Cloud Computing Fundamentals: Introduction To Microsoft Azure Az-900 Exam

Introduction

In the following chapters, we're going to talk about the AZ-900 exam and how to prepare for it. We will first cover the benefits of getting Azure certified and why you should consider getting the AZ-900 certification. We will then do an overview of the AZ-900 certification exam, what you will be evaluated on, as well as learn about the skills measured document. Finally, we will do an overview of our learning materials for this exam. By the end of this book, you will know what's needed to start studying for the AZ-900 Microsoft Certification exam. Let's start by learning what are the benefits of getting Azure certified and, more particular, why the AZ-900 exam. Let's start by asking, why do we even want to get a Microsoft certification? First of all, Microsoft certifications can really help give you a professional advantage by providing globally recognized and industry-endorsed evidence of mastering skills in a digital and cloud business. If we look at the numbers, according to multiple studies, 91% of certified IT professionals say that certification gives them more professional credibility, 93% of decision makers agree that certified employees provide more added value, and 52% of certified IT professionals say that their expertise is more sought after within the organization after getting certified. Honestly, certifications can also help you in the financial aspect of your career. 35% of technical professionals say that getting certified led to salary or wage increases, while 26% of technical professionals reported job promotions after getting certified. Now let's get a bit more Azure-specific and talk why we want to get Azure certified. Microsoft Azure is one of the top cloud providers in the world for Infrastructure and Platform as Service workloads. 63% of enterprises in the world are currently running apps on Microsoft Azure, second only to AWS. However, 19% of enterprises expect to invest significantly more on Azure in 2022, and this is leading all of the other cloud vendors this year, so Azure is still growing at an astonishing rate. Finally, 44.5% of enterprises say that Microsoft Azure is their preferred provider for cloud business intelligence. If we get more specific into our Azure certification, the Azure certification portfolio is actually the biggest certification portfolio at Microsoft, and it includes 3 fundamental-level certifications, 10 associate-level certifications, 2 expert-level certifications, and 3 specialty-level certifications. But what makes the AZ-900 unique? The AZ-900 Azure Fundamental Certification is an optional, but very highly recommended prerequisite for all of the other Azure certifications. It's the place you should start whether you have done a Microsoft certification before and now you want to specialize in Azure, or if this is your first ever Microsoft certification, the AZ-900 is where you should begin your Azure certification journey.

Chapter 1 AZ-900 Exam Summary

Now that we know why the AZ-900 is a very important and valuable exam, let's do an overview of the exam. The Azure Fundamental Certification is an opportunity to prove knowledge of cloud concepts, Azure services, Azure workloads, security and privacy in Azure, as well as Azure pricing and support. From an audience point of view, the AZ-900 is intended for candidates who are just beginning to work with cloud-based solutions and services or are new to Azure. Also, as this is a fundamentals exam, before starting to study, candidates should be familiar with general technology concepts, but really no other requirements as you will learn the fundamentals in the study material for this exam. If we take a look at the basics, the AZ-900 exam costs 99 USD; however, the price might vary depending on your region. Furthermore, I highly encourage you to check with your manager or HR person as organizations will often reimburse the cost for learning and certifications. The worst that they can say is no, so it's always worth to ask. Also, something that is really nice is that fundamental certifications do not expire. For example, associate and expert-level Microsoft certifications expire after one year, but because this is a fundamentals-level exam, it doesn't expire, so that is nice. Lastly, if you're a student, you can actually get college credit for passing Microsoft exams and earning Microsoft certifications. This works mostly in the United States, not internationally. If we take a look at the skills measured, it's split up into six categories, the first one being describe cloud concepts, which is 20 to 25% of the exam. We then have describe core Azure services, which is 15 to 20% of the exam. Third, we have to describe core solutions and management tools on Azure, which is 10 to 15% of the exam. Fourth, we have to describe general security and network security features, which is between 10 and 15% of the exam. Our fifth category is describing identity, governance, privacy, and compliance features, which is 20 to 25% of the exam. Finally, describe Azure cost management and service-level agreements, which is between 10 to 15% of the exam. There is one keyword that is repeated throughout each objective, and that is the verb describe. Verbs are very important in Microsoft certifications. So, what does the word describe mean? As we're talking about the fundamentals-level exam, the verb describe tells us that you do not need to know how to configure, manage or implement features. What you really need to know is what features are available and what business problems they solve. The goal of this exam is for you to be able to know what cloud computing challenges can be solved by what Azure solution. If you talk with someone and they say we have this business need for a workload, you need to be able to know, this Azure solution can help you with that. This is why the AZ-900 is an amazing exam for anyone working in the Microsoft ecosystem. Whether you're an IT pro, dev, project manager or business stakeholder, knowing what solutions Microsoft offers can really allow you to better understand the projects you're working on and to propose the right solution at the right time. Now that we have talked about the high-level objectives, Microsoft also provides a document called the skills outline, or the skills measured document, and it's important to review it before and after studying for this exam. The skills outlined are the full detailed list of everything that you need to know for the exam. We will review it later, but really this should be our checklist of things to study for the AZ-900 exams.

Chapter 2 Skills Measured Document

If you open up your browser and type AZ-900, this page will be one of the first choices.

This is the Microsoft Learning page for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. On the exam page at the top, you will see the description and audience for the exam, you will be able to schedule it, but what we want to talk about is the skills measured.

You will see on the exam page, you only have the high-level skills; however, it's important that you click this link, Download exam skills outline. If you click on it, it will open up a PDF, either it will download it or open up directly in the browser depending on your settings.

Something that is really important, because as the cloud always changes, so do Microsoft certification exams, so you might see at the top a warning like this one. This exam was updated on November 9, 2020, and if you go to the bottom, at the bottom you will have kind of a document with tracked changes on, so you can see what were the changes that were done on the date that it was changed.

And Microsoft generally also announces at least one or two months in advance if a change will happen, and it will be shown the exact same way, simply the date will be on the future so you can see if Microsoft will change the objectives. If you go to the top, you have the Audience Profile again, same thing, but what gets interesting is that for each exam objective, so let's say Describe Cloud Concepts, it's broken down into sub-objectives and details. Under Describe Cloud Concepts, we have Identify the benefits and considerations of using cloud services, identify the benefits of cloud computing such as high availability, scalability, elasticity, agility, and disaster recovery.

Then we have to describe the differences between the categories of cloud services.

So you need to know what's the difference between Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service and Software as a Service and then identify a service type based on a use case, so, you need to be able to know what workloads should go where. Then for each objective really, you have all of the details on what services do you need to know, what are the different things you should be able to describe. You can either save it locally or you can even print it and then use a highlighter, once you feel confident you learned something, highlight it, and this should be the checklist for your exam. You need to be able to go in the details in the skills measured document and then be able to say that all of the different tools, services, and concepts in here, I'm able to describe. It’s an important tool for your study to pass the AZ-900 exam.

Chapter 3 Why Use Microsoft Azure

We're going to look at a lot of individual services within Azure throughout the book, but in this chapter, I want to give you a broad overview of what Azure can do and how it's structured. I'm going to demystify Azure for you and give you the bigger picture of the environment that all the individual services operate in before we go into many of those services later on. But first, I want to talk about the Azure Fundamentals certification. If you're studying for the AZ-900 exam, this book will definitely help you do that, but this book doesn't encompass all of the exam objectives. If you're studying for the exam, I encourage you to read the most up-to-date study guide provided by Microsoft because it does change from time to time and then map those objectives to the topics covered in this book. That way, you'll be able to see what else you need to learn outside of this book in order to pass the exam. That said, this is a book for people new to Azure, so we're going to start from the ground up by talking about why you would want to use Azure in the first place. Azure is a cloud platform with more than 200 products and services that help you create applications and solutions. The cloud platform part just means that Microsoft abstracts away all the underlying hosting infrastructure so you can rent basic things like web hosting, computing power, databases, and storage, as well as some really full-featured solutions, like business analytics tools, artificial intelligence services, and portals for managing devices for the Internet of Things. You might never use some of those advanced tools, but they give you options you probably didn't have on-premises, at least not without installing a bunch of software and services on your own servers to do those things. But even if you just host websites and file shares, traditional things that every organization does, why would you want to use Azure? Well, there's a lot that goes into managing your own servers and datacenter. There's buying the physical hardware, storing those servers in a secure place where nobody can tamper with them, there's cooling needed because servers generate a lot of heat, and there's electricity and of course backup electricity unless you don't mind your applications being unavailable during a power outage, plus all the networking components and monitoring for health, as well as to make sure that no one hacks your network and computers. But there's also less obvious things, like you might have a need for a lot of computing power at certain times of the day, week or year, so you need the servers to be able to handle that load. Let's say you're hosting an ecommerce application to sell your company's products and there's way more traffic around Christmas than during the rest of the year. You need your servers to be able to handle the load, but they sit underutilized the rest of the year. That's a waste of money and hard drives can fail or you might need to keep increasing your storage because the business groups keep generating more files. They tend to do that. Then they're storing backups of files and databases. What about disaster recovery? If there's a major outage at your datacenter, are you okay with the apps not being available or do you want to maintain another datacenter in another location that can take over that traffic? There's also the ongoing maintenance of the operating systems on those servers. They need to be patched and monitored for threats. Then every five years or so, you need to replace all that hardware, not to mention the networking components like routers, switches, and firewalls. Microsoft, Azure and cloud computing in general was created to address many of these issues. For the rest of this book, we'll look at services in Azure for hosting applications and data and all the virtual infrastructure that allows you to do that. You'll see how easy it is to create and configure that infrastructure in Azure without having to manage any physical hardware like you do on-premises. We'll start with signing up for a subscription in Azure. That'll give you a way to follow along and create your own Azure services. Then you'll start to learn how Azure is implemented using regions, how those regions are connected, and all about Azure datacenters in the regions. You'll learn about resource groups, which are the containers for holding multiple resources that make up a logical grouping, like for an application. Then we'll explore the Azure portal, which is the main way you'll be interacting with Azure and managing instances of services that you create. We'll create some resources in the portal, and I'll show you Azure Active Directory, which is the identity service in Azure for managing user accounts, and