AZ-900 Tests Azure Service Understanding and Cloud Concepts — Not Configuration
This is a foundational exam. The traps are in shared responsibility, service model selection, and cost management concepts — not technical depth.
Check Your Readiness →Most candidates understand Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals concepts — and still fail. This exam tests how you apply knowledge under pressure.
AZ-900 is a breadth exam across six domain areas. Most questions are conceptual — know what each Azure service category does, when to use each cloud model, and how Azure's management hierarchy works.
Train administrators to apply tags consistently
Use Azure Policy with a deny or append effect to enforce tag requirements — relying on manual compliance is unreliable at scale
Create a trial subscription and estimate from the portal
Use the Azure TCO Calculator to compare current on-premises costs with estimated Azure costs; use the Pricing Calculator to estimate specific service costs before committing
Apply Azure Policy at each subscription individually
Apply Azure Policy at the Management Group level — policies cascade to all child subscriptions, ensuring consistent enforcement without per-subscription configuration
A region is a geographic area (e.g., East US). An availability zone is a physically separate datacenter within a region. Services deployed across AZs achieve higher availability than single-datacenter deployments — candidates mix these up in HA design questions.
Microsoft manages the physical infrastructure, hypervisor, and platform services. Customers manage identity, data, devices, and application-level security. This boundary shifts based on IaaS/PaaS/SaaS model — candidates often place too much responsibility on Microsoft.
Azure Policy enforces resource configuration standards (e.g., only allow certain VM sizes, require tags). RBAC controls who can do what with resources. They work together but serve different governance purposes.
Azure Reservations for committed compute (1-3 years); Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server/SQL license reuse; Spot VMs for interruptible workloads; Dev/Test pricing for non-production. Selecting the wrong savings mechanism for the scenario is a common error.
Management Groups → Subscriptions → Resource Groups → Resources. Policies and RBAC applied at higher levels cascade down. Candidates who don't understand this hierarchy miss governance and cost management questions.
AZ-900 covers more governance and cost management than most candidates expect. Test your Azure fundamentals now.