A Beginner’s Guide to the AZ-900

Describe cloud computing concepts, the benefits of cloud services, and cloud service types to prepare for the AZ-900 exam, reinforced through a practice exam.

Understand cloud computing as a shared pool of configurable resources and on-demand services, enabling ubiquitous access and rapid provisioning across Azure.

Explore cloud service types, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, along with serverless, covering consumption-based pricing, ready-to-use frameworks, and per-user billing for storage, apps, and collaboration tools.

Explore the shared responsibility model across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS to distinguish Microsoft duties from customer duties. Identify who protects data, identities, access controls, and backups in each service type.

Explore private, public, and hybrid cloud models, detailing ownership, management overhead, costs, and deployment considerations to help choose the right cloud strategy for an organization.

Compare CapEx and OpEx models, explaining capital expenditure for on-premises infrastructure and depreciation versus OpEx for public cloud with consumption-based billing.

Discover the benefits of cloud services, including high availability, scalability, and elasticity across locations with PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS. Learn about security, governance, service level agreements, and cost predictability.

Compare vertical and horizontal scaling to understand capacity changes: vertical scaling increases a single instance’s CPU or RAM, while horizontal scaling adds more instances to a pool.

Review cloud computing concepts, examine the benefits of cloud services, and summarize cloud service types, while taking the chapter quiz to prep for the practice exam and the AZ-900.

Explore the core architecture components of Azure, along with compute, networking, storage, and identity access and security aspects. This AZ-900 chapter reinforces these concepts with a practice exam.

Explore core Azure components and ARM, including JSON, Bicep, and Terraform, and understand Enter ID tenants and SaaS versus consumption-based subscriptions.

Explore Azure regions as groups of multiple data centers that enable proximity, data residency, and scalable deployment. Learn how region pairing, failover, and sovereign regions support high availability and compliance.

Learn to design redundancy with Azure availability sets and availability zones by distributing VM instances across fault and update domains and across data centers in a region.

Explore Azure compute and networking services, including virtual machines, container instances, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Functions, and App Service, and learn scale sets and vertical or horizontal scaling.

Explore Azure networking fundamentals, including virtual networks (VNet), subnets, endpoints, and VNet peering. Learn to connect on-premises and other clouds with site-to-site VPN, VPN gateway, Expressroute, and DNS.

Explore how Azure uses management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups to enforce top-down policies, security boundaries, and unified billing across resources and regions.