AZ900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Full Course & Exam 2026

Switch from owning to renting cloud resources, pay as you go, and scale up or down with Azure to cut costs, avoid upfront capex, and leverage economies of scale.

Azure ensures continuous service through redundancy, data replication, backups, and failover, distributes traffic with load balancing, scales to meet demand, and defines uptime guarantees and service credits in the SLA.

Explore the meaning of scalability in cloud computing and how resources adjust to demand. Compare vertical and horizontal scaling, including scale up and scale out, with automatic and manual triggers.

Explore how reliability detects failures, enables automated recovery, and keeps operations running during outages. See how decentralized architecture and Azure failover prevent single points of failure.

Explore manageability in cloud environments like Microsoft Azure, where automated monitoring, centralized controls, and optimization detect thresholds, scale resources, and maintain system health.

Explore infrastructure as a service (IaaS), a flexible cloud model where Azure provides hardware and you manage the OS, applications, and data.

Explore platform as a service (PaaS) and how the cloud provider manages infrastructure, runtime, and dependencies. Deploy your code to Azure App Service, and enjoy automatic scaling.

Access a fully hosted software as a service, where the complete application runs in the cloud and the provider handles infrastructure while users log in via web or mobile apps.

Explore Azure regions to reduce latency by placing compute resources closer to users; regions are clusters of data centers delivering low latency, scale, and global reach.

Explore Azure region pair, a disaster recovery approach that automatically replicates data between paired regions in the same geography for failover, with two-way and one-way options and data residency considerations.

Explore Azure sovereign regions, a physically and logically isolated cloud designed for government and regulated sectors, staying data within national boundaries and offering restricted access with on-demand scalability.

Learn how Azure availability zones create resilient apps by distributing workloads across three physically separate data centers within a region, with independent power, cooling, networking, and fast fiber connections.

Azure data centers are physical facilities that store, process, and transmit data with high‑performance hardware, organized into regions and availability zones, and secured by defense‑in‑depth measures.

Explore how Azure resources act as building blocks and how resource groups organize them as logical containers, enforcing one resource per group and a flat structure.

Understand Azure subscription as a logical billing unit, management unit, and scale unit that defines security and access controls for organizing resources.

Explore how Azure management groups organize subscriptions into a scalable hierarchy, inheriting policies and access controls from the top, with up to 10,000 groups and six depth levels.

Discover Azure compute services and Azure virtual machine concepts, compare capex and opex, and learn VM components, use cases, and the creation workflow from region to network.

Explore how virtual machine scale sets provide high availability and elasticity by managing multiple VMs behind a load balancer with scaling policies and orchestration modes.

Discover how availability sets distribute virtual machines across fault and update domains to withstand hardware failures and maintenance, and compare them with virtual machine scale sets and availability zones.

Azure App Service is a platform as a service for hosting web apps, mobile backends, and APIs, enabling faster development with reduced setup, deployment, and maintenance overhead.

Explore Azure container services—Azure Container Instance (ACI), Azure Container App (ACA), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)—contrasting containers with VMs and embracing microservice orchestration.

Explore Azure functions, a serverless, event-driven compute that runs code on triggers like Blob storage uploads, scales automatically, and charges only for execution time.

Explore Azure Virtual Desktop, a cloud-based desktop and application virtualization service that centralizes data in secured Azure data centers, enabling access from any device or browser with zero logistics.

Discover azure storage accounts as the main cloud cupboard for files, images, videos, and backups, offering scalable iaas, near you data centers, strong encryption, access policies, and 11 nines durability.

Learn about Azure storage account services including blob storage for unstructured data, file storage for shared folders, table storage for key-value data, and queue storage for decoupled messaging.

Choose the right Azure storage engine: premium, standard, archive, or ultra disk—and balance HDD and SSD performance. Implement redundancy with LRS, ZRS, GRS, RA GRS, and GZRS for durability.

Azure Migrate helps organizations move on-premises servers to Azure by discovering inventory, assessing readiness, planning migration, and executing safe, cost-aware moves with downtime planning and test migrations.

Azure data box provides a physical device up to 80 terabytes to transfer large data sets to Azure securely, with end-to-end tracking and various import-export scenarios.

Explore az copy, azure storage explorer, and azure file sync to transfer and sync files between local systems, azure storage, and on-premises servers, including cross-subscription transfers and bi-directional syncing.

Learn Azure authentication methods, including single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and passwordless authentication, and compare security and convenience trade-offs to choose effective access protection.

Learn how Azure Active Directory (Microsoft Entra ID) authenticates users, authorizes access, enables single sign-on, and enforces conditional access and identity protection via roles, groups, and permissions.

Understand how Azure directory service, or Entra ID, centralizes users, groups, and devices for authentication and authorization across Microsoft cloud apps and your own cloud applications.

Explore Microsoft Entra Domain service, enabling legacy applications to run in Azure without rewriting or redesigning them, supporting LDAP and Kerberos, enabling cloud directory lookup and lift-and-shift migrations.

Collaborate securely with external users using Microsoft Entra External ID, enabling external identities, B2B collaboration, and B2B Direct Connect with strong access control and home tenant identities.

Explore Azure conditional access in Microsoft Entra ID, using identity signals like location and device to decide access, enforce policies with multi-factor authentication on managed devices.

Explore rbac in Azure, including who what where, built-in and custom roles, least privilege, and how permissions are inherited across scopes from management groups to subscriptions and resources.

Explore defense in depth as a multi-layer security strategy across physical, identity and access, perimeter, network, compute, application, and data layers, with encryption at rest and in transit.

Learn how the zero trust model avoids automatic trust by verifying every access request, protects each asset individually, and enforces least privilege and breach-aware controls across modern networks.

Explore how Microsoft Defender for Cloud watches Azure resources, detects malware and threats, provides fixes, and manages security posture with secure scores and alerts.

Explore how Azure costs vary by resource type, consumption, maintenance, geography, network traffic, and subscription type, with examples comparing virtual machines, storage, and managed versus self-managed services.

Use the Azure pricing calculator to estimate costs for individual resources or full solutions such as virtual machines, websites, and storage, and compare on-premises versus Azure with the TCO calculator.

Explore azure cost management to track resource spending with cost analysis across services and locations, and set budget, credit, and department spending alerts for automated cost control.

Organize cloud resources with resource tags to track usage and control costs, using categories for management, cost, operations, security, and governance, enforced by Azure Policy.

Azure policy enforces company rules in the cloud by creating and managing policies and initiatives, blocks non-compliant deployments, and applies at resource, resource group, or subscription.

Learn how Microsoft Purview serves as a centralized data governance tool that discovers, classifies, and protects data across on-premises and cloud sources, with policy enforcement and compliance tracking.

Explore the azure portal and cloud shell, a web-based console and browser shell for managing azure resources with GUI, using azure CLI with bash or PowerShell.

Understand how Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the deployment and management layer for resources, and that ARM templates, as JSON declarations, define resources for repeatable, automated deployments with dependency management.

Learn infrastructure as code with IAC and Bicep, and how it compares to ARM templates. See how Bicep offers simplified syntax, modularity, and compilation to ARM for Azure deployments.

discover how Azure Arc unifies governance and management across Azure, on premises, and multiple clouds with a single dashboard, projecting non-Azure resources into Azure Resource Manager.