Microsoft AZ-900 Certification

Introduction to Azure Fundamentals

Introduction

What is Azure fundamentals?

Azure is a cloud computing platform with an ever-expanding set of services to help you build
solutions to meet your business goals.

Re watch 1st video

What is cloud computing?

It is the delivery of computing services over the internet, which is otherwise known as the cloud.
These services include servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence.
Cloud computing offers faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.

Why is cloud computing typically cheaper to use?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet by using a pay-as-you-go
pricing model. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which helps you:

 Lower your operating costs.

 Run your infrastructure more efficiently.

 Scale as your business needs change.

To put it another way, cloud computing is a way to rent compute power and storage from someone
else's datacenter.

Instead of maintaining CPUs and storage in your datacenter, you rent them for the time that you need
them. The cloud provider takes care of maintaining the underlying infrastructure for you. The cloud
enables you to quickly solve your toughest business challenges and bring cutting-edge solutions to
your users.

Why should I move to the cloud?

In our ever-changing digital world, two trends emerge:

 Teams deliver new features to their users at record speeds.

 Users expect an increasingly rich and immersive experience with their devices and with
software.

Software releases were once scheduled in terms of months or even years. Today, teams release
features in smaller batches that are often scheduled in days or weeks. Some teams even deliver
software updates continuously--sometimes with multiple releases within the same day.
To power your services and deliver innovative and novel user experiences more quickly, the cloud
provides on-demand access to:

 A nearly limitless pool of raw compute, storage, and networking components.

 Speech recognition and other cognitive services that help make your application stand out
from the crowd.

 Analytics services that deliver telemetry data from your software and devices.

What are some cloud computing advantages?

 Reliability: Depending on the service-level agreement that you choose, your cloud-based
applications can provide a continuous user experience with no apparent downtime even when
things go wrong.

 Scalability: Applications in the cloud can be scaled in two ways, while taking advantage of
autoscaling:

 Vertically: Computing capacity can be increased by adding RAM or CPUs to a virtual

machine.

 Horizontally: Computing capacity can be increased by adding instances of a resource, such as

adding more virtual machines to your configuration.

 Elasticity: Cloud-based applications can be configured to always have the resources they
need.

 Agility: Cloud-based resources can be deployed and configured quickly as your application
requirements change.

 Geo-distribution: Applications and data can be deployed to regional datacenters around the
globe, so your customers always have the best performance in their region.

 Disaster recovery: By taking advantage of cloud-based backup services, data replication, and
geo-distribution, you can deploy your applications with the confidence that comes from
knowing that your data is safe in the event that disaster should occur.

What are cloud service models?

Computing Description
model
IaaS This cloud service model is the closest to managing physical servers. A
cloud provider keeps the hardware up to date, but operating system
maintenance and network configuration is left to the cloud tenant. For
example, Azure virtual machines are fully operational virtual compute
 devices running in Microsoft's datacenters. An advantage of this cloud
service model is rapid deployment of new compute devices. Setting up a
new virtual machine is considerably faster than procuring, installing, and
configuring a physical server.
PaaS This cloud service model is a managed hosting environment. The cloud
provider manages the virtual machines and networking resources, and the
cloud tenant deploys their applications into the managed hosting
environment. For example, Azure App Services provides a managed
hosting environment where developers can upload their web applications
without having to deal with the physical hardware and software
requirements.
SaaS In this cloud service model, the cloud provider manages all aspects of the
application environment, such as virtual machines, networking resources,
data storage, and applications. The cloud tenant only needs to provide their
data to the application managed by the cloud provider. For example, Office
365 provides a fully working version of Office that runs in the cloud. All
that you need to do is create your content, and Office 365 takes care of
everything else.
What is serverless computing?
Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing enables developers to build applications faster by
eliminating the need for them to manage infrastructure. With serverless applications, the cloud service
provider automatically provisions, scales, and manages the infrastructure required to run the code.
Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven. They use resources only when a specific
function or trigger occurs.

In understanding the definition of serverless computing, it is important to note that servers are still
running the code. The serverless name comes from the fact that the tasks associated with
infrastructure provisioning and management are invisible to the developer. This approach enables
developers to increase their focus on the business logic and deliver more value to the core of the
business. Serverless computing helps teams increase their productivity and bring products to market
faster. It allows organizations to better optimize resources and stay focused on innovation.

What are public, private, and hybrid clouds?

There are three deployment models for cloud computing: public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid
cloud. Each deployment model has different aspects that you should consider as you migrate to the
cloud.
 Deployment Description
model
Public cloud Services are offered over the public internet and available to anyone who
wants to purchase them. Cloud resources like servers and storage are
owned and operated by a third-party cloud service provider and delivered
over the internet.
Private cloud Computing resources are used exclusively by users from one business or
organization. A private cloud can be physically located at your
organization's on-site datacenter. It also can be hosted by a third-party
service provider.
Hybrid cloud This computing environment combines a public cloud and a private cloud
by allowing data and applications to be shared between them.

The following image illustrates several of the cloud computing concepts that are presented in this unit.
In this example, several factors are demonstrated when you're considering where to deploy a database
server in a hybrid cloud environment. As your resources move from on-premises to off-premises, your
costs are reduced, and your administration requirements decrease.

Illustration showing the cloud computing continuum.

What is Azure?
Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network
using your favourite tools and frameworks.

What does Azure offer?

  Be ready for the future: Continuous innovation from Microsoft supports your development
today and your product visions for tomorrow.

 Build on your terms: You have choices. With a commitment to open source, and support for
all languages and frameworks, build how you want and deploy where you want to.

 Operate hybrid seamlessly: On-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge--we'll meet you where
you are. Integrate and manage your environments with tools and services designed for a
hybrid cloud solution.

 Trust your cloud: Get security from the ground up, backed by a team of experts, and proactive
compliance trusted by enterprises, governments, and startups.

What can I do with Azure?

Azure provides more than 100 services that enable you to do everything from running your existing
applications on virtual machines to exploring new software paradigms, such as intelligent bots and
mixed reality.

Many teams start exploring the cloud by moving their existing applications to virtual machines that
run in Azure. Migrating your existing apps to virtual machines is a good start, but the cloud is much
more than a different place to run your virtual machines.

For example, Azure provides AI and machine-learning services that can naturally communicate with
your users through vision, hearing, and speech. It also provides storage solutions that dynamically
grow to accommodate massive amounts of data. Azure services enable solutions that aren't feasible
without the power of the cloud.

How does Azure work?

Watch vid
What is the Azure portal?
The Azure portal is a web-based, unified console that provides an alternative to command-line tools.
With the Azure portal, you can manage your Azure subscription by using a graphical user interface.
You can:

 Build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud deployments.

 Create custom dashboards for an organized view of resources.

 Configure accessibility options for an optimal experience.

This configuration makes the Azure portal resilient to individual datacenter failures and avoids
network slowdowns by being close to users. The Azure portal updates continuously and requires no
downtime for maintenance activities.

What is Azure Marketplace?

Azure Marketplace helps connect users with Microsoft partners, independent software vendors, and
startups that are offering their solutions and services, which are optimized to run on Azure. Azure
Marketplace customers can find, try, purchase, and provision applications and services from hundreds
of leading service providers. All solutions and services are certified to run on Azure.

The solution catalog spans several industry categories such as open-source container platforms, virtual
machine images, databases, application build and deployment software, developer tools, threat
detection, and blockchain. Using Azure Marketplace, you can provision end-to-end solutions quickly
and reliably, hosted in your own Azure environment. At the time of writing, there are more than 8,000
listings.

Azure Marketplace is designed for IT pros and cloud developers interested in commercial and IT
software. Microsoft partners also use it as a launch point for all joint go-to-market activities.

Tour of Azure services

Let's take a closer look at the most commonly used categories:

 Compute

 Networking

 Storage

 Mobile

 Databases

 Web

 Internet of Things (IoT)

 Big data

 AI

 DevOps

Compute

Compute services are often one of the primary reasons why companies move to the Azure
platform. Azure provides a range of options for hosting applications and services. Here are
some examples of compute services in Azure.

Service name Service function

Azure Virtual Machines Windows or Linux virtual machines (VMs) hosted in Azure.

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Scaling for Windows or Linux VMs hosted in Azure.
 Service name Service function

Sets

Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster management for VMs that run containerized services.

Azure Service Fabric Distributed systems platform that runs in Azure or on-premises.

Managed service for parallel and high-performance computing

Azure Batch
applications.

Containerized apps run on Azure without provisioning servers or

Azure Container Instances
VMs.

Azure Functions An event-driven, serverless compute service.

Networking

Linking compute resources and providing access to applications is the key function of Azure
networking. Networking functionality in Azure includes a range of options to connect the
outside world to services and features in the global Azure datacenters.

Here are some examples of networking services in Azure.

Service name Service function

Connects VMs to incoming virtual private network (VPN)
Azure Virtual Network
connections.
Balances inbound and outbound connections to applications or
Azure Load Balancer
service endpoints.
Optimizes app server farm delivery while increasing application
Azure Application Gateway
security.
Accesses Azure Virtual Networks through high-performance
Azure VPN Gateway
VPN gateways.
Provides ultra-fast DNS responses and ultra-high domain
Azure DNS
availability.
Azure Content Delivery
Delivers high-bandwidth content to customers globally.
Network
Protects Azure-hosted applications from distributed denial of
Azure DDoS Protection
service (DDOS) attacks.
Azure Traffic Manager Distributes network traffic across Azure regions worldwide.
Connects to Azure over high-bandwidth dedicated secure
Azure ExpressRoute
connections.
Monitors and diagnoses network issues by using scenario-based
Azure Network Watcher
analysis.
Implements high-security, high-availability firewall with
Azure Firewall
unlimited scalability.
Creates a unified wide area network (WAN) that connects local
Azure Virtual WAN
and remote sites.
Storage

Azure provides four main types of storage services.

Service
Service function
name
Azure Blob
Storage service for very large objects, such as video files or bitmaps.
storage
Azure File
File shares that can be accessed and managed like a file server.
storage
Azure Queue A data store for queuing and reliably delivering messages between
storage applications.
Table storage is a service that stores non-relational structured data (also known
Azure Table
as structured NoSQL data) in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a
storage
schemaless design..

These services all share several common characteristics:

 Durable and highly available with redundancy and replication.

 Secure through automatic encryption and role-based access control.
 Scalable with virtually unlimited storage.
 Managed, handling maintenance and any critical problems for you.
 Accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.

Mobile

With Azure, developers can create mobile back-end services for iOS, Android, and Windows
apps quickly and easily. Features that used to take time and increase project risks, such as
adding corporate sign-in and then connecting to on-premises resources such as SAP, Oracle,
SQL Server, and SharePoint, are now simple to include.

Other features of this service include:

 Offline data synchronization.

 Connectivity to on-premises data.
 Broadcasting push notifications.
 Autoscaling to match business needs.

Databases

Azure provides multiple database services to store a wide variety of data types and volumes.
And with global connectivity, this data is available to users instantly.

Service name Service function

Azure Cosmos DB Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL options.

Azure SQL Database Fully managed relational database with auto-scale, integral
 Service name Service function

intelligence, and robust security.

Fully managed and scalable MySQL relational database with high

Azure Database for MySQL
availability and security.

Azure Database for Fully managed and scalable PostgreSQL relational database with high
PostgreSQL availability and security.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual

Service that hosts enterprise SQL Server apps in the cloud.
Machines

Fully managed data warehouse with integral security at every level of

Azure Synapse Analytics
scale at no extra cost.

Azure Database Migration Service that migrates databases to the cloud with no application code
Service changes.

Fully managed service caches frequently used and static data to

Azure Cache for Redis
reduce data and application latency.

Fully managed and scalable MariaDB relational database with high

Azure Database for MariaDB
availability and security.

Web

Having a great web experience is critical in today's business world. Azure includes first-class
support to build and host web apps and HTTP-based web services. The following Azure
services are focused on web hosting.

Service name Description

Azure App Service Quickly create powerful cloud web-based apps.

Azure Notification Hubs Send push notifications to any platform from any back end.

Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely

Azure API Management
and at scale.

Azure Cognitive Search Deploy this fully managed search as a service.

Web Apps feature of Azure App

Create and deploy mission-critical web apps at scale.
Service

Azure SignalR Service Add real-time web functionalities easily.

IoT

People are able to access more information than ever before. Personal digital assistants led to
smartphones, and now there are smart watches, smart thermostats, and even smart
refrigerators. Personal computers used to be the norm. Now the internet allows any item that's
online-capable to access valuable information. This ability for devices to garner and then
relay information for data analysis is referred to as IoT.
Many services can assist and drive end-to-end solutions for IoT on Azure.

Service
Description
name

IoT Fully managed global IoT software as a service (SaaS) solution that makes it easy to
Central connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale.

Azure IoT Messaging hub that provides secure communications between and monitoring of millions
Hub of IoT devices.

Fully managed service that allows data analysis models to be pushed directly onto IoT
IoT Edge devices, which allows them to react quickly to state changes without needing to consult
cloud-based AI models.

Big data

Data comes in all formats and sizes. When we talk about big data, we're referring to large
volumes of data. Data from weather systems, communications systems, genomic research,
imaging platforms, and many other scenarios generate hundreds of gigabytes of data. This
amount of data makes it hard to analyze and make decisions. It's often so large that traditional
forms of processing and analysis are no longer appropriate.

Open-source cluster technologies have been developed to deal with these large data sets.
Azure supports a broad range of technologies and services to provide big data and analytic
solutions.

Service name Description

Run analytics at a massive scale by using a cloud-based enterprise data warehouse

Azure Synapse
that takes advantage of massively parallel processing to run complex queries
Analytics
quickly across petabytes of data.

Process massive amounts of data with managed clusters of Hadoop clusters in the
Azure HDInsight
cloud.

Azure Integrate this collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics service with other big
Databricks data services in Azure.

AI

AI, in the context of cloud computing, is based around a broad range of services, the core of
which is machine learning. Machine learning is a data science technique that allows
computers to use existing data to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends. Using
machine learning, computers learn without being explicitly programmed.

Forecasts or predictions from machine learning can make apps and devices smarter. For
example, when you shop online, machine learning helps recommend other products you
might like based on what you've purchased. Or when your credit card is swiped, machine
learning compares the transaction to a database of transactions and helps detect fraud. And
when your robot vacuum cleaner vacuums a room, machine learning helps it decide whether
the job is done.
Here are some of the most common AI and machine learning service types in Azure.

Service name Description

Cloud-based environment you can use to develop, train, test, deploy, manage, and
Azure Machine
track machine learning models. It can auto-generate a model and auto-tune it for
Learning
you. It will let you start training on your local machine, and then scale out to the
Service
cloud.

Collaborative visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy machine
Azure ML
learning solutions by using prebuilt machine learning algorithms and data-handling
Studio
modules.

A closely related set of products are the cognitive services. You can use these prebuilt APIs
in your applications to solve complex problems.

Service name Description

Use image-processing algorithms to smartly identify, caption, index, and

Vision
moderate your pictures and videos.

Convert spoken audio into text, use voice for verification, or add speaker
Speech
recognition to your app.

Map complex information and data to solve tasks such as intelligent

Knowledge mapping
recommendations and semantic search.

Add Bing Search APIs to your apps and harness the ability to comb billions of
Bing Search
webpages, images, videos, and news with a single API call.

Natural Language Allow your apps to process natural language with prebuilt scripts, evaluate
processing sentiment, and learn how to recognize what users want.

DevOps

DevOps brings together people, processes, and technology by automating software delivery
to provide continuous value to your users. With Azure DevOps, you can create build and
release pipelines that provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your
applications. You can integrate repositories and application tests, perform application
monitoring, and work with build artifacts. You can also work with and backlog items for
tracking, automate infrastructure deployment, and integrate a range of third-party tools and
services such as Jenkins and Chef. All of these functions and many more are closely
integrated with Azure to allow for consistent, repeatable deployments for your applications to
provide streamlined build and release processes.

Service
Description
name

Use development collaboration tools such as high-performance pipelines, free private

Azure
Git repositories, configurable Kanban boards, and extensive automated and cloud-
DevOps
based load testing. Formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services.
 Service
Description
name

Azure
Quickly create on-demand Windows and Linux environments to test or demo
DevTest
applications directly from deployment pipelines.
Labs

Get started with Azure accounts

When you're working with your own applications and business needs, you need to create an Azure
account, and a subscription will be created for you. After you've created an Azure account, you're free
to create additional subscriptions. For example, your company might use a single Azure account for
your business and separate subscriptions for development, marketing, and sales departments. After
you've created an Azure subscription, you can start creating Azure resources within each subscription.
What is the Azure free account?
The Azure free account includes:

 Free access to popular Azure products for 12 months.

 A credit to spend for the first 30 days.
 Access to more than 25 products that are always free.

The Azure free account is an excellent way for new users to get started and explore. To sign
up, you need a phone number, a credit card, and a Microsoft or GitHub account. The credit
card information is used for identity verification only. You won't be charged for any services
until you upgrade to a paid subscription.

What is the Learn sandbox?

Many of the Learn exercises use a technology called the sandbox, which creates a temporary
subscription that's added to your Azure account. This temporary subscription allows you to
create Azure resources for the duration of a Learn module. Learn automatically cleans up the
temporary resources for you after you've completed the module.
When you're completing a Learn module, you're welcome to use your personal subscription
to complete the exercises in a module. The sandbox is the preferred method to use though,
because it allows you to create and test Azure resources at no cost to you.

Case study introduction

Knowledge check
Summary
 1 minute

In this module, you learned how to:

 Describe the basic concepts of cloud computing.

 Determine whether Azure is the right solution for your business needs.
 Differentiate between the different methods of creating an Azure subscription.

Learn more
 Azure free account FAQ
 Create an Azure account
 Align requirements with cloud types and service models in Azure
 What is infrastructure as a service (IaaS)?
 What is platform as a service (PaaS)?
 What is software as a service (SaaS)?
 Serverless computing