Azure Solutions Architect Certification: The Ultimate Bundle

Contrast on-premise servers with cloud resources to show how peak events like Black Friday cause outages and wasted hardware, and how cloud solves this problem.

Discover what the cloud is, a collection of compute, networking, storage, and other services managed by providers. Learn how cloud data centers enable scalable, pay-as-you-go infrastructure with automatic maintenance and security.

Discover the five cloud characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service, and learn how they enable scalable, cost-efficient cloud solutions.

Compare CapEx and OpEx to understand cloud economics, highlighting upfront investments in data centers and servers versus pay-as-you-go operating expenses, with the cloud offering flexible OpEx and cost efficiency.

Explore IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to understand how cloud providers allocate infrastructure, platforms, and software, while clients manage varying levels of control and responsibility.

Explore public, private, and hybrid clouds, including how each is accessed and where resources reside, with private on-premises security and hybrid workload separation examples like Azure Arc and AWS Outposts.

Explore cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, and understand data centers, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, while noting Azure's growth as the fastest growing public cloud.

Meet Microsoft Azure, the public cloud announced in 2008 and released in 2010, the second largest cloud offering vast IaaS and PaaS services and regional footprints.

Discover azure regions and data centers, learn how availability zones boost resilience, and see how paired regions enable geo replication for high availability.

Discover Azure services and cloud computing fundamentals, from virtual machines and databases to networks and AI algorithms, and explore hundreds of services organized by category.

Create a free azure account with a $200 credit by signing in with a microsoft account or a new email, verify via email and phone, then access the azure portal.

Explore the Azure portal as the entry point to create, manage, view, and remove resources, using the hamburger menu, search bar, and cloud shell to access favorites, settings, and notifications.

Clarify that a subscription is a container for resources, while an account is an identity to access them. Explain that subscriptions attach to accounts and support multiple users and clients.

Create a resource group in Azure by selecting the subscription, naming the group, choosing the region, and reviewing the deployment with a notification confirming success.

Find your resource group in the Azure portal using the search bar. Check recent resources or type the resource name to locate it under resource groups, then open it.

Explore the resource page to understand a resource group's display, including name, location, subscription, pin to dashboard, and favorites, plus the menu with overview, activity log, and access control.

Use azure cloud shell to manage resources with azure cli (bash) or azure powershell, create and delete resource groups in West US, and learn storage, upload, and switching between shells.

Select a region closest to your audience, ensure the required services are available, consider availability zones for redundancy, and compare pricing across regions.

Resource groups are free to create and help you organize Azure resources by development, test, and production within a subscription, using naming conventions like RG to simplify management.

Explore Azure storage accounts, a versatile resource used by services to store data such as database backups, VM disks, diagnostic data, and explicit data storage, all at low cost.

Explore service level agreements (SLA) and how Azure provisioning affects uptime, with examples from App Service and Azure SQL tiers, and how to compute the actual system SLA.

Learn how cloud pricing works, including per-resource, per-consumption, and reservation models, and use the Azure Calculator to compare regions, OS, and instance types to optimize costs before provisioning.

Learn to set up budgets in Azure cost management to monitor usage, track annual spending, and receive email alerts when spending approaches the $200 free trial limit.

Explore how cloud-based architectures require infrastructure knowledge, including networking, firewall, application gateways, VPN, load balancers, and cloud-specific security. Learn to design secure, scalable cloud infrastructure with hands-on experience.

Build and deploy the read it cloud bookshop on Azure, featuring a books catalogue, shopping cart, inventory management, and order engine, with compute, networking, security, databases, and messaging.

Demonstrate the Reddit website’s catalog, shopping cart, and inventory, with an employee sign-in, showing live stock changes as items like Traffic Secrets and The Clean Code move to the cart.

Install the dotnet sdk to run dotnet-based apps. Download the sdk version eight from dotnet.microsoft.com, select your operating system and architecture, install, and verify completion.

download and install VSCode for developing the reddit app, choosing the version compatible with your operating system; launch and pin the VSCode icon to the taskbar for easy access.

Install the C sharp extension for dotnet core and the azure tools extension pack in VSCode to boost cloud development; the C sharp dev kit offers features like solution explorer.

Install and run the catalog locally by loading the catalog folder into VSCode, building with F5, and loading books into an in-memory database for cloud migration.

Explore the project code, including the index page retrieving books from the database via context, displaying them in a table, and discuss in-memory vs Azure SQL and shopping cart integration.

Explore azure compute, the core services for hosting and running applications, compare IaaS and PaaS, and learn about virtual machines, app services, AKS, and Azure Functions.

Explore virtual machines as an iaas in Azure, where Azure manages the host and hypervisor, while you control the vm, os, and software, plus region, image, size, and pricing.

Explore creating and configuring an Azure virtual machine, from price estimation in the pricing calculator to deployment, network setup, remote connectivity via RDP, and cleaning up resources.

Calculate the real cost of a virtual machine in Azure by adding the virtual machine, the premium disk, the public IP, and storage usage, typically around $180 per month.

Reduce Azure virtual machine costs by using auto shutdown for dev/test, reserved and spot instances for production and non-critical tasks, and disk optimization to choose appropriate disk types.

Understand how to keep Azure VMs available by comparing SLAs, using fault domains and update domains, and deploying across availability sets or availability zones with load balancing.

Create an Azure virtual machine in a new resource group, choose availability zone or availability set, configure disk type and auto shutdown, and download an ARM template for automation.

Explain how arm templates use a json declarative file to describe Azure resources for deployment, exportable and source-controlled, usable via portal or cli with what-if and multi-resource deployments.

Show how an ARM template defines parameters, variables, and resources to deploy a VM with NIC, NSG, VNet, and public IP, plus auto-shutdown; customize parameters and deploy via Azure CLI.

Delete an Azure virtual machine and choose which resources to remove, such as the IP address or disk, or keep them, then delete the resource group.

Explore virtual machine scale sets: a group of identical VMs managed as one, scalable with load balancing, ideal for variable web app load; modify images only via new image.

Create and configure a virtual machine scale set, enable auto scaling with CPU-based rules, and manage deployment, instances, and scaling policies.

Explore Azure instance metadata services, a REST API accessible only from a VM that reveals VM details like SKU, instance size, storage, networking, and scheduled events for eviction notifications.

Publish the catalog app to an Azure virtual machine, install the dotnet eight hosting bundle, and configure IIS to run on port 8080 with a static IP.

Provision an Ubuntu Linux vm, install node, clone the weather api with git, run on port 8080, and connect to the catalog vm via private ip in the same vnet.

Design the read it web app’s architecture using azure icons and svg symbols, including a two virtual machine layout with a catalog app and a weather API.

Avoid leaving a virtual machine open to the internet due to security risks, noting that public IP and RDP access must be avoided even for learning.

App Services provides fully managed web hosting that runs your code with no virtual machines and secure infrastructure. Integrates with GitHub, supports dotnet, nodejs, Java, Python, PHP, and containers.

Discover how app services auto scale to traffic spikes, starting with a single instance and adding instances when CPU percentage or HTTP queue length conditions are met.

deploy the inventory component of the Reddit store as an azure app service. Build locally in VS Code, then deploy the code to the web app using the Azure extension.

Deployment slots let you test new app service versions with separate URLs, swap to production after validation, and use traffic splitting to gradually route users to the new slot.

Create a deployment slot for your app service and deploy v2 code to the staging slot. Swap slots to promote the staging version to production and verify traffic routing.

Explore deployment types, basic, rolling, and blue-green, and how traffic splitting and app service slots enable staged upgrades, testing, and safe swaps.

Examine the current architecture, noting the move from two virtual machines for catalog and weather API to three elements with an app service for the inventory app.

Discover AKS, Azure Kubernetes Services, a managed Kubernetes on Azure that lets you deploy containers and manage them with Kubernetes tools, paying only for the virtual machines used.

Understand how containers, a thin packaging model, bundle software, dependencies, and configuration for predictable, fast deployments. Compare them with virtual machines and the container runtime.

Discover how docker uses the daemon, images, registry, and containers to run isolated applications and how dockerfiles customize images for cloud deployments.

Explore how container proliferation challenges—deployment, scalability, monitoring, routing, and high availability—are tackled by container management tools that replace traditional host managers and load balancers.

Explore Kubernetes, the de facto standard container management platform, and how pods and services deliver routing, exposure, load balancing, and high availability for containerized apps.

Learn to install Azure CLI locally, build and push a Docker image to Azure Container Registry, and deploy to AKS using the VSCode Docker extension.

Learn to create and configure an AKS cluster, integrate with an ACR, and deploy a container app using kubectl and a deployment YAML from VS Code.

Examine the current architecture of the Reddit app, including two VMs for catalog and weather API, an app service for inventory, and an AKS cluster that uses Azure Container Registry.

Explore Azure functions hosting plans: consumption, premium, and dedicated. Learn pricing, RAM limits, cold start behavior, VNet integration, and always-on considerations for each plan.

Explore durable functions in Azure that manage state and retries, enabling function chaining with call activity async and a durable orchestration context.

Install Azure Functions Core Tools to run functions locally, then run http-triggered functions: process order storage and process order cosmos, and test with Postman, reviewing Cosmos DB and storage settings.

Deploy and run Azure functions by creating a function app in the consumption hosting plan, configuring dotnet 8 isolated worker model, storage, and deploying via VS Code and Postman tests.

Describe current architecture of the Reddit website, including two VMs, the App service, AKS, and the ACR container registry, plus a function app for order processing, with two functions.

Learn how to pick the right Azure compute type—Azure Functions, App Service, AKS with ACR, or Virtual Machines—using a practical flowchart-based decision process.

Discover additional Azure compute options beyond virtual machines, App Service, AKS, and Azure Functions. Explore Logic Apps, Azure Container Instance, and App Service container for single-container deployments.

Explore networking in Azure as the foundation of cloud security, covering Vnets, subnets, load balancer, and application gateway, and the role of firewalls in protecting virtual machines and web servers.

Azure virtual networks (vnets) host resources like virtual machines, apps, and databases in a region-scoped network. By default, resources within a vnet can communicate; peering, subnets, and NSGs govern access.

Understand CIDR notation, the classless inter-domain routing method for representing an IP range as an address plus a 0–32 bit count, such as /24 (256 addresses) and /16 (65,536 addresses).

Explore how subnets segment a virtual network and allocate a subset of the VNet IP range to group resources; learn default cross-subnet communication and address space considerations.

Open the portal to see two virtual machines sharing the same VNet and default subnet. Note how the address space, default subnet IP ranges, and network interfaces enable communication.

Create and configure a virtual network in a new resource group, define two subnets, adjust IP blocks, and verify deployment.

Create two virtual machines in a single VNet with front and back subnets and test private IP connectivity. Then add a second VNet to show isolation and peering options.

Attach an NSG to subnets and VM interfaces, then define security rules using five-tuples (source, source port, destination, destination port, protocol) prioritized by number to gatekeep access.

Learn how to configure the catalog VM's network security group (NSG), attach it to a network interface, and manage inbound rules including RDP and 8080 access.

Learn how NSG rules govern private traffic between VNet resources, restrict SSH to your IP, and expose the weather API on port 8080 via private IP.

Move the weather api to a dedicated subnet in a VNet, configure subnets and NSGs, and ensure cross-subnet communication while preserving SSH access via Azure cloud service tags.

Learn how network peering securely connects two VNets, enabling cross-region communication while keeping sensitive resources isolated behind NSGs, with a price of $0.01 per GB.

Move the weather api to a new VNet by reusing the weather disk, creating a nonoverlapping IPv4 space, and launching a new VM, then test cross-VNet access requiring VNet peering.

Configure two vnet peerings for cross-virtual network access, then enforce NSG rules: deny port 8080 traffic and allow TCP from the catalog VM’s private IP to the weather API.

Explore Azure network topology with Network Watcher, visualize and troubleshoot networking, using connection troubleshoot for VM-to-VM links and the topology viewer to inspect VNets, subnets, NSGs, and network interfaces.

Reviews the Reddit web app's current architecture, moving from two side-by-side virtual machines to each in its own vnet with an nsg, improving robustness and security.

Learn to secure virtual machine access and minimize exposure of public IPs by implementing just-in-time git access, VPN, jump box, and bastion across Azure resources.

Use Azure Bastion to securely connect to a VM through a web-based viewer, without open RDP ports, and learn deployment, costs, and portal requirements.

Enable service endpoint on the subnet to route traffic from your VNet to managed services without leaving Azure backbone, keeping public IPs while blocking internet access.

Learn how Privatelink extends managed services into the VNet, keeping traffic private, blocking internet access, and enabling on-prem connections to resources like Azure SQL and App Service via private DNS.

Compare service endpoints and Privatelink for Azure, highlighting security with private IP versus public IP, cost and setup differences, and growing service support for Privatelink.

Discover how VNet integration lets App Service access resources inside a VNet without internet exposure, and compare it with service endpoint and Privatelink.

Learn how app service access restrictions gate inbound traffic by ip addresses, vnets, and service tags, enabling exposure behind a load balancer or gateway while the default rule becomes deny.

Explore app service environment, a dedicated hardware, deployed directly into a virtual network with subnets and NSGs, offering isolation, elevated security, and scalable app service across VNets.

Explore how Azure load balancer distributes traffic at layer four and checks VM health. Compare basic and standard types, including redundancy and SLA, with front-end IP and back-end pools.

Explore how the application gateway acts as a layer seven web traffic load balancer, routing by URL path and supporting App Services, VMs, AKS, and the WAF.

Configure an Azure application gateway and estimate its cost with the pricing calculator. Deploy a standard v2 gateway in a new VNet and set up backend pools and routing rules.

Configure the application gateway to reach the inventory app service, fix backend health by overriding the host name for https, and use a service endpoint to restrict access.

Connect the catalog VM to the application gateway by configuring vnet peering, updating the gateway backend pool with the catalog VM private IP on port 8080, and enforcing gateway-only traffic.

Discover connecting application gateway to AKS with AGIC, but AKS has its own gateway, AGIC is in preview and buggy, so use third-party gateway solutions for AKS routing and protection.

Learn how to protect function apps with an application gateway by configuring back-end pools and access restrictions, using the same setup as app services.

Examine the current Reddit architecture: the app gateway connects to the app service via a service endpoint and peers with the catalog VNet, while an NSG blocks direct catalog access.

Explore affinity in the application gateway, which keeps users on the same instance and hurts load balancing, so design stateless apps to avoid it.

Embrace stateless architecture to enable scalability and redundancy by storing user data in a shared data store, using multiple servers behind a load balancer to handle requests.

Shows how the application gateway routes to the app service and how cookies rely on the app service domain, risking drops when domains mismatch; fix: set a custom domain.

Design a secure hub-and-spoke cloud network with a central VNet housing the app gateway and separate VNets for each application layer, with NSG-secured peering.

Learn about data in Azure through fully managed cloud services like relational databases, NoSQL databases, and object stores, compare pricing models, and understand why managed services avoid patching and maintenance.

Explore major database features including security with network isolation and encryption, backup type and retention, and availability through SLA replication and Docker, with notes on Azure storage.

Compare database on a virtual machine with Azure managed databases, highlighting flexibility and control of virtual machines, plus the responsibilities for SLA, updates, security, and backups, and introduce Azure SQL.

Explore Azure SQL flavors: database, elastic pool, and managed instance, covering security, backups, availability, and pricing models, with emphasis on on-prem compatibility and cloud features.

Explore Azure SQL pricing across managed instance and Azure SQL database, detailing flavors, service tiers, and vcore or dtu models. Understand practical examples, reservations, and price ranges for different configurations.

Identify the right Azure SQL flavor by answering key questions: migrate on prem SQL—choose managed instance; need multiple low utilization databases—elastic pool; otherwise choose Azure SQL database.

Create an Azure SQL database and its server, enable SQL authentication for development, enable geo-redundant backups, and connect via the SQL server extension in VSCode with firewall access.

Connect the catalog app to Azure SQL by configuring startup and appsettings, run dotnet ef migrations to create the books table, and deploy through the application gateway.

Secure the database connection by using a private endpoint and private DNS zone in the VNet, removing the public firewall rule to ensure access via private IP.

Connect the inventory app to Azure SQL, via VS Code deployment and configuring app service connection strings, with VNet integration and a private endpoint to share catalog and inventory data.

Explore Cosmos DB, a fully managed NoSQL service with global distribution, multiple APIs, and partitioned containers that enable high availability, automatic management, regional replication, and robust security.

Compare sql and nosql databases, noting relational tables and acid transactions versus schemaless json storage with eventual consistency and scalable performance.

Explore Cosmos DB consistency levels from strong to eventual, including bounded staleness, session, and consistent prefix, and learn how to balance high availability, low latency, and data accuracy.

Discover Cosmos DB pricing using request units per second, where reading a 1 kilobyte item by id costs one RU, with provisioned, autoscale, and serverless options across regions.

Create an Azure Cosmos DB account using the SQL API for NoSQL data, provision throughput, configure networking and backups, then build a database, container, and query items with SQL.

Configure and deploy an order function to store orders in Cosmos DB, wiring the connection string, testing locally with Postman, then deploying to Azure and validating updates.

Azure MySQL is a managed MySQL service on Azure, with security and on-prem compatibility, featuring IP firewall rules, private endpoints, Azure Active Directory authentication, TLS, tiered backups, and geo-redundant storage.

Explore Azure MySQL pricing by tier and compute power, covering basic, general purpose, and memory optimized options, reservations, and example costs.

Create an Azure MySQL flexible server in a new resource group for development, with burstable tier, 20 GB storage, seven-day backups, and locally redundant storage.

Explore Azure PostgreSQL, a managed PostgreSQL on Azure with hyperscale deployment and on-prem compatibility, built-in security, backups, and 99.99% availability using Azure AD, TLS, and PostgreSQL tools.

Explore Azure storage, a massively scalable object store with blobs as the primary storage and six redundancy options, plus hot, cool, and archive tiers.

Explore how Azure blob storage pricing varies by redundancy option, access tier (hot, cool, archive), and capacity. See practical examples of 1 TB costs and per-100k operation fees.

Create a storage account in a new resource group with geo-redundant storage and TLS 1.2. Configure anonymous access and a store images container, then upload and view a file.

Explore three authentication methods for private blobs—Azure AD identity, access keys, and SAS tokens. Learn key rotation, read-only SAS access, and how to use connection strings and URLs with SAS.

Monitor storage account capacity and usage by service type via the capacity insights page. Manage networking, private endpoints, and read access from the secondary region with RA/GRS and failover.

Configure a storage account with public container access, set up a CDN profile and endpoint, and use lifecycle management and JSON code view to manage tier moves.

Delete the old resource group, then create a new reddit app storage account in west europe with the standard tier and a private container named new orders for app orders.

Sign in to Azure to manage storage accounts with the Azure Storage Explorer desktop app, view containers, and upload, download, and delete blobs.

Explore Azure Redis, a managed in-memory distributed cache compatible with OSS Redis and Redis Enterprise, with security features and tier options from basic to enterprise flash.

Azure Radius pricing varies by tier and memory, with basic 250 MB at $16/month and premium 26,624 MB at $1,619/month, with three-year reservations offering 55% off the list price.

Connect the catalog to Azure Cache for Redis to store shopping cart items in memory, configure the connection string, enable SSL, and deploy to the virtual machine.

Connect the shopping cart to Redis and readings to fetch book details and place orders through the order function, storing results in Cosmos DB.

Analyze the current Azure-based architecture with Azure SQL, Redis, and Cosmos DB across catalog, inventory, cart, and orders, and plan for security, monitoring, and regional redundancy.

Apply the decision flow to choose the right Azure data store based on data type. Relational and structured data map to Azure SQL, MySQL, or PostgreSQL; NoSQL with Cosmos DB; graph data to Cosmos DB with Gremlin API; blob data to Azure Blob Storage.

Explore Azure messaging and how to select the right solution among Storage queue, Service Bus, Event Grid, and Event Hub, for handling load, throughput, and latency in microservices.

Discover Azure storage queue, the simplest queue in a storage account for creating, sending, and receiving messages, with storage account pricing and availability and up to 20k messages per second.

Learn how to create and configure an Azure storage queue within a new resource group, send and pull messages using JSON, and run a simple queue demo in VSCode.

Publish events to subscribers with Azure Event Grid, enabling event-based architectures without queues or ordering guarantees, with simple pricing, and terms like event, publisher, event source, topic, subscription, and handler.

Event grid pricing is based solely on operations, with the first 100,000 free per month and no tiles, instance size, or region factors; 1 million operations cost $0.54.

Connects the storage account to the orders function via an Event Grid system topic triggered by blob creation, reads the new order, and saves it to Cosmos DB.

Connect the shopping cart to the storage account by uploading the order blob and replacing the function with storage-based processing, then deploy the v2 image and verify end-to-end flow.

Secure the orders function by restricting access to the function app so only Azure Event Grid can access it, using access restrictions and the Azure Event Grid service tag.

Discover Azure Service Bus, a durable, fully managed message queuing service that supports queues and topic pub-sub patterns, with AMQP and JMS 2.0 API compatibility in the premium tier.

Service bus pricing depends on tier and operations. Standard tier with 10 million operations costs under $10 per month, while premium uses message units, reaching about $1,354 monthly.

Create an Azure service bus, a resource group, and a queue. Deploy a VSCode project, send and inspect messages with Service Bus Explorer, and compare pick and receive modes.

Discover Event Hubs, a managed Kafka-based big data streaming platform that handles millions of events per second, with producers, partitions, and consumer groups, TEU throughput, and SLA.

Explore event hubs pricing by tier, examining ingress and throughput units. See how capacity units drive costs, from about $11 to $19,999 per month.

Explore how to deploy and configure Azure Event Hubs, create a namespace and an event hub, set up a simple consumer in code, and stream test events with Data Explorer.

Choose the right Azure messaging service by comparing storage queue, service bus, event grid, and event hubs, considering use cases, features like duplicate detection and dead-letter queues, and message size.

Explore the current architecture of the Reddit web app, featuring an Event Grid topic that connects the storage account and the function app, enabling a secure, asynchronous trigger.