AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Define cloud computing as a standardized IT capability delivered over the internet with pay-as-you-go, self-service access, featuring provider and consumer roles and ITIL practices like service requests, incidents, and changes.

Explains the five essential cloud qualities—on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and pay-as-you-go—needed to become a public cloud provider.

Explore cloud delivery models—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—and compare control versus cost, with on-premises and cloud coexistence via private connections and examples like Office 365.

Learn to distinguish private, community, public, and hybrid cloud models and apply the cloud qualities: on demand self-service, rapid elasticity, resource pooling, pay as you go, broad network access.

Cloud computing powers blogs, marketing websites, non-critical apps, and testing, and supports big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; today it underpins applications, with legacy hardware not available in cloud.

Compare cloud providers by their regulations, standards, compliance, and security certifications to ensure secure handling of sensitive data, PCI standards for payments, and government and regional data regulations.

Assess how cloud providers deliver security, compliance, and standards across global data centers, enabling trust for sensitive data in multitenant environments. Evaluate regulations, PCI standards, and certifications for provider selection.

Capex versus opex models define data center spending: upfront capital investment vs cloud's ongoing operating costs, with scalable billing and planning supported by a skilled cloud architect.

Learn the Azure fundamentals, core services and high-level concepts, including resources, resource groups, management groups, tags, and the basics of accounts and subscriptions.

Azure delivers on-demand IT services via internet technologies with reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure, and offers IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS for government organizations, healthcare, educational institutions, and financial institutions worldwide.

Trace the history of Windows Azure from 2008 to 2010 availability, and the 2014 renaming to Microsoft Azure, highlighting open source support and features like single sign-on and multifactor authentication.

Explore the vast list of Azure services and solutions, distinguishing between services and solutions, with focus on compute, databases, containers, security, networking, and storage, including examples like SAP on Azure.

Azure accounts act as global, unique access to services and subscriptions, with sign-up via a valid email (Gmail, Yahoo, corporate, or Microsoft), GitHub integration, or phone verification.

Understand how subscriptions link to accounts to access Azure services, with types like free, pay-as-you-go, enterprise agreement, and student plans, and how organizations structure development and production environments.

Explore the Azure free tier, including 12 months of free services and a $200 credit. Access always free offerings like Cosmos DB and App Service for hands-on practice.

Discover how to create a free Azure account, sign up by email or phone, verify with a code, and complete card verification with a small refundable charge.

Discover how to access and manage Azure services using a range of management tools, including the Azure portal and a browser-based command line interface on multiple platforms.

Explore the Azure portal, the unified graphical user interface to manage all services across Windows, Linux and Mac, from simple web apps to complex analytics and pipelines.

Log into the Azure portal, view the home page and dashboard, and customize resources with pinning. Switch directories, access help, check service issues, and review billing and documentation.

Learn to install and configure Azure PowerShell modules, connect to your account, and create an Azure resource group (Tutorial Resource Group) using sample commands.

Explore the Azure cross-platform CLI that unifies management of Azure services across Windows, Linux, and Mac, with Linux-friendly commands and automation scripts.

Install and use the Azure CLI across Windows, Linux, and Mac, perform login and basic commands, and create a resource group with az group create using documented syntax.

Explore Azure Cloud Shell, a browser-based, authenticated shell in the Azure portal for managing resources with Windows PowerShell or Linux Bash, without local dependencies.

Explore cloud shell, a browser-based environment that runs bash across platforms. Learn to log in, provision a storage account and resource group, and manage container instances from the portal.

Learn Azure resource terminology by identifying any manageable item in the portal as a resource, with examples like virtual machines, virtual networks, storage accounts, and load balancers.

Create and manage resource groups, assign names and locations, add resources, use tags for metadata, and safely move resources between groups, mindful that deleting a group removes its resources.

Organize enterprise environments with management groups that cluster subscriptions and resource groups, enforce policies by inheritance from the root, and support up to 10,000 groups across six depth levels.

Learn how to apply Azure tags to subscriptions, resource groups, and resources. Use policies to enforce tags, ensuring case-sensitive values and enabling metadata-based organization and reporting.

Learn how azure tags assign a name and value to resources, enabling functional decisions, classification by department and region, and production environment management across resources, resource groups, and subscriptions.

Apply resource locks to prevent accidental deletions or modifications of Azure resources. Learn about two types, cannot delete and read-only, and their inheritance from management groups or subscriptions.

Apply Azure resource locks to prevent accidental modifications or deletions. Use read-only or do-not-delete locks, where read-only blocks changes and do-not-delete blocks deletions, inheriting from parent to child.

Azure policies enable real-time cloud compliance at scale by defining, assigning, and managing rules to ensure resources like virtual machines and databases meet backup and replication requirements.

Discover how to view, create, and assign policies in an azure subscription, enforce compliance, and prevent unwanted resources while testing deployments and validating policy effects.

Azure blueprints define a repeatable set of Azure resources to enforce organization standards and compliance, enabling rapid, governed deployment of multi-application environments.

Explore Azure fundamentals by mapping regions, availability zones, special regions, and geographies to data boundaries, and learn how content delivery networks or Pioppi locations deliver content with low latency.

Understand how Azure regions, availability zones, and geographies define the global footprint, with sixty regions housing one or more data centers to bring services closer to users and boost business.

Explore how availability zones create resilience within a region by housing physically separated data centers with independent power, cooling, and networking, connected by fast private fiber.

Explore paired regions within a geography, separated by at least 300 miles with private fiber connections, enabling cross-region replication to protect applications and data from disasters.

Explore how geographies use two or more regions to preserve data residency and compliance boundaries, beyond availability, and learn why primary and secondary locations affect data replication and regulatory compliance.

Explore how a content delivery network uses global point-of-presence locations and edge servers to deliver high-speed movie content, reducing latency by routing users to nearby locations.

Explore Azure core services across compute, storage, networking, databases, and monitoring, and learn authentication, authorization, high availability, disaster recovery, and Azure solutions for IoT, artificial intelligence, and big data.

Explore Azure compute options from IaaS with virtual machines to containers and serverless functions, guiding architects to choose the right compute option for each scenario.

Explore Azure compute and introduction to virtual machines, software representations of physical servers in the cloud, with pay-as-you-go deployment, full OS, networking, and storage control.

Explore Azure virtual machine types across six families—general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, GPU-optimized, and high-performance compute—to match application requirements.

Explore Azure virtual machine pricing options, including pay-as-you-go, reserved, spot, and hybrid pricing, with per-second billing and licensing benefits.

demonstrate creating a Windows VM in Azure by using the portal, selecting subscription, resource group, region and availability zone, choosing image and size, and configuring networking and storage before deployment.

Learn to connect to a Windows VM via remote desktop using a public IP or DNS and credentials, then configure remote access, domain joining, or install software.

Create a Linux virtual machine by selecting subscription, resource group, region, and image; choose authentication, configure public IP and NIC, then deploy. Validate the settings.

Connect to a Linux VM via SSH, using a username, password, and IP or DNS name on port 22; configure Red Hat Linux 8.2 as a web or application server.

Explore containers as a private emulated environment that runs multiple applications with Docker, eliminating OS licenses and heavy server management to enable fast, cost-effective deployment.

Explore Azure App Service, a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web applications. Bring your own code or container; it supports any programming language.

Explore azure compute basics by outlining virtual machines, functions, and container capabilities as core options, while the module provides contextual knowledge of computer services.

Explore how Azure virtual network provides logical isolation for your subscription, creating subnets and routing. Learn how peering, VPN connections, on-premises connectivity, and network security groups enable secure cross-network communication.

Create an Azure vNet in the portal by selecting subscription and resource group, naming the network, setting region and address space, then configure subnets, Bastion host, and firewall options.

Learn how subnets segment a virtual network to organize resources, with gateway subnets for networking services like VPN gateways, and manage IP capacity within the VNet.

Create the gateway subnet named 'Gateway subnet' in your VNet for networking services, and add general-purpose subnets with defined IP ranges; ensure capacity stays within the VNet.

Azure network security groups act as firewalls to filter inbound and outbound traffic for virtual machines and subnets, using up to 50 allow or deny rules prioritized by number.

Configure and manage a network security group to control inbound and outbound traffic for a virtual machine by adjusting priority, source, destination, port, and protocol.

Use application security groups to reuse network security policies, avoid manual IP maintenance, and control communication across web, application, and database tiers with group tags.

Enable private vnet peering to route traffic between virtual networks across regions or within the same region, without the public internet, via the Microsoft backbone and non overlapping IPs.

Explore high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery; learn how load balancing across multiple servers beats failover clustering in Azure and Google cloud deployments.

Explore how fault domains and availability sets distribute virtual machines across independent racks to withstand hardware failures, with update domains and a load balancer to ensure high availability in Azure.

Compare Azure load balancer and application gateway to ensure high availability, showing layer 4 TCP/UDP balancing with five-tuple info and SSL offload on layer 7 for internet-facing publishing.

Explore virtual networks, subnets, and security options like network security groups and application security groups; examine peering, VPN connections, availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and layer seven load balancers.

Understand storage fundamentals across block, file, blob, and object storage in Azure, and how data classification into structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data informs capacity, performance, and fault tolerance.

Explore Azure Storage, a Microsoft managed cloud service, delivering highly available, secure, durable, scalable storage. Discover blob, disk, file, and table storage, plus relational and big data databases.

Explore the Azure storage big picture: choose storage account types (general-purpose v2/v1, blob, file, table, queues), replication options, standard vs premium, and hot, cool, or archival data.

Explore Azure storage accounts, manage access for blob, file, queue, and table data, secure with SSL, monitor performance, and compare general-purpose v2, premium block, and file storage types.

Create a unique Azure storage account name, 3 to 24 characters of lowercase letters and numbers, and choose between standard and premium tiers based on environment and budget.

Learn how Azure storage accounts use hot and archival access tiers to balance cost and performance based on data access patterns, with archival for longer retention.

Explore redundancy strategies in Azure by replicating data in the primary region across availability zones for durability, and decide whether to asynchronously replicate to a secondary region with read access.

Create an Azure storage account in the portal, comparing standard and premium performance and general-purpose storage types, and explore six replication options, networking, and security settings.

Explore Azure blob storage, Microsoft’s object storage solution for unstructured data, with scalable, pay-as-you-use pricing, hot/cool/archival tiers, and REST API access via storage accounts and containers.

Learn to create blob storage containers, upload files, and set access levels (private, blob, and container) in the portal, then review storage account monitoring of egress, ingress, and data flow.

Learn how Azure disk storage provides block storage for virtual machines, including managed and unmanaged disks, standard and premium options, with pay-for-provisioning and workload-based performance considerations.

Learn Azure file storage, a fully managed file share service in the cloud accessible via smb and cifs, enabling hybrid access from Windows, Linux, and on-premises data centers.

Explore Azure table storage as a cost-effective, schema-free key-value store optimized for user profiles and metadata, with unlimited tables in a storage account.

Explore Azure databases as a service, where Microsoft manages, scales, and guarantees high availability and global distribution, with options like MySQL, Cosmo's DB, and migration service.

Explore Azure SQL databases as a fully managed platform as a service that offloads maintenance, with pay-by-transactions or capacity, and deployment options like single database, serverless, and elastic pool.

Create and configure an Azure SQL database by provisioning a server and database, choosing deployment models (basic to premium, standard, serverless, elastic pool), and enabling backups and replication.

Learn how Azure Cosmos DB offers a fully managed, globally distributed database with single-digit millisecond latency and 99.9995% availability, with open source APIs like Cassandra, Gremlin, and Table API.

Leverage the Azure database migration service, a fully managed tool, to simplify and automate data migration, including schema and objects, from multiple sources to Azure with near zero downtime.

Discover how Azure Active Directory provides a fully managed, cloud-based identity and access management solution that authenticates users, enforces policies, enables single sign-on, and manages apps, devices, and B2B/B2C integrations.

Understand how authentication validates credentials to log into the portal. Authorization uses role-based access control to define actions you can perform, such as creating virtual machines, networking, storage, or databases.

Learn how Azure AD uses users and groups to enforce rule-based access control, with permissions inherited by members, and options for manual, on-premises sync, or Graph API.

Enhance login security by enabling multifactor authentication, adding a one-time password from SMS, email, or an authenticator app after entering your credentials. Note that MFA requires a premium license.

Master Azure role-based access control to grant fine-grained access to Azure resources through role assignments, scope, and security principals.

Explore Azure monitoring and reporting to keep mission-critical apps informed about performance peaks and outages. Use activity log service, health advisor, and monitors to alert admins and guide capacity planning.

Explore how Azure Monitor and Application Insights collect telemetry from apps, on premises environments, operating systems, and Azure resources; analyze performance and logs, visualize dashboards, and enable rest api integrations.

Learn how the Azure activity log acts as a log repository, recording who did what with timestamps and 90-day retention, plus export to Azure Monitor, Azure Storage, or Event Hub.

Navigate the Azure activity log in the portal, filter by subscription and timespan, and review JSON logs to identify deployments, as a Red Hat Linux VM, and who initiated actions.

Discover how Azure Service Health monitors your app’s critical services, delivers personalized alerts by region, and guides maintenance and security advisories to reduce outages.

Learn how to use azure service health to monitor the status, maintenance, and security advisories for your subscriptions, filter by regions and services, and access incident details and mitigation steps.

Azure Advisor analyzes your account to boost high availability, security, performance, and cost optimization, offering tailored recommendations for backups, load balancing, and right-sized resources.

Azure Advisor acts as a customized cloud consultant, auditing your account and delivering tailored recommendations. It covers cost optimization, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance improvements.

Discover Azure solutions for application development, e-commerce, game development, IoT, and AI, with migration tools and guidance to securely migrate virtual machines, databases, and other workloads.

Explore how Azure IoT connects internet-enabled devices to cloud-based systems for data analysis and management, with IoT central as a fully managed saas and IoT hub for bidirectional communication.

Explore big data and analytics solutions that store and analyze internet-derived data, using Azure SQL Data Warehouse for on-demand, scalable analytics with a managed open-source analytics service supporting Apache Spark.

Leverage Azure AI to unlock insights with knowledge mining, build models with machine learning, and deploy intelligent applications across cloud, on-premises, and edge devices.

Adopt the shared responsibility model for Azure security, using firewalls as a service, network and application security groups, and the security center for a security picture and advanced threat protection.

Explore defense in depth with a layered security approach and the shared security responsibility model in Azure, including firewall as a service and security groups.

Security in the cloud is a shared model between providers and customers, with Microsoft securing physical data centers while customers protect data, identities, and configurations across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Explore how the Azure firewall acts as a stateful, managed service that monitors inbound and outbound traffic, enforces rules by source IP ranges and protocols, and logs with Azure Monitor.

Azure DDoS protection defends resources from distributed denial of service attacks by monitoring traffic and automatically mitigating threats. Basic is free with limited coverage; standard on-demand offers broader protection.

Azure security center continuously monitors hybrid environments, assessing security posture across on-premises and cloud resources, identifying vulnerabilities and blocking malware with adaptive application controls and compliance insights.

Azure Key Vault provides a centralized, fully managed solution for secret management, storing passwords, connection strings, certificates, and API keys, with role-based access control and hardware security modules support.

Explore cloud-based information protection that labels and protects documents and emails with automatic, manual, or mixed labeling, and track flows, who accessed it, when, and source IP to prevent leakage.

Assess how Azure upholds privacy and data protection standards in cloud hosting, including encryption at rest and trusted access, through global compliance offerings and certification frameworks.

Learn how the Microsoft privacy statement explains what personal data Microsoft collects across products, how it is processed and shared with partners, and how you can access and control it.

Learn how cloud migration affects cost planning, uptime, and connectivity, and how subscriptions, service level agreement, pricing calculator, and total cost of ownership inform Azure solutions.

An account links to one or more subscriptions, enabling access to Azure services and billing. Choose subscription types: free, pay-as-you-go, enterprise, or student to support development, production, and geographic workloads.

Explore three Azure purchase options: enterprise agreement with annual negotiated spend discounts, web direct with monthly billing, and cloud solution providers that bill through partners.

Analyze factors that affect Azure costs by examining meter instances and usage records driving monthly bills. Location, power, real estate, labor, service type, and provider choices influence prices.

Use the pricing calculator to configure cloud products, estimate costs, and export or share price estimates; adjust location, OS, licenses, and usage to see monthly totals.

Use the total cost of ownership calculator to estimate cloud migration savings by defining workloads, adjusting assumptions, and comparing on-premises costs to Azure over five years.

Analyze subscription costs by service, tags, location, and resource type to identify spending hotspots. Apply cost optimization recommendations, set spending limits, and consider reservations to minimize expenses.

Learn how Azure service level agreements define uptime guarantees for virtual machines, networks, and storage, and how to calculate downtime and eligibility for service credits.

the composite sla is the combined uptime of a web app service and a database service with different slas; uptime depends on component slas and architecture.

Explore the Azure service life cycle, detailing how each service releases to public use through phases such as public and private previews, general availability, and ongoing service and feature updates.

Understand how public and private preview features in Azure invite customers to test services, collect feedback, and guide redevelopments, with private versus public previews and related terms and SLAs.

Explore the release cycle from development to general availability, including previews and public testing, and learn how to stay informed with Microsoft live updates and service level commitments.

Subscribe to Microsoft live updates and the RSS feed to get the latest Azure news, features, and service availability. Filter by category to view general availability.