UPDATE
I took this exam on the 7th and passed. Yay me! I can conform that this stuff will indeed help you pass this exam.
Hello everyone.
I have my own feelings on the value of vender certification, but we won't go into that here. Needless to say I have in the past been blessed with being in a role where I didn't need them. However I recently took a step back into the world of contracting and the situation I find myself in these days is, if I don't have the cert I'm not even getting an interview. Seems my MCDST from 2007 or multiple expired VCP's just don't cut it any more.
So I have decided to get back on the cert wagon and get my AZ-900, which in theory I should sail through, right?
Here is my crib sheet of exam areas that are a bit misleading, or super specific question about stuff you don't realistically need to know that could trip you up. This will be getting added to as I go though it.
Good Luck
Resource groups
- Resource groups don't inherit tags
- They do inherit permissions
Advisor tool
- Will give advice on how you could make financial savings
- Will not give you advice on security of Azure AD
Support Plans
They will ask you very specific questions about this
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/plans/
I mean, as if you will ever need to memorise this stuff, its right here. Regardless they do so you need to know it.
- A free azure account has the same SLA's as a paid for one
- A free azure account has the basic support plan that does not include technical support
- Services in public preview do not have an SLA
- Azure AD has a 99.9% uptime guarantee
- None of the plans has a 10 minute SLA. The best you can do is the premium plan and 15 minutes
Cost Etc
- You use Pricing Calculator to work out how much something costs
- If you have downtime you will be given service credits as compensation
- If you are running a Pay-as-you-go environment you can only have a maximum of 20 vCPU's out of the box. you can get more but you need to raise a ticket.
- You can only have one free Azure account
- You can merge 2 subscriptions in the portal
Azure tools
- Azure policies control the access of azure administrators
- Windows 10 has access to all the azure tools
- So does ubuntu
- So does a Mac
- Android has Azure cloud shell and power apps
- Remember Azure CLI is not PowerShell, no matter how much it would make sense for it to be PowerShell, it's not.
- Remember Azure Cloud shell is PowerShell (ouch my head)
- You get compliance reports from "Microsoft Trust centre"
- Events are stored in Azure Log analytical. Think event log.
General Functionality
- Availability zones protect against DC failure
- Availability zones are not currently available in all regions
- You can manage resources across multiple subscriptions with "Management Groups"
Security
- MFA (two-factor) is controlled by Azure identity protection
- Azure firewall & Network Security Groupsare very similar things. A general rule is, if the traffic is coming from the internet to your vNetwoks, it should go through a Azure firewall. If its between your vNetworks, then its a NSG.
- Ports are opened using "network security groups"
- Application passwords are stored in the key vault
IOT Tools
- Azure time series insights’ “Helps provide a powerful data exploration and telemetry tools to help you refine operational analysis”
- IOT Central “Provides a Fully managed SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor and manage your IoT assets at scale”
As-A-service
- SQL is platform as a service
- CDN is platform as a service
Mad shit that is there for no discernible reason
- The Azure URL is https://portal.azure.com and yes this is a question, and incredibly useless one.
- The screens are called blades. So you manage a VM form the VM blade. I never heard anyone call it this until I started looking at the exams. Its not even mentioned in the documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-health/resource-health-overview