AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator

Learn about governance and management in Azure services.

Learn how to access policies, resource locks, and tags, as well as how Azure services such as Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints can help you build a comprehensive cloud governance strategy.

Learn about the decisions you make before creating a virtual machine, the options to create and manage the VM, and the extensions and services you use to manage your VM.

You’ll learn the fundamental principles of computer networking to prepare you for the Azure admin and developer learning paths.

Explore the fundamentals of computer networking security and monitoring.

Install the Azure CLI locally and use it to manage Azure resources.

Install Azure PowerShell locally and use it to manage Azure resources.

Secure internal resources, external resources, SaaS applications, and more with Azure Active Directory. Learn about the features and capabilities available in Azure AD.

Describes the benefits of using Docker containers as a containerization platform. Discuss the infrastructure provided by the Docker platform.

Learn how using Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Cosmos DB – or a combination of them – for your business scenario is the best way to get the most performant solution.

Migration to the cloud presents new ways to think about your IT expenses. This module teaches you about the factors that influence cost and tools you can use to help estimate and manage your cloud spend.

Create users in Azure Active Directory. Understand different types of groups. Create a group and add members. Manage business-to-business guest accounts.

Manage users and groups in Azure Active Directory

Evaluate self-service password reset to allow users in your organization to reset their passwords or unlock their accounts. Set up, configure, and test self-service password reset.

To grant access to a subscription, identify the appropriate role to assign to an employee. Understand when you might need to temporarily elevate your own access to regain access to a subscription.

Learn how to use RBAC to manage access to resources in Azure.

Understand the structure of role definitions for access control. Identify the role properties to use that define your custom role permissions. Create a custom Azure role and assign to a user.

Use Azure Resource Manager to organize resources, enforce standards, and protect critical assets from deletion.

Cost is one of the most important aspects of the cloud and can have a massive impact on your business. Azure has several tools available to help you get a better understanding of cloud spend and some best practices that you can leverage to help you save money.

Learn how to use cost analysis to understand how your costs accrue each month. Use this understanding to create an Azure budget to monitor and alert on your costs.

Identify Azure resources that you can move to a different resource group. Use the Azure portal to move resources.

Evaluate options to manage device identities in Azure AD. Allow users to join devices in Azure AD. Require devices to be marked as compliant. Enable Enterprise State Roaming.

Learn how to provide disaster recovery by replicating storage data across regions and failing over to a secondary location.

Create an Azure Storage account with the correct options for your business needs.

Azure provides a variety of disk storage options for virtual machine workloads. Identify the features of capabilities of each type to ensure your application performs optimally.

Learn how Azure Storage provides multilayered security to protect your data. Find out how to use access keys, to secure networks, and to use Advanced Threat Protection to proactively monitor your system.

Azure Files provides a cloud-based file share for storing and sharing files to applications. Whether it’s an application hosted in Azure App Service, an Azure VM, or an on-premises app, Azure Files can store and share file access between one or more applications and systems in a secure and failure-resilient manner.

Azure Storage Explorer allows you to quickly view all the storage services under your account and navigate, read, and edit data stored in those services through a user-friendly graphical interface.

Evaluate Azure Import/Export to copy data from Azure Blob storage to an on-premises server. Create an export job in your Azure Storage account. Get the BitLocker keys to unlock the drives that you receive.

Evaluate Azure Data Box family to import terabytes (TBs) of data from a local computer to Azure Blob storage. Order disks. Copy data to disks and return them. Verify that the data is uploaded to Azure.

Evaluate and deploy Azure File Sync to extend the capacity of your on-premises file share.

In this module, we discuss how to create a Linux virtual machine using the Azure portal.

Azure virtual machines (VMs) enable you to create dedicated compute resources in minutes that can be used just like a physical desktop or server machine.

Learn how to use the cross-platform Azure CLI to create, start, stop, and perform other management tasks related to virtual machines in Azure.

Understand and create the different types of disk storage available to Azure virtual machines (VMs).

Use Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) to encrypt OS and data disks on existing and new VMs.

Deploy the Azure Update Management solution to update virtual machines in your cloud environment.

Learn how Resource Manager templates express your deployments as code, enabling you to deploy faster and more reliably.

Standardize and automate your virtual machine deployments to minimize manual configuration, variance, and errors.

Enable your application to automatically adjust to changes in load while minimizing costs with virtual machine scale sets.

Create a desired state configuration script that checks that IIS is installed. Onboard virtual machines (VMs) for management by Azure Automation. Automatically install IIS on the VMs where that feature is missing.

Create a Docker image and store it in a repository in Azure Container Registry. Use Azure App Service to deploy a web application based on the Docker image. Configure continuous deployment for the web app by using a webhook that monitors the Docker image for changes.

Respond to periods of increased activity by incrementally increasing the resources available and then, to reduce costs, decreasing these resources when activity drops.

Learn how to run containerized apps using Docker containers with Azure Container Instances (ACI).

Determine the types of business problems that can be solved using Azure Kubernetes Service. Describe the benefits of container orchestration with features like deployment management, automatic updates, and self-healing.

Learn how to deploy Azure Bastion to securely connect to Azure Virtual Machines directly within the Azure portal.

Learn how to configure networking in a secure way for your Azure virtual machines.

A good Azure IP addressing schema provides flexibility, room for growth, and integration with on-premises networks. The schema ensures that communication works for deployed resources, minimizes public exposure of systems, and gives the organization flexibility in its network. If not properly designed, systems might not be able to communicate, and additional work will be required to remediate.

Create a DNS zone for your domain name. Create DNS records to map the URL to an IP address. Test that the domain name resolves to your web server.

Use virtual network peering to enable communication across virtual networks in a way that’s secure and minimally complex.

Learn how to control Azure virtual network traffic by implementing custom routes.

VPN Gateway in Azure provides secure connectivity between your on-premises networks and clients.

Connect your on-premises systems and users to Azure and Office 365 by using ExpressRoute for private, dedicated, and guaranteed throughput connectivity.

Network security groups and service endpoints help you secure your virtual machines and Azure services from unauthorized network access.

Improve application resilience by distributing load across multiple servers and use path-based routing to direct web traffic.

Discuss the different load balancers in Azure and how to choose the right Azure load balancer solution to meet your requirements.

Review multidimensional metrics for the load balancer in Azure Monitor Metrics, and check health probe status for the load balancer.

Use Network Watcher tools, diagnostics, and logs to help find and fix networking issues in your Azure infrastructure.

Use monitoring services on Azure to bring operational excellence to your applications and infrastructure.

Learn how to use Azure Monitor for VMs to monitor your organization’s Azure virtual machines.

Evaluate monitoring options for an Azure virtual machine (VM). Enable diagnostics to get data about your VM. View VM metrics and create an alert to monitor performance.

Use Azure Monitor logs to extract valuable information about your infrastructure from log data.

Respond to incidents and activities in your infrastructure through alerting capabilities in Azure Monitor.

Application Insights is an Azure service that you can use to monitor the behavior and performance of a web application. If you run a web app in Azure, you can take advantage of several benefits provided by Application Insights simply by enabling it, without changing any of your code. When you complete this module, you’ll know how to enable Application Insights and client-side monitoring and view metrics in the portal.

Use Azure Backup to help protect the data for on-premises servers, virtual machines, virtualized workloads, SQL Server, Azure Files, and more.

Provide disaster recovery for your Azure infrastructure by managing and orchestrating replication, failover, and failback of Azure virtual machines with Azure Site Recovery.

Learn how to recover from infrastructure and service failure, loss of data, and disasters by incorporating reliability into your architecture.