Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

For IT leaders: When teams move workloads to Azure without a shared foundation, the risks show up quickly: unclear ownership under the shared responsibility model, inconsistent permissions, and cloud bills nobody predicted. This AZ-900 course gives your whole team a common baseline before anyone deploys production resources.

Role fit: This course is built for IT practitioners with 0–2 years of experience, including systems administrators, network engineers, and developers who are new to Azure. Team Leads can use it to align mixed-skill teams on the same terms, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, subscriptions, and resource groups.

Risk and governance: Learners see how policies, budgets, and security settings set at the subscription level are inherited by resource groups. They also learn how identity, access, and policy decisions fit into Azure deployments, and why a security-first mindset should shape Azure design.

Time investment: The course runs about 10 hours across 10 skills of roughly one hour each. Most learners can finish it in two to three weeks alongside their regular work.

Change-management note: The instructor deploys live VMs and App Services, and following along accrues real charges. Give learners a sandbox subscription with a budget in place. Advanced hybrid topics, such as ExpressRoute, are intentionally scoped out and pointed toward AZ-800/801.

How CBT Nuggets supports the rollout: The course is delivered as an AZ-900 certification Playlist, so Training Managers can assign it as a single path and track progress toward certification.

IT teams use this training to replace guesswork with a shared, practical understanding of how Azure works before they deploy, budget for, or secure production workloads. The scenarios come straight from day-to-day cloud operations.

• Fewer cost surprises: Practitioners learn why an idle VM keeps consuming resources and how to right-size services instead of defaulting to the largest option. They also learn how subscriptions, resource groups, and budgets support better cost visibility.
• Cleaner governance from day one: Teams learn how subscriptions and resource groups shape who can work on which resources, which permissions they hold, and how costs are tracked. They also learn how security policies and budget controls apply across the Azure resource hierarchy.
• Smoother hybrid identity and migrations: Staff learn why on-premises Active Directory still enforces Group Policy while users are synchronized into Azure AD for cloud access. They also learn why moving large file-share datasets over the public internet can strain bandwidth and complicate migration planning, and which migration options to consider instead.
• Faster, lower-risk releases: Team Leads gain a common vocabulary for IaaS, PaaS, serverless, and core Azure service categories such as compute, networking, storage, web, containers, identity, and security. This helps teams discuss new features, availability, and operational tradeoffs without talking past each other.

The result is a team that can talk about Azure with developers, network engineers, and finance using the same terms, and that is ready to move on to associate-level paths such as AZ-800/801 or AZ-204.

Knowledge

• How IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS differ, and how each model shifts responsibility for security, maintenance, and cost between your team and Microsoft
• How Azure organizes resources through subscriptions and resource groups, and how policies, budgets, and cost analysis set at the subscription level are inherited by resource groups
• How Azure virtual networks support cloud networking for Azure resources at a foundational level
• When to choose VMs, App Services, or event-driven Function Apps on a consumption-based model
• How Azure AD differs from on-premises Active Directory, and why organizations sync users to Azure AD for access to cloud resources
• How storage accounts support redundancy, resiliency, and backups for cloud-based data

Ability

• Navigate the Azure portal, deploy a resource group, and connect to a Windows Server virtual machine
• Deploy a sample web application to an Azure App Service
• Use the Azure pricing calculator and pricing tiers to estimate and right-size workloads before deployment, so the team avoids over-provisioning
• Run basic Azure CLI and PowerShell commands to view and manage subscriptions and resources
• Use Azure Monitor and Alerts at a high level to keep track of what is running in the environment
• Move files into storage accounts using Azure storage management options at a high level