Azure Architect and Engineer

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We are a small but mature software development company that has migrated many of our platforms to the Azure ecosystem. The migration was completed within the last year, and has carried some pain points during the transition, and overall maintenance. We are looking for someone to evaluate our architecture and provide advice and insight, based on a combination of base-practices and practical application for a smaller organization. We are looking to position our solutions for continued growth and maximize our investment with Azure. This should be considered when thinking about the overall decisions in architecture. We’re not looking to design a large-scale build-out today but need guidance on how to scale at a steady pace, should our client base grow. The right person for this engagement should be solution-oriented, and comfortable being a mentor / teacher / trainer, and not necessarily doing hands-on work. There is potential for this to turn into a longer-term engagement, should the right person be found. We’re starting small with this design evaluation exercise to make sure we have the right fit before taking on additional work and projects. There are several skillsets listed below that will be important for this engagement to be successful. Skills ranked high should be demonstrated with a solid understanding of implementing, integrating, and maintaining. You will need to be a subject matter expert in these areas. Skills ranked lower may be services we are testing out or already have a solid grasp of. For this initial engagement, I’m requesting an estimate of hours to accomplish the delivery goal. Myself and one other team member will be actively engaged, and available to answer questions. We’re looking for someone that would have some availability during the typical business hours in the eastern time zone. Deliverable: Hourly rate or fixed cost for this discovery and consultation. We would expect to have multiple virtual meetings to dive deeper into our current architecture, and where things are heading. If we need to have an initial discovery call to make sure we’re a good fit, I am also open to that. Background: I am new to the company and am working on formulating our strategy with cloud services. We do have a smaller on-prem footprint but are not considered hybrid in the traditional sense for end-customer services. I will largely be managing and directing these engagements. There is another member of the team that you will work closely with that was involved in most aspects of the current setup. Knowledge-transfer and mentoring with this individual is crucial for these consultations to be a success. Anticipated questions: - Advice on proper labeling, organization and setup of Azure services. - Best practices and recommendations around App Services. This includes firewall, gateway, key vaults, security, and use of DevOps for build deployments. - Recommendations for using the key vault, and best practices. - Review and recommendations for properly implementing health, monitoring, and alerting for our ecosystem. Viewing our solution holistically, building these services in initially, and not as an after-thought. - AKS implementation - Permissions and user access. Advising on how to properly set up developers with access to view health and system activity from a read-only dashboard type of view. Allowing them to get access to immediate system questions without involving IT. - RBAC / Reviewing existing permissions for teams. How should we be grouping users? Access level groups, without managing granular access on a case-by-case basis. - Backup and recovery. Establish our baseline and making sure all resources are configured appropriately for the policy. - Reviewing tiers / SLAs and configurations. For example, we recently discovered we were on a developer tier for APIs that lack an SLA and were subject to an outage. We’re looking to prevent this. - Recommendations with overall build of VMs, disk type, encryption setup, etc. Uncovering what we don’t know, haven’t thought of, or should give consideration to. You build this list! We’re open to exploring other ways to architect and manage these services. We’re very much interested in someone that brings things to the surface that we haven’t thought of before. This insight would be extremely helpful, instead of approaching this as a checklist type of engagement. We do adhere to HIPAA requirements, any experience or recommendations surrounding this would also be beneficial. We also require an NDA or BAA signed prior to a deeper dive into our environment.

Keyword: SQL

Microsoft Azure SQL Database Microsoft Azure Azure App Service Network Architecture System Monitoring