AZ-900 prep: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Explore how Azure delivers cloud computing with on-demand compute and storage, a broad set of resources for analytics and artificial intelligence, and pay-as-you-go pricing that integrates with on-prem environments.

Create a free Azure account, understand the free credits and 12-month and forever free services, learn how to pause resources, and navigate the portal and basic interface.

Create your first Azure virtual machine in the AZ-900 prep course, using Windows Server 2019 with a pay-as-you-go B1ms size in East US, and explore deployment and networking basics.

Launch a virtual machine and connect via remote desktop protocol, using administrator credentials, then deallocate, shut down, and delete the virtual machine to stop costing money.

Explore Azure management groups as a hierarchical governance structure that groups subscriptions and management groups up to six levels, enabling inherited policies, access, and compliance across subscriptions.

Navigate how subscriptions serve as logical units linked to an account, with management groups, per-region limits, cost controls, access, policy scope, and environment separation.

Resource groups are logical containers for Azure services that group related resources under shared permissions and RBAC, cannot be nested, and deleting the group removes all its resources.

Housing networked servers, data centers are physical buildings with power, networking, and cooling. Regions cluster multiple data centers and connect them with a dedicated fast network.

Explore how Azure regions are geographic locations with data centers and how region pairs enable disaster recovery through failover, while latency and customer location guide region choices.

Explore Azure sovereign regions in North America and China, detailing US government and DoD regions, and China regions with 21Vianet partnership, plus legal entity requirements and disconnection from global Azure.

Distribute your virtual machines across multiple data centers within a region using availability zones. Ensure zone resilience by keeping zones miles apart, so if one goes down, others stay available.

Describe how availability sets boost resiliency by spanning fault domains and update domains with separate power and network, and compare with availability zones, noting premium for zones and higher sla.

Explore Azure virtual machine scale sets, load-balanced machines across zones and fault domains, supporting 1000 instances with central configuration, automatic upgrades, and monitoring.

Tag resources with name-value pairs to categorize services, using examples like department, owner, and data type, while noting that tags on resource groups do not automatically cascade to resources.

Explore Azure resource manager and ARM templates to automate consistent VM deployments using JSON templates, export and manage resources, handle dependencies, and streamline Azure provisioning.

Identify the core resources required for a virtual machine: resource group, an operating system image, storage discs, a virtual network with a network interface, and an optional public ip.

Identify factors that affect Azure costs, including service type, performance, regions and zones, and egress traffic, to plan storage, databases, and virtual machines cost effectively.

Explore factors that reduce Azure costs, including hybrid benefit for Windows and SQL licenses, spot instances, reserved instances, enterprise agreements, and cost-saving practices like deallocating unused VMs.

Use the Azure total cost of ownership calculator to compare Azure costs with on-premises, including hidden costs like hardware, software, electricity, and IT, and download the report.

Use the Azure Pricing Calculator to generate an indicative cost estimate with breakdowns for virtual machines, region, OS, tier, hours, storage, and discounts.

Explore azure cost management and billing to understand your bill, set budgets and alerts, and optimize resource use by analyzing costs by service, location, and tags.

Learn how Azure ensures reliability and predictability through redundancies across availability zones and regions, preventing data loss and downtime, while avoiding a single point of failure via application resiliency.

Explore the benefits of security and governance in the cloud, including data that becomes confidential, integral, and available. Understand identity and access management, threat protection, encryption, and regulatory compliance.

Understand the benefits of manageability in the cloud by organizing resources into resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups, with cascading security and centralized control in the Azure portal.

Compare capital expenditure and operational expenditure, illustrating upfront hardware costs, depreciation timing, on-prem vs Azure costs, and how reserved instances affect deductions across years.

Describe the consumption-based model, where you pay for services only when you use them, such as vm hours and provisioned storage. Explore reserved options and hybrid benefits for savings.

Compare on premises vs the cloud, explore LaaS, Pass and SaaS, and learn how data location, security, and costs are managed by you or the provider.

Explore the shared responsibility model across on-premises, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, noting how hardware, operating systems, and data ownership shift.

Explore IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS with real-life examples like on-premises servers, Azure virtual machines, and Gmail or Office 365, illustrating who updates what under the shared responsibility model.

Explore serverless computing with Azure functions and logic apps, where you don’t control the server; Microsoft runs and scales resources only when events occur.

Explore public, private, and hybrid clouds, comparing cost, maintenance, security, and certain data on premises. Discover how hybrid deployments balance on-premises and cloud resources and the related IT support needs.

Explore Azure virtual machines as IaaS with configurable CPU, memory, storage, networking, and OS options, plus scale sets for rapid provisioning and disaster recovery testing.

Azure app services is a PaaS for deploying web apps and mobile backends using ASP.NET, PHP, Python. It delivers enterprise grade performance, security, and high availability with traffic manager.

Discover Azure container instances (ACI) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for deploying containerized apps with Docker, quick launches, per-second billing, isolation, scalable pod management, storage and networking.

Discover Windows Virtual Desktop, a cloud-hosted Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session enabling multiple users, remote desktops and apps access from any device, with Azure Active Directory, RBAC, and data separation.

Discover Azure Functions: small, event-driven code that runs on triggers in a serverless model. Auto-scaling and pay-per-use pricing enable cost-efficient scaling, with optional durability via storage.

Explore Azure virtual networks (vnets) to connect resources within a single region, segment with subnets, and enable service endpoints to access key vaults, SQL, cognitive services, and Cosmos DB.

Explore virtual networks, subnets, and IP addressing in Azure, including CIDR notation /16 and /24, private and public IPs, NICs across subnets, and internal versus public load balancers.

Differentiate public and private endpoints by noting that public endpoints use routable ip addresses and require authentication, while private endpoints expose resources inside a virtual network via private link service.

Learn how virtual network gateways enable site-to-site, point-to-site, and network-to-network connections between on-premises networks and Azure, and how ExpressRoute provides a private, high-speed link.

Explore Azure DNS, a hosting service that resolves domain names to IP addresses; use third-party registrars like GoDaddy and manage records with RBAC and activity logs via portal or CLI.

Blob storage, or container storage, stores binary large objects in a storage account as containers and blobs, including images, videos, and documents, with block and append blobs.

Explore storage access tiers hot, cool, and archive, and how usage patterns, costs, and rehydration rules shape where you store data, with lifecycle moves from hot to cool to archive.

Explore Azure disk storage options for virtual machines, comparing standard HDD/SSD with premium SSD and Ultra disks, and learn resizing requires deallocation and premium SSD offers higher SLA.

Explore azure file storage: cloud file shares with up to 2000 reads per file and one write, backed by replication and options for standard v2 or premium storage.

Explore storage redundancy options in azure storage accounts, including LRS, ZRS, GRS, and GZRS, across primary and secondary regions.