compliance standards.
2. Question: What is the primary purpose of Azure Policy?
Answer: The primary purpose of Azure Policy is to create policies that enforce different rules and effects over your resources, helping you gain organizational and regulatory compliance.
3. Question: Can you describe how Azure Policy helps plan and administer SAP workloads?
Answer: Azure Policy helps in ensuring compliance and governance for SAP workloads by applying defined policies on the resources supporting these workloads. It allows us to define rules for resource configurations and ensures they remain compliant with corporate standards.
4. Question: How does Azure Policy evaluate resources?
Answer: Azure Policy evaluates resources by comparing the properties of those resources to business rules. An assessment happens whenever a resource is created, updated, or a periodic reassessment is triggered.
5. Question: Can additional Azure services be integrated with Azure Policy?
Answer: Yes, integration can be done with Azure services like Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, and Azure Security Center to provide more insights on your resources.
6. Question: What are some major components of Azure Policy?
Answer: The major components of Azure Policy include policy definitions, policy parameters, policy assignments, policy initiatives, and evaluation of policy.
7. Question: Could Azure Policy be used to create a default tag that inherits the value of another tag?
Answer: Yes, Azure Policy can do that via a policy assignment that deploys a built-in policy definition enforcing tags and their values.
8. Question: What kind of operations can be performed using Azure Policy REST APIs?
Answer: Using Azure Policy REST APIs, you can get individual policy assignment details, policy definition details, perform compliance assessments, and more.
9. Question: What are some common use cases for Azure Policy?
Answer: Azure Policy can be used for preventing VMs without specific tags from being deployed, enforcing MFA on accounts with Write permissions, denying resources from being deployed to specific locations, etc.
10. Question: If non-compliant resources are found during policy evaluation, what happens next?
Answer: If non-compliant resources are found, Azure Policy marks these resources and presents them in the compliance dashboard. It does not delete already existing resources.
11. Question: Can Azure Policy deny deployment of specific resource types?
Answer: Yes, Azure Policy can deny deployment of certain resource types using the ‘not’ condition in the policy rule.
12. Question: Are Azure Policies evaluated instantly upon definition and assignment?
Answer: No, Azure Policies are not evaluated immediately. It takes some time for evaluation to take place, generally within 30 minutes.
13. Question: What would you use to group together a collection of Azure Policies?
Answer: An Initiative definition (sometimes called a policy set) is used to group together a collection of Azure Policies.
14. Question: Can historical policy evaluation data be accessed?
Answer: Yes, Azure Policy keeps historical policy evaluation data which can be accessed to observe the level of compliance over some specific period in time.
15. Question: What is the purpose of policy parameters within Azure Policy?
Answer: The purpose of policy parameters is to simplify code and improve policy reusability. Parameters help generalize policy definitions by introducing flexibility.
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