AZ-900 prep: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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