Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)

For IT leaders: As workloads move to Azure, many teams run cloud infrastructure on habit instead of shared standards. The result is inconsistent access controls, manual deployments, and uneven resource governance. This AZ-104 course gives your administrators a common baseline across identity, storage, networking, compute, automation, and monitoring. It also prepares them for the single exam required for the Azure Administrator Associate certification.

• Role fit: Best suited to IT Practitioners with about a year of Azure exposure, and to experienced admins who need to validate their skills. A Team Lead can assign it to an entire infrastructure or cloud ops group to standardize practices.
• Time investment: About 17 hours across 17 skills, so most learners can finish in a few weeks at 3–5 hours per week. The PowerShell and Azure CLI primer helps learners who are new to scripting.
• Risk and governance: The course covers Azure AD, roles and role-based access control, subscriptions, resource groups, regions, availability zones, and monitoring. These are core concepts for least-privilege access, resource governance, and availability planning.
• Change management: Modules on ARM templates and Bicep help teams move from portal clicks to repeatable, code-based deployments.

The skills are sequenced as a Playlist and include hands-on challenges, such as mounting file shares and building containers, so learners practice each task as they go.

IT teams use this AZ-104 training to run Azure infrastructure with fewer surprises and less reliance on outside help. The course works through hands-on scenarios teams see in production: mounting Azure file shares for Windows, Linux, and macOS users over SMB, locking down storage accounts with private endpoints, and monitoring deployed resources after virtual machines, storage accounts, and other services go live.

• More resilient operations: Team Leads can rely on staff who understand Azure regions, zones, and resources before an incident happens, not during one.
• Safer, repeatable deployments: Practitioners turn manual portal clicks into ARM templates and Bicep files with dev/prod parameters. This cuts configuration drift and removes infrastructure as the bottleneck in the release cycle.
• Tighter access control: Admins apply role-based access control across users and resources and learn the gotchas before they become audit findings, such as cloud-only identities not being supported for some file share authentication options.
• Earlier detection of issues: Teams use metrics and logs to watch deployed resources and spot high-severity problems sooner.

Because the course pairs the Azure portal with PowerShell and the Azure CLI, IT Directors get a team that can script and automate routine admin work, not just click through it.

Knowledge

• How Azure regions, availability zones, and resource organization shape resiliency, redundancy, and deployment decisions, plus where Cost Management + Billing fits
• How Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) differs from on-premises Active Directory, and how role-based access control scales permissions across users and resources
• Storage account fundamentals: data resiliency options, file share authentication methods and their limits, including cloud-only identity considerations, and when private endpoints make sense
• Virtual network design concepts: subnets, peering, network security groups, DNS within Azure, and load balancing
• The IaaS-to-PaaS spectrum: virtual machines, App Services with deployment slots, and where Azure container services fit within the broader Azure service catalog
• How ARM templates and Bicep support repeatable infrastructure within CI/CD lifecycles

Ability

• Manage Azure resources from the portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Cloud Shell
• Deploy and connect to virtual machines, and mount Azure file shares over SMB on Windows and Linux clients
• Identify where container services fit among Azure compute options
• Configure App Service deployment slots to support controlled rollouts, such as canary traffic splits
• Author and deploy parameterized ARM templates and Bicep files for consistent dev and prod environments
• Test and perform Site Recovery failovers, and monitor workloads with Azure Monitor metrics, logs, alerts, and VM and Network Insights