AZ-900 Bootcamp: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (JUNE 2026)

Enhance your AZ-900 exam preparation with a variety of tools: a custom 40-question mock exam that simulates the real AZ-900 format with multiple-choice, true/false, and fill-in-the-blank questions; a fun AZ-900 crossword puzzle to reinforce key concepts; and nearly 100 free online flashcards to review and solidify your knowledge.

In this lecture, you’ll learn what cloud computing actually means and why it is a foundational concept for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. You’ll explore how services such as compute, storage, networking, databases, analytics, and AI tools are delivered over the internet through providers like Microsoft Azure.

We’ll examine the core characteristics that define cloud computing, including on-demand resource provisioning, scalability, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go pricing, and contrast this model with traditional on-premises infrastructure. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how cloud computing shifts organizations away from owning and maintaining physical hardware and toward consuming flexible resources delivered from Microsoft’s global data centers.

In this lecture, you’ll learn how responsibilities are divided between you and Microsoft when using Azure, a key concept for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. You’ll explore how the shared responsibility model defines who is accountable for infrastructure, operating systems, applications, and data security across different cloud service types.

We’ll compare how responsibilities shift between Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service, and examine what remains your responsibility in each model. Understanding this division is critical not only for the exam, but also for avoiding security gaps and managing cloud environments effectively in the real world.

In this lecture, you’ll learn the three primary cloud deployment models covered on the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam: public, private, and hybrid cloud. You’ll explore how each model determines where resources are hosted, who manages the infrastructure, and how workloads are accessed.

We’ll examine the characteristics of public cloud environments in Microsoft Azure, the control and isolation provided by private clouds, and the flexibility offered by hybrid cloud configurations. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how these models differ and how organizations choose between them based on scalability, compliance, cost, and operational requirements.

In this lecture, you’ll examine real-world scenarios that determine when public, private, or hybrid cloud models are most appropriate. Building on your understanding of deployment models, you’ll explore how factors such as scalability, cost efficiency, compliance requirements, and operational control influence cloud strategy decisions.

We’ll walk through practical examples, including startups leveraging the public cloud for rapid deployment, financial and healthcare organizations using private clouds for stricter control, and hybrid environments supporting cloud bursting, disaster recovery, and gradual migration to Azure. By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to match common organizational needs to the most suitable cloud deployment model, a skill that is essential for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam.

In this lecture, you’ll take a short break from the video format and complete a quick Azure Micro Challenge designed to reinforce the concepts we’ve just covered.

This interactive activity includes a couple of simple sorting exercises focused on the shared responsibility model and cloud deployment models. The goal is to help you quickly review these ideas in a slightly different format while giving your brain a break from watching videos.

The challenge only takes about 60 seconds to complete and is meant to be a light, low-pressure way to reinforce your understanding before moving on to the next section of the course.

In this lecture, you’ll explore how Microsoft Azure strengthens both security and governance, two critical pillars of successful cloud adoption and key concepts for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. You’ll examine how Azure provides built-in platform-level protections across physical infrastructure, networking, identity, and data, along with advanced tools such as Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Policy, and Role-Based Access Control.

We’ll also discuss how governance mechanisms enforce standards automatically, reduce misconfigurations, and help organizations maintain compliance at scale. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how security and governance work together in Azure to reduce risk, maintain control, and enable organizations to innovate without sacrificing oversight.

In this lecture, you’ll explore how Microsoft Azure delivers high availability and scalability, two core advantages of cloud computing and key concepts for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. You’ll examine how built-in redundancy through Availability Sets and Availability Zones helps keep applications online during hardware failures or maintenance events.

You’ll also learn how Azure dynamically scales resources using services like Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Azure App Service, allowing applications to adjust automatically to changing demand. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how high availability and scalability work together to improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency in modern cloud environments.

In this lecture, you’ll explore how Microsoft Azure delivers reliability and predictability, two essential benefits of cloud computing and important concepts for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. You’ll examine how built-in fault tolerance through Availability Zones and platform-managed services helps keep applications running even when individual components fail.

You’ll also learn how Azure provides predictable performance and cost transparency through defined service tiers, usage tracking, pricing tools, and cost management features. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how reliability and predictability work together to create stable, consistent cloud environments that organizations can confidently plan around and trust for critical workloads.

In this lecture, you’ll learn how the consumption-based model changes the way organizations pay for IT in Microsoft Azure, a foundational concept for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. You’ll explore how Azure meters resource usage and bills based on actual consumption rather than large upfront hardware purchases.

We’ll compare this pay-as-you-go approach to traditional capital expenditure models and examine how it improves flexibility, cash flow, and cost efficiency. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how the consumption-based model aligns cloud spending with real-time demand and why it plays a central role in modern cloud economics.

In this lecture, you’ll compare the primary Azure pricing models and learn how organizations balance flexibility, cost savings, and predictability when paying for cloud resources. Building on the consumption-based model, you’ll explore how pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot pricing each support different workload requirements.

You’ll examine when to choose flexible monthly billing, when to commit to longer-term reservations for discounted rates, and when deeply discounted spot capacity makes sense for interruptible workloads. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how Azure pricing models align with different business priorities, a key concept for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam.

In this lecture, you’ll take a short break from the video format and complete a quick Azure Micro Challenge designed to reinforce the concepts we’ve just covered.

This interactive activity includes a couple of simple sorting exercises focused on the consumption-based model and cloud pricing models. The goal is to help you quickly review these ideas in a slightly different format while giving your brain a break from watching videos.

The challenge only takes about 60 seconds to complete and is meant to be a light, low-pressure way to reinforce your understanding before moving on to the next section of the course.

In this applied scenario, you’ll step into the role of a decision-maker at a mid-sized healthcare organization that must modernize its aging infrastructure while maintaining compliance and minimizing risk. Instead of reviewing definitions, you’ll evaluate real-world tradeoffs between public, private, and hybrid cloud models.

You’ll analyze factors such as reliability, regulatory requirements, scalability, and cost predictability to determine which cloud model best fits the organization’s needs. This exercise reinforces how cloud model decisions are made in practice and prepares you to recognize scenario-based cues on the AZ-900 exam.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one of the core models of cloud computing, alongside Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). IaaS provides virtualized computing resources over the internet, such as virtual machines, storage, and networking. It essentially allows organizations to rent IT infrastructure from a cloud service provider, rather than investing in physical hardware.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides a platform for developers to build, run, and manage applications without the complexity of maintaining the underlying infrastructure, such as servers, networks, and storage. PaaS offers a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud, where developers can focus on writing code and developing applications without worrying about the hardware and software management needed for their apps to run.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud computing model where software applications are hosted and managed by a third-party provider and made available to customers over the internet. In this model, users access the software through a web browser without the need to install or maintain it on their own hardware.

In this lecture, you’ll take a short break from the video format and complete a quick Azure Micro Challenge designed to reinforce the concepts we’ve just covered.

This interactive activity includes a couple of simple matching and sorting exercises focused on the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud service types. The goal is to help you quickly review these ideas in a slightly different format while giving your brain a break from watching videos.

The challenge only takes about 60 seconds to complete and is meant to be a light, low-pressure way to reinforce your understanding before moving on to the next section of the course.

In Azure, regions are physical locations where Microsoft operates data centers to deliver cloud services. Region pairs consist of two regions within the same geography for redundancy and disaster recovery. Sovereign regions like Azure Government or Azure China are isolated to meet local compliance and regulatory requirements.

Availability Zones in Azure are physically separate data centers within an Azure region. Each zone has independent power, cooling, and networking to provide high availability and fault tolerance. By distributing resources across multiple zones, Azure ensures resilience against data center failures, allowing services to remain operational even if one zone goes offline.

In this Azure Micro Challenge, you’ll reinforce several key infrastructure concepts: regions, region pairs, sovereign regions, availability zones, and datacenters.

Through two short sorting exercises, you’ll review how Azure organizes its global infrastructure and match statements to the concepts they describe.

The activity should take about a minute to complete and is designed to give you a quick mental break from the lecture format while helping reinforce the key ideas we just covered.

In Azure, resources are the fundamental building blocks of cloud services, including virtual machines, storage accounts, databases, and networks, used to create solutions. These resources are organized into resource groups, which act as logical containers to group related resources for easier management and organization. Resource groups allow you to apply common configurations, such as access control policies, monitoring, and lifecycle management, to all resources within the group. This helps streamline administration and ensures that related resources are managed together efficiently, making it easier to scale and maintain cloud solutions.

An Azure Subscription is a billing and management unit that holds Azure resources. It tracks usage costs and allows for access control and policy management. Multiple subscriptions can be used to separate projects or departments for better organization and governance.

Management Groups in Azure are hierarchical containers used to organize and manage multiple subscriptions. They allow you to apply policies, compliance, and access control consistently across all subscriptions within the group. This helps streamline governance and ensure uniform management across large organizations or complex cloud environments.

In this challenge, you’ll review several key concepts related to the Azure resource hierarchy: management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources. In this quick sorting exercise, you’ll match statements and use cases to the level of the hierarchy they describe.

The activity should take about a minute to complete and is meant to help reinforce the key ideas you just covered.

Tagging allows you to assign metadata to Azure resources, such as virtual machines, making it easier to track and categorize them based on specific criteria like environment, department, or cost center.

In this lab, you will learn how to effectively tag resources in Microsoft Azure to better organize and manage your cloud infrastructure.

In this lecture, we’re going to cover various compute services that are available in Azure. We'll cover Azure Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, App Services and Azure Functions. We'll also touch on Container Services and Kubernetes.

In this lab, you’ll learn how to deploy and configure an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) using the Azure portal. The lab walks you through the steps of creating a new virtual machine, configuring its settings, including availability zones, security options, and network configuration.

You’ll also learn how to attach and configure disks for your VM, manage network access, and ensure that resources such as IPs and NICs are properly deleted when the VM is removed.

In this lab, you’ll learn how to deploy and configure an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS) using the Azure portal.

A VM Scale Set is an Azure compute resource that allows you to deploy and manage a set of identical VMs. This lab walks you through the process of setting up the scale set, configuring auto-scaling based on CPU usage, and attaching storage to the VMs.

You’ll also configure network settings and management options to ensure smooth operations.

By the end of this lab, you’ll have deployed a scalable, flexible infrastructure capable of automatically scaling in or out based on workload demands.

Azure Virtual Desktop is a desktop and app virtualization service that runs on the cloud. It allows for the virtualization of both desktops and applications, providing a scalable and flexible environment.

In this lecture, we'll cover key Azure management tools, including the Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, the Azure CLI, and more.

In this lab, you’ll learn how to create and configure a Virtual Network (vNet) and Subnet in Microsoft Azure.

Virtual networks are essential for organizing and managing network traffic within the Azure environment, and subnets allow you to segment your vNet for better control over resource communication.

This lab walks you through the process of creating a new vNet, configuring address spaces, and setting up subnets to meet the needs of different applications. You’ll also apply network security features like encryption and use tags to categorize your vNet.

For those of you interested in broadening your Azure knowledge, I recommend exploring my  20-Minute Tech Talk on Azure Traffic Manager. This talk takes a dive into Azure Traffic Manager, a versatile tool within Azure's services for managing and optimizing web traffic across global Azure regions.

While this tech talk is not a requirement for the AZ-900 course, it offers valuable additional learning for anyone curious about advanced traffic management capabilities and strategies in Azure. It's a great resource for enhancing your understanding of Azure's networking features.

The intent of this tech talk is to provide you with enough knowledge to speak intelligently about Azure Traffic Manager, whether it’s with your peers, or during a job interview. You won’t become a Traffic Manager expert by watching this 20-minute tech talk, but you WILL be able to confidently discuss Azure Traffic Manager, should you find yourself discussing it in a job interview.

For those interested in expanding their knowledge beyond this AZ-900 course content, I recommend checking out my 20-Minute Tech Talk on Azure Bastion.

This tech talk offers an insightful look into Azure Bastion, a powerful tool within Azure's networking capabilities, providing a secure, manageable, and efficient way to access Azure VMs remotely. While this knowledge is not required for completing the AZ-900 course, it provides valuable additional learning for anyone interested in the practical applications and benefits of Azure Bastion in real-world scenarios.

The intent of this tech talk is to provide you with enough knowledge to speak intelligently about Azure Bastion, whether it’s with your peers, or during a job interview. You won’t become an Azure Bastion expert by watching this 20-minute tech talk, but you WILL be able to confidently discuss Azure Bastion, should you find yourself discussing it in a job interview.

In this lab, you’ll learn how to create and configure an Azure Storage Account using the Azure portal.

The lab provides step-by-step instructions, walking you through the process of setting up a storage account, selecting key configuration options, and enabling advanced features like geographic redundancy, network access controls, and blob versioning.

By the end of the lab, you’ll have hands-on experience with setting up a storage account, configuring its security settings, and deploying it within a specific Azure environment.

In this lab, you will learn how to create and configure an Azure File Share within an existing Azure storage account. Azure File Share allows you to set up a fully managed file share in the cloud, accessible through standard protocols like SMB and NFS.

This lab will guide you through the step-by-step process of creating a file share, selecting appropriate access tiers, and reviewing important configuration settings. By the end of this lab, you will have hands-on experience creating a file share that is optimized for frequent data access and ready to be used for storing and sharing files.

Learn what Azure Migrate is, why it's used, and what offerings comprise the service.

In this lab, you will gain hands-on experience with Microsoft Entra ID by creating and configuring a new user account in the Microsoft Entra Admin Center. This process is fundamental for managing identities within an organization, and you will explore key features such as adding user details and configuring user properties.

By the end of the lab, you will understand how to effectively manage user accounts in Entra ID, ensuring that users have the correct permissions and settings for accessing resources within your environment.

In this lab, you will learn how to assign Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) roles to users in Microsoft Azure. You will be guided through the process of selecting a resource group, assigning the “Virtual Machine Contributor” role to a specific user, and verifying the role assignment. This exercise ensures you can effectively manage access within a resource group, allowing team members to perform tasks according to their assigned roles while maintaining security and compliance.