Learn why cloud matters, the limits of on-premises systems, and how Azure covers them. Create a free Azure subscription, explore the portal, and set budget alerts to prevent charges.

Cloud computing means internet-based computing where you rent on-demand resources like virtual machines, software platforms, databases, and storage from a provider. Access these resources via the internet without on-premises maintenance.

Explore azure free options by using the Microsoft Learn sandbox to activate a temporary two-hour environment for hands-on learning.

Learn how students can create an Azure free subscription without a credit card by using a valid student email, verifying with a school email code, and starting free services.

Explore the benefits of cloud computing, including high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, elasticity, and agility, and compare capital versus operational expenditure while understanding SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and consumption-based pricing models.

Explore how moving to the cloud enables high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery through regional replication, load balancing, and rapid failover to minimize downtime.

Explore how cloud scalability, elasticity, and agility optimize resource use and costs by auto adjusting capacity, with vertical and horizontal scaling and a load balancer.

Discover the economic benefits of cloud computing, from trading capital expense for variable costs to rapid scale, global reach, reduced infrastructure management, and economies of scale.

Understand the shared responsibility model, where cloud provider and user split duties differently across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, including data, identities, and configurations.

Understand deployment models: public cloud offers no maintenance, nearly unlimited scalability, and high reliability; private cloud emphasizes security and compliance, and hybrid cloud blends both for sensitive data.

Explore how cloud pricing differs from on premises by examining storage usage, per-second VM billing, data transfer between regions, read/write operations, and models such as free tier and serverless.

Understand cloud fundamentals, including high availability, elasticity and scalability, rapid agility, global deployment for disaster recovery, and the economics of capex vs opex across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Explore Azure's fundamental architectural components, including regions, availability zones, and data centers, and learn to organize resources with resource groups, deploy via ARM templates, and manage subscriptions and management groups.

Explore Azure data centers and regions, learn how region pairs enable redundancy and global availability through automatic replication while considering compliance, proximity, service availability, and regional pricing.

Explore how availability zones provide isolated data center groups within regions, with independent power, cooling, and networking, enabling fast data replication and encrypted traffic across high-speed fiber links.

Understand resource groups as logical containers that group resources across regions and store metadata for centralized access control. Assign each resource to a single group.

Azure resource manager authenticates and creates resources via portal, PowerShell, CLI, or SDK using Azure Active Directory OAuth 2.0, and ARM templates enable deploying identical resources with JSON and dependencies.

Explore how Azure subscriptions, linked to your account, govern billing and resource access. Manage multiple subscriptions, set budgets and policies, and tailor access for development and production environments.

Organize hundreds of subscriptions with management groups in a hierarchical structure, applying inherited policies and region constraints across all nested subscriptions and resources.

Learn how Azure sovereign regions provide dedicated, separate data centers and portals for US government and China markets, with strict regulatory controls and limited access.

Explore compute concepts in cloud, deploy and scale virtual machines, balance load, and compare containers, app service, Kubernetes, container registry, and Windows Virtual Desktop.

Quickly create a virtual machine in the Azure portal, choosing subscription, resource group, region, OS, size, and credentials, then connect and manage disks and networking.

Deploy a simple webpage on a Windows VM by installing Internet Information Services (IIS), configuring an inbound NSG rule, and accessing the site via the public IP.

Drive high availability and improved network performance by distributing traffic across multiple virtual machines with a load balancer, using a frontend IP, backend pools, health checks, and inbound rules.

Configure virtual machines across Azure availability zones to achieve high availability for mission-critical apps and data. Learn to select zones, create virtual machines in multiple zones, and keep data synchronized.

Learn how virtual machine availability sets provide high availability and business continuity by distributing VMs across fault domains and update domains; Microsoft handles the distribution.

Create a virtual machine within an availability set and distribute it across fault and update domains for infrastructure resilience. Configure the resource group and region, then deploy two virtual machines.

Learn how Azure virtual machine scale sets automatically scale a group of load-balanced VMs by monitoring thresholds, using a shared base configuration, and applying schedules for high availability.

Explore Azure App Service, a fast platform as a service to host and manage web apps, APIs, containers, and mobile backends with automatic scaling and deployment from GitHub.

Learn to create a web app on Azure App Service by selecting a subscription and resource group, naming the app, choosing runtime and region, and selecting an app service plan.

Learn how containers package an application and its dependencies into an isolated, portable unit to run consistently across environments, with images and Docker-based container registries.

Launch a container instance in the Azure portal using a quickstart hello world image in East US, enable a public endpoint, and test access via the DNS name.

Define serverless technology and explore its advantages, then compare Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps as the two offerings to implement serverless solutions.

Explore how serverless computing eliminates infrastructure management by charging only for actual usage, enabling automatic scaling and event-driven execution with functions and logic apps.

Learn to create and test an Azure Functions app, choose a runtime, configure a simple trigger, run code, and manage resources to control costs.

Create automated workflows with Azure Logic Apps to monitor Twitter sentiment, trigger actions, and route negative feedback to customer service using drag-and-drop connectors and conditional logic.

Create a simple logic app in Azure, connect to a storage account, and use a template to delete blobs older than a set date.

Explore connecting on-premises infrastructure to the cloud with virtual networks, subnets, VPN gateway, and ExpressRoute, and compare load balancer, application gateway, CDN, DNS, and public and private endpoints.

Learn how virtual networks create isolated cloud environments, assign IP address ranges with CIDR, and partition resources into public and private subnets, with secure peering between virtual networks.

Create a virtual network and a virtual machine within the same region, configure subnets and address space, and manage resources in a resource group while noting regional constraints.

Compare vpn gateway and vnet peering for secure, encrypted connectivity between on-premises networks and Azure virtual networks, featuring site-to-site, point-to-site, and network-to-network options, with low latency and high bandwidth advantages.

Application gateway provides advanced load balancing with rules based on request data, supports auto scaling, end-to-end encryption, redundancy, and multi-site hosting for up to 100 websites.

ExpressRoute offers a private, dedicated link from on premises to a virtual network, delivering high reliability, faster speed, and lower latency for large-scale, mission-critical workloads, unlike VPN Gateway.

Learn how the DNS domain name system maps websites to IP addresses and how browsers resolve names via DNS servers, with Azure DNS edge enabling fast, global name resolution.

Learn how service endpoints enable secure, direct connectivity from a virtual network to a storage account using private IPs, avoiding public internet and exposing only the intended private path.

Explore private endpoints and service endpoints for cross-network access without public IPs, using private link service and traffic on the Microsoft backbone. Note data protection and cost considerations.

Learn about Azure storage services—table, queue, file, and blob—and how durability, redundancy, and access tiers secure data. Explore tools like storage explorer, import/export, and file sync for migration.

Explore how data redundancy protects against hardware failures and disasters while weighing cost and availability. Compare LRS, ZRS, GRS, and RA-GRS options.

Use hot, cool, and archive access tiers to balance frequency and cost and latency. Hot offers low latency for frequent access, cool handles infrequent access, archive stores rarely accessed data.

Configure storage account settings and blob access tiers in Azure, including default options, hot, cool, archive, and rehydration choices; change tiers per file, not in bulk.

Queue storage buffers messages to decouple producers and consumers, enabling asynchronous backlog processing. Create and manage queues in the portal, add messages, and let applications fetch them for processing.

Explore Azure disk storage for virtual machines, including creating and attaching operating system and data disks, choosing managed versus unmanaged disks, and understanding standard, premium, and ultra disk types.

Install storage explorer to manage your storage accounts from a single place in the azure portal, log in to view subscriptions and data lake, including Cosmos TV.

Explore the Azure import and export service for moving data between on-premises and cloud storage, including Data Box options and the rule: import to the cloud, export from blob storage.

Discover Azure file sync to keep cloud shares and on-premises servers in sync with storage sync service, sync group, and endpoints, including local caching for hybrid environment.

Demonstrates implementing Azure file sync with a storage account and two Windows Server VMs, registering them with a storage sync service, and syncing a file share across endpoints.

Download the easy copy tool, use the CLI to list, upload, and copy files to storage containers, with token or Active Directory authentication.

Azure Migrate serves as a hub to discover and assess on-premises infrastructure and migrate databases, web apps, virtual machines, and data to the Azure cloud using third-party tools.

Explore the Microsoft azure data box, a secure hardware appliance designed to copy very large data sets (over 40 terabytes) using import or export options, via the portal.

Explore Azure storage services, including blob, table, queue, and file, covering blob types, redundancy options, access tiers, and disk storage, with migration tools like Storage Explorer and Data Box.

Explore how Azure identity services secure access through authentication and authorization, covering Azure Active Directory, B2B, RBAC, SSO, MFA, passwordless, zero trust, and defense in depth.

Differentiate authentication from authorization and explore access control methods like multi-factor authentication, single sign channel, role-based access, and credentials like private and public keys and digitally signed XML.

Azure Active Directory is the identity and access management service that authenticates users and apps for sign-in to Office 365 and other resources, using tenants to isolate organizations.

Learn how to invite external users to Azure Active Directory as guest identities for B2B collaboration, granting access to resources.

Learn how to upgrade Azure Active Directory from free to premium P1 or P2 with a 30-day free trial, and compare features like conditional access, identity protection, and dynamic groups.

Azure Active Directory roles govern permissions, assign the user administrator role to individuals or groups to create or manage users, and understand group eligibility and permanent settings.

Differentiate Azure AD administrator roles from RBAC roles by understanding their scope: AD roles manage Active Directory resources, while RBAC roles control access to other services.

Enable single sign on to access multiple applications with one Active Directory identity, trusted by Azure Active Directory, simplifying credential management and revoking access when users depart.

Explore how conditional access in Azure Active Directory evaluates identity signals: user type, location, and device, to decide whether to allow, deny, or require multifactor authentication, based on B1/B2 licenses.

Master RBAC by assigning role based access through security principles, defining reader, contributor, owner, or custom and resource specific roles, and scoping access from management groups to resources.

Demonstrates role-based access control by granting a user permissions through role assignments at the resource group scope, with Azure Active Directory managing access.

Apply zero trust by verifying explicitly and enforcing least privilege across devices, networks, and users. Assume breach with risk-based policies, device health checks, and end-to-end encryption to protect cloud resources.

Protect data by applying multiple layers of security across physical, identity and access, network, compute, and applications, ensuring data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Explore how Azure identity service handles authentication and authorization with Azure Active Directory, manage tenants and directories, support external users, single sign-on, directory roles, and password authentication options.

Explore factors influencing cloud costs, use the pricing and total cost of ownership calculators, and apply cost management reports and alerts to reduce monthly billing.

Explore how subscription types, meters, resource types, and region impact Azure costs, and learn to manage billing by usage, storage type, and bandwidth considerations.

Navigate the pricing calculator to estimate hourly and monthly costs for Azure resources, including virtual machines, storage, SQL databases, operating system choices, redundancy, bandwidth, and three-year reserved discounts.

Learn to cut cloud costs by reserving instances for stable workloads, leveraging hybrid licensing, using spot pricing, and following advisor recommendations, while deleting unused resources and choosing cost-efficient regions.

Use the total cost of ownership calculator to compare on-premises capex with edge and Azure opex, define your workload, and view five-year savings in a granular report.

Explore factors that drive cloud costs, including resource types, usage meters, and location-based pricing, and learn to forecast costs with the pricing calculator and cost management tools.