AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals + Free Lab & Practice Exams 2026

Explore how cloud computing delivers computing services over the internet—servers, storage, software, analytics—using IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS with pay-for-use pricing, scalability, and cost savings.

Explore the shared responsibility model in cloud computing, where providers secure the physical infrastructure and customers protect data, access, and applications. See how responsibilities shift across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Define cloud models by examining private, public, hybrid, and multi cloud deployments, and compare how control, security, scalability, and cost considerations shape their use.

See how Azure Arc brings management to on premise, multi-cloud, and edge resources from a control plane, enabling policy and monitoring; explore Azure VMware Solution for VMware workloads on Azure.

Compare capital expenditure and operational expenditure for data centers, highlighting cloud computing as a consumption-based model where you pay only for the resources you use.

Learn to use the Azure pricing calculator to estimate virtual machine costs by adjusting CPU, RAM, region, and operating system, and compare pay-as-you-go with one- or three-year saving plans.

Explore Azure services and options, including Azure Active Directory, DevOps, Container Registry, Notification Hubs, Backup, Cosmos DB, Stream Analytics, and AKS, with free tiers and pay as you go pricing.

Define cloud computing and shift from capital to operational expense, plus the shared responsibility model. Explain cloud models (public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud), identify use cases, consumption-based model, and pricing.

Discover how cloud computing benefits organizations by meeting variable demand and delivering available, reliable, and scalable experiences. Explore security, governance, predictability, and overall manageability strengthened in the cloud.

Explore how cloud computing delivers cost savings, scalability, accessibility, backup and disaster recovery, security, and automatic updates. Compare on premises data center costs with cloud advantages to optimize it spending.

Explore how cloud availability keeps resources accessible through redundancy, load balancing, and failover. Understand disaster recovery options and uptime targets of 99%, 99.9%, and 99.999%.

Explore cloud scalability, including vertical scaling (scaling up) and horizontal scaling (scaling out), with examples from peak traffic and cost efficiency by adding or removing resources as needed.

Cloud elasticity automatically scales resources up or down to meet demand, enabling efficient resource use and cost savings, while scalability is the capacity to handle more work.

Learn how to design reliable cloud systems by implementing redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery with Azure services such as VMs, availability zones, Site Recovery, Azure Backup, and Azure Service Health.

Discover how cloud predictability enables forecasting of performance and costs using monitoring, budgeting, automation, capacity planning, and predictive analytics with Azure Monitor, Azure Cost Management, and Azure Autoscale.

Secure the cloud by applying identity and access management, data encryption in transit and at rest, and network security, while upholding governance, compliance, and monitoring to align with business goals.

Understand the two types of cloud manageability—management of the cloud and management in the cloud—and how auto scaling, templated deployments, health monitoring, and automatic failover boost performance.

Explore cloud benefits, including high availability and reliability that keep your application running. Learn how the cloud offers a secure and highly manageable environment for your resources.

Explore cloud service types such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and learn how the shared responsibility model applies to each, plus use cases and emerging FaaS, BaaS, and DaaS.

Explore infrastructure as a service (IaaS), a cloud model delivering virtualized resources like virtual machines, storage, and networking. Scale deployments and apply security under the shared responsibility model.

Explore platform as a service (PaaS), a model that lets developers build, deploy, and manage applications while the provider handles infrastructure, operating system, and databases, speeding development and reducing costs.

Explore Azure serverless, a cloud platform that runs code without managing servers, scales automatically, and charges only for usage, featuring Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Event Grid, and more.

Describe infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service, and identify appropriate use cases for each cloud service. Explain how the shared responsibility model assigns responsibilities across cloud types.

Explore the core architectural components of Microsoft Azure, along with compute, networking, storage, and identity, access and security services, as part of the AZ-900 Fundamentals learning path.

Explore the core architectural components of Azure, including data centers, availability zones and regions, and the Azure resource hierarchy of resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups.

Explore Microsoft Azure, a cloud platform for building, deploying, and managing apps worldwide. Learn compute, storage, networking, containers, serverless functions, databases, AI, and the Azure portal.

Discover Azure's breadth of services from compute to artificial intelligence and Internet of things, and learn how an Azure subscription with free and paid options enables deployment and management.

Discover how to create a free Azure account and explore free and paid services, including a 12-month free tier and a $200 Azure credit for the first 30 days.

Create a temporary Azure account without a credit card to practice with a one-hour sandbox. Explore Microsoft Learn modules and use the active sandbox for hands-on Azure resource exercises.

Explore the Azure portal tour, learn to create a resource, customize the dashboard, use search and favorites, and manage directories, subscriptions, and notifications.

Explore Azure physical infrastructure, including data centers, regions, and availability zones, and learn how regional choices and redundancy ensure secure, reliable access to services worldwide.

Explore Azure availability zones and a high-availability strategy using redundancy, load balancing, replication, auto failover, monitoring, testing, and backup and recovery.

Explore a live 3D tour of a Microsoft Azure data center, from lobby to server rooms, revealing security, cooling, networking, and green energy innovations powering the cloud.

Explore how Azure region pairs within the same geography boost availability, disaster recovery, and data residency while minimizing latency, and understand bidirectional backups and exceptions like Brazil South.

Explore the Azure global infrastructure map to view regions and availability zones across the world. Learn how cross-region disaster recovery and data residency influence virtual machine deployment choices.

Explore Azure management infrastructure, focusing on resources and resource groups within a subscription, including deployment, lifecycle, access control, and cost management.

Azure subscription unifies management, billing, and scale to organize resources, apply policies, and monitor costs. Subscriptions enable deployment across environments, granular access control, and Azure AD integration for secure identities.

Compare azure compute types—container instance, virtual machines, and functions—while outlining vm options, hosting choices, and networking elements including azure virtual networks, subnet, peering, dns, vpn gateway, and express route.

Learn how Azure virtual machines provide cloud-based, infrastructure as a service for hosting apps and data, and how VM scale sets enable automatic scaling, self-healing, rolling updates, and load-balanced availability.

Distributes two or more virtual machines into an Azure availability set to spread across fault domains and update domains, ensuring redundancy and availability.

Move to the cloud with virtual machines by cloning on-prem servers to Azure, preserving OS and apps, to gain scalability, flexibility, and cost saving.

Access a remote Windows desktop via Azure Virtual Desktop on the Azure cloud from any device. Explore containers that package apps and dependencies into lightweight images for runtimes with Kubernetes.

Compare virtual machines and containers: VMs offer strong isolation but higher resource use and slower boot; containers are lightweight, fast, and ideal for cloud and microservices.

Discover Azure functions, a serverless, event-driven compute that runs code only when triggered by events like storage changes, with pay as you go pricing and automatic scaling.

Explore Azure hosting options, from virtual machines to containers, and see how Azure App Service provides a managed platform with automatic scaling for web apps, mobile apps, backends, and APIs.

Explore Azure virtual network fundamentals, including isolation, private IP addressing, subnets, routing, network security groups, firewall, load balancing, and connectivity via VPN, ExpressRoute, and peering for hybrid deployments.

Learn how Azure Virtual Network isolates and secures resources, controls communications, and routes traffic with route tables and BGP, while filtering via NSG, Azure Firewall, service endpoints, and private link.

Explore the azure portal to create a virtual machine from the create resource option. See how virtual machines are treated as resources and start with a VM for az-900 prep.

Demonstrates creating a virtual machine in the Azure portal, detailing resource groups, subscription, disk, networking, management settings, tags, and the review and create steps.

Learn how subscription choices such as concierge, free, and pay-as-you-go determine available resources, licensing, and virtual machine options, and how to organize deployments using resource groups.

Choose a virtual machine name and region to optimize latency for your target users, then verify availability zones in the chosen region to support your VM deployment.

Explore selecting an operating system image for an Azure virtual machine from a large catalog of Linux and Windows options, including 64-bit configurations.

Explore how to choose a virtual machine size in Azure, including spot discount, free resources, and region and subscription constraints, with pricing examples.

Create an administrator account for Windows server VMs, set a strong username and password, enable remote access via RDP, and manage licensing options.

Explore disk options for Azure virtual machines, comparing premium SSD, standard SSD, and standard HDD, and learn delete with VM behavior, data persistence, and attaching existing disks.

Configure an Azure virtual network by creating a vnet in a resource group, defining subnets and public IPs, and enabling rdp/ssh access with security groups and load balancing.

Learn to configure monitoring and tags for a virtual machine, including alert rules, boot diagnostics, and custom data scripts; review, create, and deploy a Windows VM with a template.

Explore the Azure virtual machine overview in the portal, including name, type, resource group, location, and public IP; learn to connect via remote desktop.

Demonstrates remotely connecting to an Azure virtual machine via remote desktop using the public IP, with credentials and certificate warnings; explore RDP, SSH, and command-line tools in the Azure portal.

Learn how to create and organize cloud resources by selecting a subscription and resource group, then provisioning a function app or other instance with basic options, tags, and region.

See how to create a web app in Azure, selecting a unique name and code (dotnet seven/six, Python, Docker, static web app), OS, region, GitHub deployment, then review and create.

Watch a live demo of creating an Azure function app, selecting subscription, resource group, code or container, Python on Linux, choosing serverless or premium plans, and deploying with monitoring.

Explore configuring and managing an Azure function app, including custom domains, deployment slots, scaling options, and editing function code via portal or VS Code.

Learn to create and configure a virtual network in Azure, including setting the address space, subnets, and optional security features like firewall and DDoS protection.

demonstrates creating a virtual network peering between vnet one and vnet two to allow cross-network access for virtual machines, with traffic from the remote virtual network allowed.

Explore how to view and edit network security groups (NSGs), manage inbound and outbound rules, and add ip-based rules in the West US region, including creating new NSGs.

Demonstrate how public and private endpoints govern access to resources like storage accounts, with virtual networks, subnets, and private endpoint connections.

Explore how azure virtual private networks securely connect on-premises networks to azure vnet using ipsec, enabling site-to-site, point-to-site, and vnet-to-vnet links with gateway options, expressroute, and high availability.

Explore Azure ExpressRoute, a private direct connection between on-premises networks and Azure data centers, delivering lower latency, higher security than the public internet, with circuit and virtual hop options.

Learn how Azure dns hosts dns domains in Azure, provides global, low-latency resolution via a network, supports dnssec, advanced management, and integration with Azure services for public and private endpoints.

Explore Azure compute and networking services, comparing containers, virtual machines, functions, and virtual machine scale sets; describe virtual networks, ExpressRoute, VPN, DNS, peering, and public and private endpoints.

Describe Azure storage services and storage accounts, blob storage tier, data redundancy, and migration options including Asset copy, Azure Storage Explorer, and Azure Data Box.

Explore Azure storage accounts for storing unstructured data as blobs, files, queues, and tables, with configurable replication options across data centers and endpoints for secure access.

Azure storage offers lrs, zrs, grs, and gzrs redundancy to balance cost and availability, with data replicated in the primary region and optionally in a secondary region.

Explore Azure Blob Storage as a fully managed, scalable object store for unstructured data, with hot, cool, and archive tiers and seamless integration with other Azure services.

Explore Azure Files, a fully managed cloud file storage service using SMB and NFS, enabling shared access, cross‑platform mounting, scalability, durability, security, and easy integration with Azure services.

Explore Azure storage's fully managed queue service for global access via http or https, enabling asynchronous processing and backlogs, plus managed disks for durable, high availability storage for virtual machines.

Explore Azure file movement options, from large-scale migrations with Azure Migrate and Azure Data Box to tools like Azure Data Factory, Azure Storage Explorer, Azure File Sync, PowerShell, and CLI.

Create and configure a storage account by selecting resource group, unique name, region, performance, and redundancy, then set security and access tier (hot or cool).

Configure a storage account by selecting network access, default to Microsoft network routing, enable data protection features like point-in-time restore, soft delete, versioning, tracking, and encryption with customer-managed keys.

Explore configuring a storage account, create a container for blobs, and manage access levels from private to anonymous read; then upload files and set hot, cool, or archive tiers.

Generate a per-file sas token to grant read access via blob sas url from anywhere. Show how an access key differs from a sas token for private container access.

Explore lifecycle management in Azure storage accounts, creating rules to move data from hot to cool or archive based on last modified, with blob types and rehydration considerations.

Explore using the storage browser to manage blob containers, file shares, and the recent view, and download Azure Storage Explorer for local access.

Compare Azure storage services and accounts, describe storage tiers and redundancy options, and migrate data into and within Azure using Azure Storage Explorer, File Sync, Azure Migrate, and Data Box.