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Azure Practical Training

A course on becoming an Azure Cloud Engineer

Welcome

Welcome to the Azure Practical Training! If this is your first time coming here, please familiarise yourself with the information below. If you’re a returning user, or using this as part of an instructor-led course, feel free to jump directly to the:

Table Of Contents

Objectives

The primary goal of this training is to give you practical Azure skills that you can use in daily work. Using big words - prepare you for working with Microsoft Azure as an independent operator capable of contributing across all three stages of an engagement’s lifecycle - plan, build and run.

The course is designed to give you a solid understanding of how various components of the cloud platform impact each other and how to use that knowledge to deliver on non-functional requirements.

Contents

This training was designed with Microsoft’s AZ-104 instructor-led training materials as a baseline. While the official course, which prepares candidates for the Azure Administrator Associate exam, is well-rounded and covers most topics needed to become productive when working with Azure, it only focuses on fundamental skills. With that in mind, this training additionally delivers examples of real-life applications, commonly used patterns, non-standard practices that can improve security and reliability, and many other aspects.

The training is aligned as much as possible with Microsoft’s recommendations but also applies the mission-critical lens to deviate from the standard approach whenever it is more productive. Those deviations will be clearly marked.

Format

This material allows you to study how you like, where you like and at your own pace. I use it to aid the instructor-led and classroom-based training I give regularly, but I also did my best to allow you to follow along on your own.

In this training, you will take on the role of a cloud engineer who works for the Contoso enterprise and has been assigned the task of setting up the company’s new cloud environment. The development team at Contoso is working on new line-of-business applications, and you want to deploy those applications in Azure. Subsequent steps will build on top of each other until we reach production. We will present the theory in the smallest possible blocks and get you working on the cloud environment quickly and as much as possible. Because this is a practical approach to learning Azure, we will leave you to discover many things independently by doing the work. There are (almost) no commands that you will need to copy-paste to accomplish a goal without much consideration. Instead, you’ll have to get familiar with the official documentation and find this out on your own.

Certification

The secondary goal is to prepare you for the baseline technical certification - Azure Administrator Associate, which you can obtain by passing the AZ-104 exam. However, because the contents of this course greatly exceed the official AZ-104 training material, you will be well on your way towards other achievements. With some limited additional study, you should be able to pass the following exams:

Throughout the course, I will provide exam tips highlighting common exam questions and topics, but please bear in mind that Microsoft refreshes and adjusts the questions regularly.

Pre-requisites

You do not need any prior knowledge of Microsoft Azure or hands-on experience. While the Azure Fundamentals course (culminating with the AZ-900 certificate) will be a valuable introduction, it is unnecessary. This training introduces and explains all concepts required to progress. However, this course expects you to have a solid understanding of technical concepts around systems administration. For example, we will not explain TCP/IP networking, how virtual machines work, and when we use the SMB protocol.

Acknowledgements and Credits

Throughout this training, I used visual aids created myself, but wherever possible, I also employed images and graphics from the Microsoft official documentation at https://learn.microsoft.com.

Last but not least, the format is not only inspired, but copied, from David Beazley’s Practical Python traning. I recently had the pleasure of joining a Python training based on David’s content, and I fell in love with the format.