Azure Fundamentals: AZ-900 Certification +Practice Questions

Explore cloud concepts and the benefits of moving to the cloud, compare public, private, and hybrid models, differentiate IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and examine cost management and administration.

Track monthly updates to the Azure portal and Microsoft 365 portal, noting minor changes like renamed options or moved tabs, while the course is updated quarterly to reflect evolving interface.

Discover how to achieve Azure high availability by using an availability set to distribute VMs across multiple fault and update domains, avoiding a single point of failure.

Discover how cloud computing replaces on premise infrastructure and traditional VPN with Azure hosted email, apps, and file servers, enabling secure, geo-located resources for remote workers.

Understand economies of scale by exploring how larger purchase volumes reduce per-unit costs, with cloud storage examples from major providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS.

Learn the difference between CapEx and OpEx, contrasting hardware upfront costs and tax deductions with pay-as-you-go cloud services that replace physical infrastructure.

Explore the three cloud models—public, private, and hybrid—and compare their advantages, disadvantages, and key characteristics.

Understand the public cloud, owned by the provider and accessible over the internet. Lease resources through your subscription, while the provider manages all underlying infrastructure.

The private cloud is a single-company owned, access-restricted environment secured by a site-to-site vpn. The company owns hardware and licensing and relies on a smee for cloud security.

Understand how a hybrid cloud combines public and private clouds, where a public web server connects to a private database, enabling secure, publicly accessible applications for sensitive data.

Explore the different types of cloud services—infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service—and define their characteristics.

Explore platform as a service (PaaS) to focus on applications within an environment for building, testing, and deploying, while the cloud provider handles servers, storage, operating systems, and development tools.

Explains software as a service where applications are centrally hosted and fully managed by the provider, with users configuring in-app settings while patching and updates are handled by the vendor.

Explore core Azure services and architectural components, learn how regions and geographies affect data storage, and review Azure product offerings, solutions, and management tools for public and hybrid clouds.

Azure regions group multiple data centers for low latency across 54 regions worldwide, with special regions for data residency and region pairs that replicate resources for redundancy.

Select an Azure region when creating resources like virtual machines, choosing from regions near your users or to meet data residency requirements, and apply policies to restrict regions for compliance.

Explore how Azure geographies group multiple regions to meet data residency and compliance needs across Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.

Explore how Azure resource groups organize resources for an application as a manageable unit. Set up metering, billing, quotas, policies, and access controls while understanding deletion effects.

Explore the core Azure services and products you can actually use in this lesson today.

Explore Azure compute and virtual machines, including on-demand provisioning, disks, memory, networking, and containers, with emphasis on VM scale sets, App Services, and Functions.

Configure a Windows VM as a web server by installing the IIS role, verify access via the public IP, then stop and restart the VM in the Azure portal.

Explore how Azure dedicated hosts place your virtual machines on dedicated physical servers, with host groups, regions, availability zones, and fault domains to achieve high availability.

Explore how to use the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell to manage resources from the command prompt or PowerShell, including authentication, subscription access, and resource creation, modification, and deletion.

Install the azure cli from the download page, sign in via the browser or cloud shell, and run az commands to create and delete resource groups.

Demonstrates installing the Azure PowerShell module, authenticating to an Azure subscription, and using tab completion to create, manage, and delete resource groups with get-help.

Explore Azure network services, including the Azure virtual network for VM-to-VM communication and on-premises connections, plus VPN gateway, load balancer, application gateway, and CDN across regions.

Explore Azure virtual networks, where an address space defines subnets and network IDs, and where computers can communicate only when they share the same virtual network.

Enable connectivity between separate Azure virtual networks by using vnet peering. It routes traffic both ways through the Azure backbone for high throughput.

ExpressRoute offers private, high-speed connectivity between your on premise network and Azure resources via a site-to-site link, encrypted and provider-dependent, with configurable bandwidth in the Azure portal.

Demo shows configuring Azure blob storage by creating a storage account and container, uploading data, and mapping a Z drive with a PowerShell script.

Explore Azure database services, including Cosmos DB for globally distributed data with user updates, and a managed Azure SQL Database, plus a migration tool for on prem to Azure migrations.

Explore the Azure marketplace to search, trial for 30 days, purchase, and provision thousands of applications in your Azure environment, with categories like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain compute.

Azure arm templates let you reuse settings to quickly deploy Windows virtual machines and related resources. Visualize, edit, and reuse templates to reduce administrative errors.

Apply Azure locks to protect resources from accidental modification or deletion, using read-only and delete locks, which can be applied and removed in the portal.

Explore Windows Autopilot as a cloud-based modern deployment that resets devices and applies profiles, policies, and applications, contrasting it with traditional on-prem deployments using WDS or MDT.

Explore how Azure Virtual Desktop delivers scalable, secure remote desktops and apps worldwide, leveraging host pools, application groups, and workspaces to control access and resources.

Explore Azure virtual desktop to deliver remote desktops and apps from any device, with scalable resources, centralized administration, MFA security, and single- or multi-session options via HTML5 browser access.

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) provides secure remote access across devices, delivering applications and desktops on demand while centralizing updates and administration for scalable, cost-efficient resource use.

Explore Azure solutions in lesson three, introducing core concepts and practical insights for understanding Azure in the Azure Fundamentals course.

Explore the internet of things, from smart thermostats and appliances to water sensors, and learn how Microsoft IoT Central and Azure IoT Hub provide cloud-hosted, bi-directional monitoring and reporting.

Azure Sphere protects IoT devices with defense in depth, certified hardware, and a secure operating system with updates, connecting devices to cloud for threat detection via a security service broker.

Azure Databricks enables cloud-based data engineering with Apache Spark to process massive data, scale on demand, and optimize costs while exploring data through machine learning.

Azure Synapse unifies data ingestion and analytics, storing data in a warehouse and enabling on-the-fly, easily searchable big data analysis.

Explore Azure management solutions and discover the range of tools to manage Azure, from graphical interfaces to PowerShell.

Explore Azure management tools, including the Azure portal and Azure Cloud Shell, to authenticate, navigate hundreds of services, and manage subscriptions through the browser, app, PowerShell, CLI, and Bash.

Azure Advisor is a free built-in tool in Azure that analyzes your configuration and provides proactive recommendations on high availability, security, performance, and cost to align with best practices.

Learn about the rename of Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID, the Entra product family for identity and network access, and confirm that capabilities remain unchanged.

Explore the core Azure identity services in this lesson and build foundational knowledge for the AZ-900 certification and practice questions.

Learn how authentication verifies identity using credentials and how authorization grants access levels, enabling creating new data, reading, and deleting data within Azure Active Directory environments.

Explore Microsoft Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory, its free edition and premium licenses, enabling single sign-on, hybrid identities, conditional access, and identity protection.

Explore the Azure portal overview and Entra ID basics, highlighting the default directory, tenant ID, and domain naming, and learn how Entra ID underpins users, groups, devices, and licenses.