AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals + AZ900 Practice Tests

Master Azure fundamentals with a beginner-friendly course covering cloud concepts and core services like compute, networking, and storage, plus practice tests and a 45-minute exam with a 700/1000 passing score.

Explore cloud computing basics by comparing traditional data centers with on-demand Azure resources. Use portal.azure.com to access pay-as-you-go services and scale as needed.

Explore the traditional on-premises data center and the shift to cloud computing with IaaS, the shared responsibility model, and lift-and-shift migration for moving applications to cloud hardware.

Learn platform as a service (paas) where Microsoft manages the operating system and infrastructure, while you handle the application data; app service exemplifies paas with shared responsibilities and scalability.

Software as a service delivers a fully developed cloud application, such as Office 365 apps like PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Teams. The provider handles the software; customers manage their data.

Understand private, public, and hybrid cloud deployment models, their use cases, and the pay-as-you-go OpEx framework guiding cloud expenditures and CapEx versus OpEx.

Cloud computing delivers services over the internet, including storage and servers, and compares public, private, and hybrid models within shared responsibility framework, focusing on infrastructure versus software as a service.

Discover the Microsoft Learn Open Book feature that lets you access Microsoft documentation during exams for role-based certifications, except labs and fundamentals exams.

Create a free Azure account to start using services. Know that a subscription is a billing agreement and that a credit card is required for identity validation.

Explore what the Azure free account includes: a $200 credit for 30 days, 12-month free products, and free services, plus cost analysis and free student accounts.

Learn cost management and billing in Azure, using tools to monitor and optimize costs for virtual machines and storage, view invoices, and understand budget versus spending limit with notifications.

Understand azure physical infrastructure, including regions, availability zones, and data centers, and how regional pairs enable disaster recovery and sovereign regions for government workloads.

Understand Azure management infrastructure by organizing resources into a subscription and resource groups, noting that resources live in one group, span regions, and can be moved between groups.

Design an Azure virtual network with private IP ranges and subnets for virtual machines, distinguishing private from public IPs and configuring the network in the Azure portal.

Provision a Windows VM inside a virtual network and subnet, then explore automatically created resources: a public IP, a network interface card, and an OS disk.

Create a Windows VM in Azure by selecting subscription, resource group, region, image, and size with premium SSD, in virtual network, then tag and assign a public IP before deployment.

Learn to connect to a VM via remote desktop protocol using its public IP on the NIC and configure the NSG to deny inbound traffic by default while allowing 3389.

Master Azure network security by configuring NSG rules—five-tuple filtering for inbound and outbound traffic—applied at subnet level or NIC, shaping access to VMs.

Connect two Azure virtual networks with virtual network peering to enable private IP communication between East and West US virtual networks.

Learn virtual network pairing, including simple and global VNet pairing, and configure VPN gateway with IPsec tunnels for site-to-site or point-to-site connectivity, plus Express route as a private option.

Group virtual machines with an application security group to create logical ASGs, then apply inbound NSG rules by destination ASG to control ports 80 and 1433 across the VMs.

Learn how the domain name system enables name resolution for virtual machines by using Azure DNS, private zones, and public DNS records to map names to IP addresses.

Connect to a virtual machine, install the web server with PowerShell, and enable IIS, then access the default page via port 80 and customize it in C:\inetpub\wwwroot.

Explore app service as a platform as a service in Azure that hosts web apps without managing underlying VMs, supports multiple runtimes, and uses an app service plan.

Explore Azure Functions, a serverless compute option that charges only for code execution time. See how event-driven triggers like http and timer invoke functions, avoiding infrastructure prepayment.

Explore Azure high availability and service level agreements, and learn how a premium SSD VM delivers about 99.9% uptime.

Discover how availability sets distribute your app across multiple VMs in fault domains up to three and update domains up to twenty to reduce correlated failures and achieve 99.95% SLA.

An availability set spreads your app across racks in a single data center, protecting only against hardware failures there; for full data center outages, a different availability solution is needed.

Explore availability zones in the east US region, distributing VMs across three zones to protect against data center failure with a 99.99% SLA.

Learn how composite SLA forms by multiplying the SLAs of multiple services, like app service and SQL database, and note that the overall uptime may drop if any service fails.

Create and manage a virtual machine scale set that automatically scales the number of load-balanced VMs up or down based on demand, using CPU thresholds and defined min/max instances.

Learn why containers provide a lightweight alternative to virtualization, using Docker to run three apps with a shared kernel and without a full operating system.

Compare containers and virtual machines, noting that containers share the host OS and need no full OS; install Docker on an Ubuntu VM to create containers in a virtual network.

Explore Docker architecture, where the client CLI communicates with the daemon server to run containers like Nginx, via REST API calls that trigger image pulls from Docker Hub.

Learn how Docker images serve as blueprints containing the OS, file system, and application dependencies to create containers. Explore pulling nginx from Docker Hub and building containers from images.

Create and run an nginx docker container on an Azure VM, using docker run -d and -p for port mapping, and configure the network security group to allow access.

Launch containers with Azure container instances, avoiding VM setup and Docker installation; deploy an nginx image from Docker Hub and access it on port 80 via the public IP.

Create an Ubuntu 20.04 virtual machine in the existing virtual network, connect via ssh (PuTTY or Git Bash), update apt, and install Docker with the get.docker.com script.

Explore Azure storage as a scalable, durable data solution using storage accounts with globally unique names, standard and premium performance, and services like blobs, tables, queues, and file shares.

Explore Azure storage redundancy options, including local, zone, geo, and geo zone redundancy. Replication within the primary region or across paired regions affects availability and cost.

Create a general purpose v2 storage account in the Azure portal, select resource group, globally unique name, and explore containers, file shares, queues, tables with public access and hot tier.

Explore how a general purpose v2 storage account supports blob, file, queue, and table services, create containers, upload blobs, and use OS disks for operating system virtual machines.

Explore Azure storage access tiers: hot, cool, and archive, and how tier choices affect storage and transaction costs, egress, and pricing in the portal.

Azure Migrate offers a unified platform with discovery and assessment, tools for server, data, and database migration to Azure, plus Azure Data Box for offline transfers up to 80 TB.

learn to use the easy copy command line tool to copy blobs and files to and from a storage account, configure authentication, permissions, and run from anywhere.

Use Azure Storage Explorer, a graphical tool that lets you sign in, connect to your storage account, and upload or download files with proper permissions across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Learn how Azure File Sync links an on-premises file server to an Azure file share to enable multi-site sync, cloud tiering, and volume free-space policy for backup and disaster recovery.

Explore how on-premises Active Directory serves as the identity and authentication layer, validating user credentials before access to laptops and resources, and contrast with Azure Active Directory.

Explore how Azure Active Directory provides cloud-based identity and authentication for cloud and on-premises apps, explains tenants, primary domain, and custom domains, and how users log in to portal.azure.com.

Understand how Azure Active Directory tenants create separate identities for Tailwind Toys and Tailwind Sports, each with its own web application and users.

Differentiate authentication from authorization: authentication proves who you are via Azure Active Directory, while authorization grants permissions through built-in or custom roles like global administrator or user administrator.

Understand how an Azure subscription resides under an Azure AD tenant, and how global administrator and application administrator roles govern access in a one-to-many relationship.

Compare Azure RBAC and Azure AD roles, and learn how scope and inheritance at subscription and resource group levels control access to production virtual machines with reduced management overhead.

Learn how to organize subscriptions into management groups in Azure to simplify access control, policies, and compliance across all subscriptions and resources in a tenant.

Apply resource locks to protect Azure resources from accidental deletion or modification. Use delete or read-only locks at subscription, resource group, or resource level, inherited by child resources.

Azure policy enforces organization standards and data residency by restricting resource creation to approved locations, such as East and West US, enabling scalable compliance.

Explore hybrid identities by syncing on-premises users with Azure Active Directory via Azure AD Connect, creating an identity store for on-premises and cloud applications, including Azure AD Connect Cloud Sync.

Learn how Azure Active Directory, now Microsoft Entra, licenses affect security features like conditional access and identity protection, and implement multi-factor authentication with security defaults and the Microsoft Authenticator app.

Conditional access policies unite signals to grant or block access, enforce multi-factor authentication, require at least a premium p1 license (p2 also works), and need security defaults disabled.

Implement the zero trust model by never trusting, always verifying with explicit authentication and authorization. Apply least privilege, just-in-time access, conditional access, multi-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, and Azure AD.

Describe defense in depth, a seven-layer model protecting information. Remember the seven layers: physical security, identity and access, perimeter network, compute, application, and data.

Microsoft Defender for cloud monitors security posture across Azure, on-premises, and other clouds, delivering recommendations and a secure score to guide onboarding, encryption at rest, and MFA deployment.

Learn to manage and deploy azure resources programmatically using cloud shell, PowerShell, and Azure CLI; create resource groups, VMs, and storage accounts with ARM templates.

Azure advisor acts as a personalized cloud consultant, analyzing resources and recommending cost savings, security, reliability, performance, and operational excellence, including idle VMs to downsize or shut down.

Discover how to monitor Azure service health with the status page, service health, and resource health, filter by region, and set alerts for plan maintenance.

Azure Monitor collects metrics and logs from Azure, on-premises, and other clouds via an agent, storing them in a log analytic workspace for SQL language queries (KQL) and alerts.

Experience high availability as a core cloud benefit in Azure by deploying resources across availability zones and spreading virtual machines across different hardware to guard against data center failures.

Explore cloud scalability by learning how vertical and horizontal scaling adjust resources to meet demand, including scale up, scale down, scale out, and scale in for virtual machines.

Learn how reliability combines resiliency and availability, and how the shared responsibility model affects Azure deployments, including availability zones and SLAs.

Explore cloud predictability by balancing performance and cost, selecting vm sku options, storage like solid-state drives, availability zones, and using the Azure pricing calculator for cost forecasting.

Explore the Azure pricing calculator to estimate costs for virtual machines and services, including region, size, run time, and pay-as-you-go versus upfront pricing, with reserved instances and hybrid benefit options.

Explore the total cost of ownership calculator to compare on premises infrastructure with Azure cloud, uncovering cost savings, license considerations, and report generation for migration decisions.