The Microsoft AZ-900 exam is designed for candidates who want to show foundational-level knowledge of cloud services and specifically how Microsoft Azure handles these services. Companies often use this certification to train employees with non-technical backgrounds, such as salespeople or purchasers of cloud-based services, cloud project managers, and other quasi-technical cloud functions. The AZ-900 certification verifies that a certified individual has a fundamental grasp of how Azure accommodates different cloud needs.

Azure offers many networking tools to perform a large range of functions, from serving public and private websites to allowing for high-availability, highly scalable infrastructures, to efficiently serving data to end-users around the globe.

In this lab, you will navigate the Microsoft Azure Portal and receive an introduction to networking services as provided by Azure. Each lab step will focus on a different Azure networking service. By the end of this lab, you will have a basic grasp of different Azure networking tools as well as how and why they are used.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Understand how to navigate to different networking services in the Azure Portal
• Demonstrate a fundamental grasp of networking services provided by Azure
• Demonstrate when and why different Azure networking services are used

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

• Anyone interested in a quasi-technical role using Microsoft Azure
• Anyone hoping to certify in more in-depth Azure certifications and wanting a good place to start

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• Familiarity with the Azure Portal is helpful but not required
• Basic networking principles is helpful but not required

Updates

Sep 12th, 2024 - Updated VM image

June 15th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

January 25th, 2022 - Updated to match the latest AZ-900 exam topics. Content on load balancers, application gateways, and CDNs has been moved to a new lab

December 27th, 2021 - Updated screenshots and instructions to reflect the latest UI

December 10, 2021 - Updated instructions to reflect deployment time

October 20th, 2021 - Extended lab duration 15 minutes

August 31st, 2021 - Fixed a typo in the commentary related to the CDN endpoint domain

April 9th, 2021 - Moved validation checks to the most relevant lab step for more immediate validation feedback

April 8th, 2021 - Updated CDN SKU version to prevent lab startup issue

January 17th, 2020 - Added back Virtual Network Gateway and Application Gateway lab steps

December 17th, 2020 - Removed student user permissions Microsoft withdrew support of causing the lab to fail to set up

December 14th, 2020 - Removed Virtual Network Gateway and Application Gateway lab steps while a solution to avoiding their long provisioning delays is developed

March 9th, 2020 - Updated the CLI command used to retrieve the name of the storage account instead of using tags