Pass AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals in 3 weeks! (2025)

Sign up for an Azure account to access free credits and a 12-month free tier, enabling hands-on practice with Azure services through the portal.

Explore how Microsoft entered the cloud in 2008 with Project Red Dog, launched Windows Azure in 2010, and grew to over 160 services as second largest cloud provider after AWS.

Tour the Azure portal interface, navigate the left pane, manage dashboards and favorites, use Cloud Shell for CLI tasks, and access documentation and all services.

Explore Azure services by category, highlighting key options across AI and machine learning, analytics, compute, databases, IoT, security, and networking with examples like Azure Bot Service and Cosmos DB.

Explore how cloud computing replaces on-premise infrastructure with scalable, pay-as-you-go services from providers like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, anchored by on-demand self-service and rapid elasticity.

Compare cloud and on-premise infrastructure across cost of ownership, provisioning speed, and scalability. Understand security models, data control, and maintenance requirements to choose the solution that fits your organization's needs.

Navigate the shared responsibility model across SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and on-premises, clarifying which security and compliance tasks lie with providers and customers, with practical IAM, encryption, and configuration best practices.

Explore public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud models, their advantages, use cases, and security considerations. See how hybrid and multi-cloud setups balance cost, scalability, and integration challenges.

Explore how the consumption-based model in cloud computing enables pay-as-you-go resources that scale with usage, replacing upfront CapEx with cost-optimized OPX and flexible capacity.

Explore cloud pricing models—pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot pricing—and see how these options impact total cost of ownership, scalability, and flexibility.

Explore the global cloud market share across major providers, highlighting AWS leadership, Azure growth, and GCP's steady rise, with notes on multi-cloud and hybrid strategies shaping the future.

Review key cloud concepts for the exam, including on-demand computing resources, shared responsibility, service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), and public, private, and hybrid clouds with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Explore high availability and scalability in cloud computing, including automatic failover, data center redundancy, and vertical and horizontal scaling to ensure continuous, scalable services.

Explore cloud reliability through multiple data centers, automated backups, and seamless maintenance and recovery. Examine predictability with pay-as-you-go pricing, budgeting tools, alerts, cost control, and auto scaling.

Explore cloud security and governance to protect data and ensure compliance. See encryption, multi-layered defenses, automated patching, RBAC, data residency, and centralized governance tools in action.

Explore how cloud manageability centralizes resource management through dashboards, enabling real-time monitoring and alerts, automated scaling, and cost-conscious control of resources.

Learn key cloud computing concepts such as availability, scalability, reliability, security, and manageability; review exam-focused points like high availability, elasticity, disaster recovery, fault tolerance, and compliance for Azure fundamentals.

Understand cloud service types: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how responsibilities shift between provider and user across IT layers from facilities to data, with use cases explored in detail.

Explore IaaS, infrastructure as a service, delivering computing power, storage, and networking on a pay-as-you-go basis, with OS-level access and scalable cloud hosting.

Discover how platform as a service sits between IaaS and SaaS, letting you manage data and application logic while providers handle infrastructure, OS, and runtime.

Discover software as a service (saas) where the provider manages the entire software stack and data center infrastructure, delivering ready-to-use applications via the internet with subscription-based access.

Explore IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how Azure VMs, App Service, and SQL Database enable lift-and-shift, development, and software delivery. Highlight security tasks and data management as key responsibilities.

Explore Azure's operating hierarchy from Azure account to subscriptions, resource groups, and resources, showing how subscriptions separate costs and management, and how resource groups enable deploying resources together with RBAC.

Explore Azure physical infrastructure, including data centers, servers, storage, and networking, and learn how global regions and disaster recovery support low latency and application availability.

Discover how Azure regions group data centers into geographic areas with low-latency networks, helping you deploy near your audience while considering data residency, availability zones, and regional service differences.

Explore Azure sovereign regions, isolated from the main cloud and accessed via separate portals, including US government and China regions operated with 21Vionet for strict compliance.

Explore how Azure availability zones provide redundancy and fault tolerance within a region by using independent data centers, power, cooling, and high-speed connections to withstand disasters.

Discover how Azure region pairs enable disaster recovery by backing up apps and data across paired regions and availability zones within the same geography, ensuring availability during regional outages.

Identify Azure resources as building blocks deployed to regions and see how resource groups contain related resources, apply RBAC, and manage with tags, policies, and lifecycle considerations.

Explore how to create and manage resource groups in Azure, assign a storage account to a group, choose region and redundancy, and perform safe delete with a name confirmation.

Understand how an Azure subscription provides authenticated access and a billing boundary to deploy resources within resource groups, enabling cost tracking and governance through management groups.

Manage Azure subscriptions efficiently by organizing them into nested management groups, applying unified policies and RBAC inheritance to ensure governance and compliant access across all resources.

Explore management groups and subscriptions in Azure, create groups with IDs and display names, nest engineering teams under IT department, and assign subscriptions for policy, security, and cost management.

Organize resources logically by functionality, project, and environment; apply consistent naming conventions, tags, locks, and RBAC with least privilege, and use Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and Azure Advisor for governance.

Master Azure's core infrastructure by examining the operating hierarchy, Azure regions, Azure sovereign regions, availability zones, region pairs, and how resources, resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups enable governance.

Master Azure fundamentals by exploring regions, availability zones, data centers, resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups, plus governance, RBAC, and disaster recovery concepts essential for exam success.

Discover Azure compute services, from virtual machines and scale sets to containers, App Service, and Azure Functions, with on-demand, pay-as-you-go pricing and auto-scaling for cloud applications.

Discover Azure virtual machines, scalable cloud compute with full operating system control and pay-as-you-go flexibility, using predefined or custom images via portal, CLI, or ARM templates.

Create a virtual machine in the Azure portal by configuring basic settings like subscription, resource group, region, image, and size, then review and deploy while noting security and networking defaults.

Connect to a running Azure virtual machine via RDP using the downloaded RDP file and credentials. Manage costs by stopping the VM and deleting the resource group when finished.

Learn how a load balancer distributes traffic across multiple Azure virtual machines to improve performance and reliability. It monitors VM health and directs traffic away from unhealthy instances.

Harness Azure VM scale sets to auto scale identical virtual machines, maintain high availability with integrated load balancing, and optimize costs by paying only for used resources.

Distribute Azure VMs across fault domains and update domains within a single data center to maximize 99.9% availability and minimize downtime during planned maintenance.

Demonstrates creating and configuring an Azure availability set in the Azure portal to host two virtual machines in East US, distributing across fault and update domains for high availability.

Explore Azure Virtual Desktop, a cloud-based virtualization service enabling remote access to multi-session Windows desktops and apps from any device with secure, scalable, cost-efficient management.

Explore how containers enable lightweight, isolated microservices, allowing independent scaling and consistent performance across environments with a shared host OS kernel, Kubernetes, and Azure cloud support.

Explore Azure container services, including ACI, Container Apps, and AKS, highlighting use cases, auto-scaling, load balancing, microservices, and production readiness to match workload needs.

Create an Azure container instance through the portal, assign a resource group, choose a region, use a hello world Linux image, deploy, and delete afterward to avoid costs.

Discover how Azure App Service provides a fully managed platform for deploying and hosting web apps, APIs, and mobile backends with auto-scaling, integrated DevOps, and security features.

Learn to deploy an Azure app service by creating the resource group, naming your web app, publishing code with .NET 8 on Windows, and using App Service Editor for content.

Compare traditional server-based backends with serverless computing, where Azure Functions run code on demand and scale automatically via REST APIs to decoupled front ends using Cosmos DB.

Explore azure functions, a serverless, event-driven compute service that runs code on demand via triggers—http, timer, blob, and more—while binding inputs and outputs and auto-scaling.

Map out how Azure Functions lets you run small code pieces across languages, auto scales, and pays only for runtime, enabling cost-effective serverless architecture.

Demonstrates creating an Azure function app in the portal, selecting the consumption plan, adding an HTTP trigger function, testing it, and deleting the resource group to save costs.

Explore Azure compute services from virtual machines and IaaS to serverless functions. Examine scale sets, availability sets, Azure Container Instances, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure App Service, and Azure Functions.

Explore Azure networking services, from virtual networks and subnets to NSGs and VNet peering, private endpoints and Azure Private Link, DNS, ExpressRoute, VPN gateway, and CDN for secure connectivity.

Explore Azure Virtual Network fundamentals, building a private, isolated cloud network with subnets, private IP space, and secure connectivity to on-premises and the internet.

Organize Azure virtual networks by creating subnets to group resources by role and security, using NSGs and routing to control traffic between public and private subnets.

Learn to create an Azure virtual network with public and private subnets, configure the IP address space, and deploy a VM within a single resource group in East US.

Learn how Azure network security groups control inbound and outbound traffic with subnet and VM level rules, priority, default policies, and stateful filtering.

Learn Azure virtual network peering to enable seamless, private communication between virtual networks—even across regions—without downtime, using Azure backbone for low-latency, high-bandwidth traffic.

Compare public endpoints, which use a public IP with authentication, to private endpoints that use a private IP in your VNet to keep traffic inside Azure for improved security.

Set up Azure VPN Gateway to securely connect on-premises networks to Azure virtual networks, using site-to-site and point-to-site VPNs with AES 256-bit encryption.

Explore how Azure ExpressRoute provides a private, dedicated connection between on-premises networks and Azure, bypassing the public internet for faster, more consistent latencies and direct Microsoft cloud access.

Discover how Azure DNS translates domain names to IP addresses, enabling real-time, global name resolution with public and private zones and Traffic Manager integration.

Discover how Azure CDN uses edge servers and caching to reduce latency, offload origin, and securely deliver video, images, and files with TLS encryption and DDoS protection.

Explore virtual networks that emulate physical networks in Azure, enabling isolation and hybrid cloud connectivity. Learn about subnets, NSGs, VNet peering, Private Endpoints, Azure Private Link, and DNS.

Explore azure compute types including containers, VMs, and functions, and review VM options like scale sets and Azure Virtual Desktop, plus networking concepts such as VNets and private endpoints.

Choose cloud storage to ensure global accessibility and cost efficiency for business data. Access durability, high availability, and fully managed services with Azure storage, addressing on-premise limitations and security concerns.

Explore structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data and how Azure services map to each type—relational databases for structured data, Cosmos DB for semi-structured, and Blob Storage for unstructured.

Explore Azure storage services overview, from the storage account to blob, queue, files, and tables, and learn about access tiers, redundancy options, and Azure disk storage.

Discover Azure storage accounts as cloud data warehouses for structured and unstructured data, using blobs, queues, file shares, and tables with a unique namespace and migration options.

Log into the Azure portal to create a storage account, select resource group, unique name, region, and standard or premium tier, then review redundancy and go to deployment.

Explore Azure storage redundancy options to maximize data durability and availability across LRS, ZRS, GRS, and GZRS, with primary and secondary region failover.

Explore Azure blob storage, Microsoft's object storage for unstructured data, organized in containers with public and private access, and accessible via http/https and client libraries.

Learn to create and manage Azure blob storage containers by naming TestContainer, uploading files, and configuring private access or blob and container anonymous access.

Master Azure blob storage access tiers—hot, cool, cold, and archive—to optimize costs, latency, and data retrieval based on access patterns and retention needs.

Create a storage account in the Azure portal and set a default access tier. Manage blob access tiers such as hot, cool, or archive, and learn per-file overrides and rehydration.

Explore azure queue storage as a scalable, asynchronous messaging service that decouples components, enables orderly processing of messages up to 64 kilobytes with ttl over http or https.

Create and manage an Azure storage queue to store and process messages asynchronously, using the portal to name, add messages, and dequeue tasks in order.

Explore Azure Tables, a schema-less NoSQL storage for vast structured and semi-structured data using key-value pairs, offering scalable, cost-efficient storage and simple access via storage accounts.

Create and manage Azure Tables in an Azure storage account using the Storage Browser, add entities with partition and row keys, and practice fast data retrieval with keyed filters.

Azure file storage's true hierarchical structure and cloud-based file shares that mount like local drives, support SMB and NFS, and enable RBAC secured access for lift-and-shift migrations.

Create and manage Azure file shares in the portal, set naming conventions and performance tiers, organize directories, and upload files for cloud, on premises, or hybrid workflows.

Azure file sync links your on-premises Windows file servers with Azure file shares in a hybrid cloud, enabling bi-directional sync and central management for fast local access and cloud tiering.

Discover how Azure disks provide persistent, durable storage for virtual machines via managed disks. Choose from Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, and Ultra, plus OS, data, and temporary disks.

Learn to use Azure Storage Explorer to manage blob containers, file shares, queues, and tables across subscriptions. Install, sign in, and connect to storage accounts for efficient day-to-day operations.

Utilize AzCopy to transfer data between Azure storage accounts, containers, and subscriptions across regions without local downloads, saving time and costs, with CLI automation and cross-cloud options.

Use Azure Migrate to discover your on-prem resources, assess dependencies, right-size Azure virtual machines, and execute a planned migration to Azure with minimal downtime.

Use the Azure Data Box, a physical 80-terabyte device shipped to your data center, to securely and quickly move large data to and from Azure, for disaster recovery.

Explore how the Azure storage account serves as the gateway to blob, file shares, queues, and tables, with redundancy options like LRS, ZRS, GRS, and GZRS.

Explore Azure storage concepts, including blob, file, table, and queue storage, storage tiers, redundancy options, tools like AZCopy and Storage Explorer, and migration options with Azure Migrate and Databox.

Explore identity and access management in Azure, distinguishing authentication from authorization, and learn about Microsoft IntraID, multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, passwordless options, conditional access, RBAC, zero trust, Defender for Cloud.

Learn how authentication verifies your identity and authorization determines your permissions in Azure, using multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, and the principle of least privilege to secure resources.

Explore Microsoft IntraID as the central cloud identity and access management platform for Azure and Microsoft 365. Learn to manage users, groups, authentication methods, single sign-on, and hybrid on-prem integration.

Understand Microsoft Intra-ID licensing: free, premium P1, and premium P2, and how each tier affects features like user and group management, dynamic groups, identity protection, and PIM.

Master Azure fundamentals by mapping accounts, subscriptions, resource groups, resources to a tenant directory, and understand billing, free trial, pay-as-you-go, Enterprise Agreement, and role-based access controls.

Learn to manage identities in Microsoft Intra ID (Entra ID): create users, assign roles, and use a default directory. Understand password policies, login, RBAC, and tenant management.

Learn how groups in Entra ID centralize user access and roles, using security and Microsoft 365 groups to manage permissions, memberships, and expiration policies across Azure resources.

Explore how Microsoft Intra-Domain Services bridges on-premises Active Directory with the cloud, enabling seamless authentication across on-premises and cloud resources using Kerberos, LDAP, and NTLM.

Explore Azure authentication services built on Intra-ID, the backbone for authentication, authorization, and management of users, devices, and applications in the cloud; learn about SSO, MFA, and passwordless options.

Explore what single sign-on (SSO) is, why it matters, and how to set it up with a practical example. Use one set of credentials to access multiple resources securely.

Learn how multi-factor authentication (MFA) strengthens security by requiring at least two factors, combining something you know, something you have, and something you are, with practical examples.

This video demonstrates enabling per-user MFA in Microsoft Intra ID, enrolling the Microsoft Authenticator app, and configuring MFA verification options in service settings.

Passwordless authentication with Azure passwordless solutions uses Windows Hello, authenticator apps, and security keys to reduce phishing and login friction.

Learn how external identities extend Azure resources securely using IntraID, enabling guest users for B2B collaboration, B2B Direct Connect, and B2C sign-in options.

Empower external collaboration with guest users via Intra ID B2B, sharing apps with controlled access, and enabling invitation or self-signup plus role-based permissions.

Learn how to invite an external guest with a Microsoft Entra ID B2B collaboration flow, from admin invitation through acceptance, sign-in, permission assignment, and eventual removal.

Enable secure Azure collaboration by establishing a mutual trust between two intra-id directories, letting external partners access shared resources using their own credentials, without guest accounts, via B2B Direct Connect.

Enable customer-facing sign-in with B2C by integrating multiple providers—from social, enterprise, to local accounts—and offer a white-label, brand-customized login using OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML.

Learn how Intra-ID conditional access uses signals like user identity, location, device, and risk level to grant or block access to apps and data through policies and MFA.

Demonstrate setting up a conditional access policy in Microsoft Entra ID, including assignments to users, target apps like the Microsoft Admin Portal, and licensing such as Intra-IDP1, plus multi-factor authentication.

Learn how azure rbac assigns access by defining security principals, roles, and scopes, using built-in roles like owner, contributor, and reader, plus resource-specific and custom roles.

Demonstrate role-based access control in Azure by granting a reader role to a user for a newly created virtual machine, showing secure, group-based permission assignment.

Implement zero trust by explicitly verifying every access request, enforcing least-privilege and just-in-time access, and assuming breach to protect identities, devices, apps, data, infrastructure, and networks.

Explore defense in depth as a multilayer security strategy in Azure, including physical security, identity and access management, perimeter, network, compute, application, and data security.

Discover Microsoft Defender for Cloud, a security management tool that continuously assesses and improves your security posture across Azure, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments with real-time monitoring and threat detection.

Learn how managed identities enable Azure services to securely authenticate to other resources without embedded credentials, using system-assigned and user-assigned identities, with a practical virtual machine and storage walkthrough.

Explore identity and access management concepts, including authentication versus authorization, MFA, password-less options like Windows Hello, SSO, IntraID, B2B/B2C, RBAC, defense in depth, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Recap essential Azure identity, security, and access management concepts, including Intra-ID/Entra-ID, SSO, MFA, B2B/B2C, conditional access, RBAC, zero trust, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Explore how Azure pricing works, from free tier and pay-as-you-go to reserved resources, and how resource type, region, access tier, and data transfer shape cloud costs.

Explore the Azure pricing calculator to estimate hosting costs for virtual machines, storage, and databases, configure services in real time, and project monthly expenses and savings options.

Explore how the Azure total cost of ownership calculator estimates cost and operational savings when migrating on-prem workloads to Azure, including licensing, labor, and infrastructure costs.

Explore Azure cost management tools to track, analyze, and optimize cloud expenses with cost analysis, budgeting and forecasting, optimization, and cost-saving plans.

Analyze costs before deploying in Azure and apply cost-saving strategies like reserved instances, spot pricing, deallocating idle resources, and a shift from IaaS to PaaS, with regional pricing and offers.

Tag Azure resources with name-value pairs to organize VMs, storage, and databases, improving cost management and visibility. Apply tags via portal, CLI, or automation, and filter or group reports.

Explore Azure cost efficiency through pay-as-you-go opex, regional pricing, and data transfer costs, and learn to estimate and optimize spend with pricing and TCO calculators, budgets, alerts, and cost management.