How To Pass A AZ-900 Azure Certification

Cloud computing platforms and applications are a crucial part of any organization in today’s world. As organizations handle a lot of business data daily, cloud computing provides them with a secure platform to store, manage, and use this data.

The services of the cloud platforms can be used as per requirement, which in turn helps in cutting costs. Using cloud computing, small and large businesses have been able to minimize their IT expenses.

Popular cloud service providers are Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Thus, professionals with Azure fundamentals certification have a lot of job opportunities.

Let us look at the basics of Azure.

What is Azure?

Azure is a cloud computing platform offered by Microsoft that allows you to develop, test, manage, and deploy cloud applications. You can execute existing applications or create and scale other applications. Launched in February 2010, this cloud service follows a pay-per-use model that allows you to pay for only the services you use. Small, medium, and even fortune 500 companies all use Azure for their cloud computing needs.

Azure offers four types of cloud services –

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Serverless

Once subscribed to Azure, you have access to all the services in the Azure portal. You can use these resources to create virtual machines and cloud-based databases. Moreover, Azure supports multiple programming languages such as C#, Node JS, and Java.

Why is Azure such a preferred cloud service provider?

Due to all the amazing features discussed earlier, Microsoft Azure has become one of the most trusted cloud providers in the world. More than 80% of the Fortune 500 companies, including IBM and Alibaba, use Azure today. Some of the most popular services offered by Azure are –

Compute

Compute services allow you to create and execute Virtual Machines, batch jobs, and build scalable cloud applications. Once deployed, Azure handles everything, including load balancing, provisioning, and monitoring. The service fabric feature allows you to create Microservices. These are applications that contain other smaller applications. Compute resources that you create within the Azure cloud can be configured using the private or public IP address.

Web

Azure lets you build and deploy web applications. Features such as API management, content delivery, reporting, and handling notifications are also available.

Mobile

This enables you to develop and launch cloud applications for mobiles. Features such as tools for creating APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), handling notification services, and back-end tasks are offered.

Storage

Cloud storage services for structured and unstructured data are available at Azure.

The following storage options are offered 

• Disk Storage
• Blob Storage
• File Storage
• Queue Storage

Analytics

These provide storage and distributed analytics including features such as –

• Big Data Analytics
• Data Lakes
• Real-time Analytics
• Business Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Data Warehousing
• Internet of Things

DevOps

This provides tools such as Azure DevOps that support DevOps software development, Application diagnostics, DevOps tool integrations, and test labs for testing software applications.

Advantages of Azure

The key benefits of using Microsoft Azure are –

• You can create Virtual Machines of your preferred configuration. Virtual hard drives are offered for storage.
• Application creating, testing, and deployment takes very little downtime. The integrated development environment allows multiple teams to master Azure quickly, and the pay as you go, model, makes things cost-efficient.
• Data stored in Azure data centres are highly secure. It is hack-proof as the data centres have features such as two-tier authentication, a global incident response team, and proxy card access readers.
• Real-time auto-updates allow the cloud infrastructure to be up to date, which in turn helps the business to grow and handle their operations seamlessly.
• Built-in analytics support allows businesses to derive insights from business data and make important organizational decisions.

As more companies begin adopting Azure, professionals need to equip themselves with the basics of Azure. Some form of training or certification can immensely help here.

Azure certifications

Azure Certifications are categorized into three levels – fundamental, associate, and expert level. The most popular Azure certifications are –

• Microsoft Certified: Azure – Fundamentals Exam AZ-900
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator – Associate Exam AZ-103
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer – Associate Exam AZ-203
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer – Associate Exam AZ-500
• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer – Associate Exam AI-100
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist – Associate Exam DP-100
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer – Associate Exams DP-200 and DP-201
• Microsoft Certified: Solutions Architect – Expert Exams AZ-300 and AZ-301 
• Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer – Expert Exam AZ-400

AZ-900 Azure certification

This course is aimed at teaching the candidates the fundamentals of Azure. It has no prerequisites and even non-tech candidates who are selling or marketing Azure services are also eligible.

Exam details

• Number of questions – 40 to 60
• Exam Duration – 85 minutes
• Passing score – 700
• Price - $99

Topics covered

• High Availability, Scalability, Disaster Recovery, and Fault Tolerance
• Architectural Components, Azure Resource Manager, Availability Zones and Resource Groups
• Network Security Group, DDoS Attack and Prevention,
• Azure Firewall Azure Subscription, Free Account and Purchasing Azure products/services

How to pass the AZ-900 certification?

Just like any exam, you have to put in the hard work to pass the AZ-900 fundamentals exam. Start with understanding the basics of the key domains –

• Basic cloud concepts such as SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud
• Core Azure services
• Security, trust, compliance, and privacy
• Azure pricing and support

The different resources to learn Azure fundamentals are –

• The Azure fundamentals online course on Microsoft Learn e-learning platform
• Microsoft documentation page that consists of a page dedicated to Azure fundamentals
• Joining a training program conducted by an instructor
• You can join forums and online study groups
• Reference books such as Microsoft Azure For Beginners by Adney Ainsley and
• Microsoft Azure Tutorial for Beginners by Dennis Hutten
• Sample tests online

As the AZ-900 Azure Certification tests your knowledge of Azure basics, be sure to have a clear understanding of these concepts. You can also check out ebooks, whitepapers, and analyst reports published online for your preparation.

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