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Stuck with your IT certification exam preparation? ExamLabs is the ultimate solution with Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate practice test questions, study guide, and a training course, providing a complete package to pass your exam. Saving tons of your precious time, the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam dumps and practice test questions and answers will help you pass easily. Use the latest and updated Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate practice test questions with answers and pass quickly, easily and hassle free!
Embarking on the journey to become a Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate is a significant step in any technology professional's career. This certification validates your skills in implementing, managing, and monitoring an organization's Microsoft Azure environment. It is a credential that demonstrates your expertise in handling the day-to-day operational demands of the cloud. This series will serve as your comprehensive guide, breaking down the essential knowledge areas and providing a structured path to help you succeed in the AZ-104 exam. This first part focuses on the foundational concepts and the critical domain of managing Azure identities and governance.
The value of earning the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification extends beyond a simple resume enhancement. For professionals working with enterprise systems, particularly those in roles like SAP BASIS administration, understanding the underlying cloud platform is becoming indispensable. While it may not seem like a direct extension of traditional skill sets, mastering Azure administration provides the fundamental knowledge required to operate complex workloads in the cloud. It is also a highly recommended prerequisite for more specialized certifications, such as those focusing on running specific enterprise applications on Azure, creating a solid base upon which to build further expertise.
Achieving a certification offers a structured and effective way to learn, maintain focus, and stay motivated. The process of studying for a specific goal compels you to delve into topics with a level of detail you might otherwise overlook. It provides a clear roadmap for learning and a tangible outcome for your efforts. The Microsoft certification program is well-established and designed to be accessible. It features a flat structure, meaning you do not need to pass fundamental-level exams before attempting associate-level certifications like the AZ-104, allowing you to start at the level that best matches your existing experience and career goals.
The AZ-104 exam is designed to test a broad range of practical skills. If you are new to cloud administration, you should not underestimate its difficulty. The exam requires more than just theoretical knowledge; it demands hands-on experience with the Azure platform. Success depends on dedicating sufficient time to both studying the concepts and applying them in a real or sandbox environment. Before you even begin studying, the most crucial first step is to download and thoroughly review the official exam skills outline from the Microsoft Learning website. This document is the definitive source for what you need to know.
This skills outline details every topic and subtopic that could appear on the exam. It breaks down the required knowledge into several key areas: managing identities and governance, implementing and managing storage, deploying and managing compute resources, configuring and managing virtual networking, and monitoring and backing up Azure resources. Microsoft periodically updates this guide to reflect changes in the Azure platform and the evolving role of an administrator. Always ensure you are working from the latest version to avoid studying outdated information. This document should be the backbone of your entire study plan, guiding your learning path from start to finish.
The exam experience itself is managed with a high degree of professionalism. Microsoft has a long history in the certification industry, and it shows in the smooth process from scheduling to completion. You will book your exam through your Microsoft Learning Dashboard, which also serves as a central hub for managing your certifications. From this dashboard, you can reschedule appointments if needed, launch your online proctored exam, view your results, and access your official transcripts, certificates, and badges upon passing. This centralized system makes managing your certification journey straightforward and convenient for every candidate.
A notable feature of the Microsoft certification program is the opportunity to provide feedback on each question after you have completed the exam but before you see your score. This allows you to comment on the clarity of the language, the technical accuracy of the question, or any other observations you might have. This feedback loop helps maintain the quality and relevance of the exams. Furthermore, it is important to be aware that certifications are now valid for one year. However, they can be renewed for free by passing an online assessment before they expire, ensuring your skills remain current with the platform's continuous evolution.
A core responsibility of any Azure administrator is managing identities, which is primarily handled through Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Azure AD is a comprehensive identity and access management service that provides a single place to manage users, groups, and application access. For the exam, you must have a deep understanding of how to create and manage users and groups. This includes knowing the different types of groups, such as security groups and Microsoft 365 groups, and their specific use cases for assigning permissions and managing access to resources and applications efficiently.
You will need to be proficient in creating user accounts, both individually through the Azure portal and in bulk using methods like comma-separated value (CSV) files. Understanding the properties associated with a user account, such as job titles, departments, and usage locations, is also important. The exam will test your ability to manage the entire lifecycle of a user, from creation and password resets to disabling or deleting accounts when they are no longer needed. Familiarity with administrative units for delegating permissions over specific subsets of users is another key concept you should master for the exam.
Beyond individual users and groups, the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam requires a solid grasp of device management within Azure AD. This involves understanding the different ways a device can be joined to Azure AD, such as Azure AD registered, Azure AD joined, and hybrid Azure AD joined. You should know the benefits and use cases for each join type, especially in the context of enabling features like single sign-on (SSO) and applying conditional access policies. This knowledge is crucial for ensuring that only compliant and trusted devices can access corporate resources, a key aspect of modern security.
Finally, you must be comfortable with Azure AD Connect, the tool used to synchronize on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) with Azure AD. This is a common scenario in many organizations that operate in a hybrid environment. You need to understand the synchronization process, including password hash synchronization, pass-through authentication, and federation. Knowing how to configure and troubleshoot Azure AD Connect is a practical skill that is frequently tested, as it forms the bridge between on-premises and cloud identity systems for a seamless user experience across both environments.
Governance in Azure is about enforcing rules and policies to ensure that your organization's resources remain compliant with corporate standards and service level agreements. A fundamental tool for this is Azure Policy. You need to understand how to create and assign policies to enforce specific rules for your resources. For example, you might create a policy that only allows the deployment of certain virtual machine sizes to control costs, or one that requires all storage accounts to have encryption enabled to meet security standards. The exam will expect you to know how to apply policies at different scopes, like management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups.
In addition to enforcing rules, you must be ableto audit your environment for compliance. Azure Policy provides built-in dashboards that show the compliance state of your resources against your assigned policies. Understanding how to interpret these compliance reports and remediate non-compliant resources is a critical skill for an Azure administrator. You should be familiar with the process of creating policy initiatives, which are collections of policy definitions grouped together to achieve a common goal, such as meeting a specific regulatory standard like ISO 27001.
Another key component of governance is Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). While Azure AD manages user identities, RBAC is how you grant those identities permissions to manage Azure resources. You must have a thorough understanding of the three main components of an RBAC role assignment: the security principal (user, group, or service principal), the role definition (a collection of permissions like Owner, Contributor, or Reader), and the scope (the set of resources the assignment applies to). The principle of least privilege is paramount, and you should know how to assign the most restrictive role necessary for a user to perform their job.
The exam will test your ability to create and manage custom RBAC roles. While Azure provides many built-in roles, you will often encounter situations where a more specific set of permissions is required. You should know the process of defining a custom role using a JSON template, specifying the precise actions and not-actions required. Understanding the difference between management plane operations (managing the resources themselves) and data plane operations (accessing the data within a resource) is also crucial, as RBAC roles can be defined to control both, ensuring a granular level of security across your entire Azure environment.
Effective management of an Azure environment starts with a well-organized structure of subscriptions and resource groups. A subscription is a logical container for your resources and a billing boundary. You need to understand how to create and manage subscriptions, including how to configure cost management features to monitor and control spending. The concept of management groups is also essential for the exam. Management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions, allowing you to apply governance policies and access controls across multiple subscriptions in a hierarchical structure, which is vital for large organizations.
Resource groups are containers that hold related resources for an Azure solution. The exam will require you to be proficient in creating, managing, and deleting resource groups. A key concept to master is the resource group lifecycle; typically, all resources within a resource group share the same lifecycle, meaning they are created, updated, and deleted together. You should also understand that a resource can only exist in one resource group at a time, but you can easily move most types of resources between resource groups if you need to reorganize your environment.
Resource locks are a critical governance feature you must understand. Locks prevent users from accidentally deleting or modifying critical resources. The exam will expect you to know the difference between the two types of locks: CanNotDelete, which means authorized users can still read and modify a resource but cannot delete it, and ReadOnly, which means authorized users can only read a resource but cannot update or delete it. You should know how to apply and remove these locks at different scopes, such as on a resource group or an individual resource, to protect your most important infrastructure components.
Finally, using tags to organize and manage resources is a simple yet powerful technique that is frequently tested. Tags are key-value pairs that you can apply to your Azure resources, resource groups, and subscriptions to logically organize them into a taxonomy. For example, you could tag resources with the name of the department that owns them, the environment they belong to (production, development), or a cost center for billing purposes. You need to know how to apply tags, enforce tagging standards using Azure Policy, and use tags to filter resources for management tasks and cost analysis reports.
The foundation of any storage solution in Azure is the storage account. This account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your data, accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Before you can create any storage services like blobs or file shares, you must first provision a storage account. The exam requires you to understand the different types of storage accounts, primarily General-purpose v2 (GPv2), BlockBlobStorage, and FileStorage. GPv2 is the standard and most common type, supporting all the latest features and storage services like blobs, files, queues, and tables.
When creating a storage account, you have several critical configuration choices to make that will be tested on the exam. One of the most important is the performance tier: Standard or Premium. Standard storage accounts use magnetic drives (HDDs) and are suitable for a wide range of scenarios that are less sensitive to latency. Premium storage accounts use solid-state drives (SSDs) and offer high performance and low latency, making them ideal for I/O-intensive workloads like virtual machine disks. You must be able to choose the appropriate performance tier and account type based on a given scenario's requirements for performance, features, and cost.
Another crucial configuration is the data redundancy option. Azure Storage always stores multiple copies of your data to protect it from planned and unplanned events. The exam will test your knowledge of the different redundancy options available. Locally-redundant storage (LRS) is the cheapest option, replicating your data three times within a single data center. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates your data across three different availability zones within a single region. Geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates your data to a secondary region hundreds of miles away, providing protection against regional disasters.
Finally, you should be familiar with read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) and geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS). RA-GRS builds on GRS by providing read-only access to the data in the secondary region, which is useful for maximizing availability. GZRS is the most resilient option, combining the high availability of ZRS with the regional disaster protection of GRS. For the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam, you must be able to compare these options based on their level of durability, availability, and cost, and select the correct one to meet specific business requirements for data protection.
Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud, optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. This can include documents, images, videos, and application installers. A key concept you need to master is the structure within a blob storage account, which consists of containers that act like folders to organize your blobs. The exam will expect you to know how to create and manage containers and set their public access level, which can be configured as private, blob (anonymous read access for blobs only), or container (anonymous read access for containers and blobs).
A significant part of managing blob storage involves understanding and using access tiers. Azure provides three online access tiers to help you balance storage costs with access latency. The hot tier is optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently. The cool tier is designed for data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days. The archive tier is the most cost-effective option, designed for data that is rarely accessed and can tolerate several hours of retrieval latency, making it suitable for long-term backup and archival. You must know how to set the tier for a blob at upload and how to change it later.
To further optimize costs, you must be proficient with blob lifecycle management policies. These are rules-based policies that you can create to automatically transition your data between access tiers or to delete blobs at the end of their lifecycle. For example, you could create a rule that moves blobs from the hot tier to the cool tier after they haven't been accessed for 30 days, and then moves them to the archive tier after 90 days. This automation is a powerful tool for cost management, and the exam will likely present scenarios where you need to apply these policies effectively.
Another important feature is object replication for block blobs. This allows you to asynchronously copy block blobs from a source storage account to a destination account in a different region. This is different from GRS because it provides more granular control, allowing you to specify which containers to replicate. You need to understand the benefits of object replication, such as minimizing latency for read requests by serving data from a region closer to your users, and how to configure it. This feature enhances data distribution and resiliency beyond standard redundancy options.
Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) and Network File System (NFS) protocols. This means you can mount a file share in Azure and access it from your on-premises Windows, Linux, or macOS clients just like a traditional file server. The exam will test your ability to create and configure an Azure file share, including setting its size quota and choosing the appropriate performance tier, such as standard, premium, or transaction optimized, based on the expected workload and I/O patterns.
A core use case for Azure Files is to replace or supplement on-premises file servers. To facilitate this, Microsoft provides Azure File Sync, a service that allows you to centralize your file shares in Azure Files while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of an on-premises file server. It works by installing an agent on your local Windows Server, which then synchronizes its files with your Azure file share. This creates a hybrid solution that gives you local access to your data while leveraging the cloud for centralized management, backup, and disaster recovery.
A key feature of Azure File Sync that you must understand for the exam is cloud tiering. This feature transforms your on-premises server into a local cache of your Azure file share. You can set policies to automatically tier your least frequently accessed files to Azure, leaving only a pointer on the local server. When a user accesses a tiered file, the File Sync agent seamlessly recalls the data from Azure Files. This allows you to have more data on-premises than you have local storage for, effectively extending your local capacity with the cloud.
To set up Azure File Sync, you need to deploy a Storage Sync Service resource in Azure, which acts as the top-level object for managing sync relationships. You will then create a sync group, which defines the topology for syncing a set of files. A sync group contains one cloud endpoint, which is your Azure file share, and one or more server endpoints, which are paths on your registered Windows Servers. You must be familiar with this entire setup process, from installing the agent and registering the server to creating and configuring the sync group for effective file synchronization.
Security is a paramount concern for any data stored in the cloud, and the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam covers this topic extensively. The first layer of security is controlling access to the storage account itself. You should be an expert in using Azure RBAC to grant granular permissions to users, groups, and applications to manage the storage account. For data access, you can use either the storage account access keys or Azure AD credentials. You should understand that using Azure AD for authentication is the recommended best practice as it avoids sharing powerful access keys.
A crucial security mechanism for providing delegated access to resources in your storage account is the Shared Access Signature (SAS). A SAS is a URI that grants restricted access rights to Azure Storage resources for a specified period. You must know how to create different types of SAS tokens: a user delegation SAS, which is secured with Azure AD credentials; a service SAS, which is secured with the storage account key; and an account SAS, which delegates access to resources in one or more of the storage services. Understanding how to configure the permissions, start and expiry times, and allowed IP addresses for a SAS is critical.
Encrypting your data is non-negotiable for security and compliance. You need to know that Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) automatically encrypts your data at rest before it is persisted to the storage account and decrypts it when you access it. This encryption is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. For the exam, you should understand the two options for managing the encryption keys: using Microsoft-managed keys, where Microsoft handles all key management, or using customer-managed keys, where you maintain full control over the keys stored in an Azure Key Vault.
Finally, network security is a vital component of protecting your storage account. You must be proficient in configuring storage account firewalls and virtual network service endpoints. This allows you to restrict access to your storage account to only a specific set of public IP addresses or from specific subnets within an Azure Virtual Network. For the highest level of security, you should understand how to use Private Endpoints. A private endpoint assigns a private IP address from your virtual network to the storage account, ensuring that all traffic to the storage account travels over the secure Microsoft backbone network and never traverses the public internet.
Virtual machines (VMs) are the core infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering in Azure, providing on-demand, scalable computing resources. A significant portion of the exam focuses on your ability to create and configure VMs. This process begins with planning. You must be ableto select the appropriate VM size based on the workload's requirements for CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. Azure offers a wide variety of VM series (e.g., D-series for general purpose, E-series for memory-optimized, F-series for compute-optimized), and you need to understand the use cases for each to make informed decisions.
The VM deployment process itself has many configurable options that you will be tested on. You must be proficient in creating VMs using the Azure portal, PowerShell, and the Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI). You should know how to select an image from the Azure Marketplace or use a custom image, configure networking settings like virtual networks and public IP addresses, and set up administrative accounts. Furthermore, you need to understand how to attach and manage data disks, including the different disk types available: Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, and Ultra Disks, and their respective performance characteristics and use cases.
Post-deployment management is just as important as the initial setup. The Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam will test your ability to perform common administrative tasks on a running VM. This includes connecting to the VM using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for Windows or Secure Shell (SSH) for Linux, resizing the VM to a different size to scale its performance up or down, and managing its network interfaces. You should also be familiar with resetting passwords and redeploying a VM to a new host node in the Azure fabric to troubleshoot connectivity or performance issues that may arise.
A critical aspect of VM management is automation and configuration at scale. You should be familiar with using VM extensions to perform post-deployment configuration and automation tasks. For example, the Custom Script Extension can be used to run scripts on a VM to install software or configure settings after it is provisioned. Similarly, you should understand the purpose of Azure Desired State Configuration (DSC) for managing and enforcing the configuration of your Windows and Linux VMs, ensuring they remain in a consistent and compliant state over time, which is essential for maintaining a stable environment.
Ensuring that your applications remain available during planned maintenance or unplanned outages is a primary responsibility of an Azure administrator. The exam will heavily test your knowledge of Azure's high availability features for virtual machines. The most fundamental of these is the availability set. An availability set is a logical grouping of VMs that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide redundancy and availability. When you place two or more VMs in an availability set, Azure distributes them across different physical hardware, compute racks, and storage units.
Within an availability set, VMs are distributed across fault domains and update domains. A fault domain is a group of VMs that share a common power source and network switch, essentially a rack of servers. By distributing your VMs across multiple fault domains, you protect your application from a localized hardware failure, such as a power supply or network switch failure affecting a single rack. An update domain is a group of VMs and underlying physical hardware that can be rebooted at the same time. Azure sequences reboots across update domains during planned maintenance, ensuring that only one subset of your VMs is offline at any given time.
For scenarios requiring higher availability and protection against datacenter-level failures, you must understand availability zones. An availability zone is a unique physical location within an Azure region, with each zone being made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. By deploying your VMs across multiple availability zones, you can protect your applications from failures that might affect an entire datacenter. You should know how to create VMs and place them in specific availability zones within a supported region to build highly resilient and fault-tolerant application architectures.
While availability sets and zones protect against infrastructure failures, you also need a strategy for scaling your application based on demand. This is where virtual machine scale sets come in. A scale set allows you to create and manage a group of load-balanced VMs. The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule. The exam will expect you to know how to create a scale set, configure autoscale rules based on performance metrics like CPU percentage, and update the VM image used by the scale set to roll out application updates across all instances in a controlled manner.
While VMs provide maximum control, many applications can benefit from a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering like Azure App Service. App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps and APIs. You do not need to manage the underlying operating system or infrastructure. For the exam, you need to understand the concept of an App Service Plan, which defines the set of compute resources your web app runs on. You must be able to choose the appropriate pricing tier (Free, Shared, Basic, Standard, Premium, Isolated) based on the required features, performance, and scaling capabilities.
A key feature of App Service that is frequently tested is deployment slots. Deployment slots are live apps with their own hostnames, allowing you to stage a new version of your application in a production-like environment before swapping it into production. This enables you to validate your changes without impacting the production application. After testing, you can perform a swap operation, which instantly warms up the new version in the production slot and redirects traffic to it with zero downtime. You must understand how to create deployment slots, deploy code to them, and perform swap operations.
Scaling is another critical aspect of managing an App Service application. You should know the difference between scaling up and scaling out. Scaling up means increasing the resources of the App Service Plan itself, for example, by moving to a higher pricing tier with more CPU and memory. Scaling out means increasing the number of VM instances that are running your app within the App Service Plan. The exam will expect you to know how to configure both manual scaling and autoscaling rules for an App Service Plan, allowing your application to automatically adjust its capacity to handle changes in traffic.
Finally, you need to be familiar with configuring custom domains and managing TLS/SSL certificates for your App Service apps. By default, an app is accessible at a generic subdomain, but for production use, you will want to use a custom domain name. You should know the process of mapping a custom domain to your app and securing it by uploading your own TLS certificate or using a managed certificate provided by App Service. This ensures that traffic to your application is encrypted and that users see a professional and trusted domain name in their browser.
The Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam also touches upon modern application platforms, including containers. Containers provide a lightweight way to package and run an application and all its dependencies in an isolated environment. You should have a foundational understanding of two key Azure services for running containers: Azure Container Instances (ACI) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). ACI is the simplest and fastest way to run a single container in Azure without having to manage any virtual machines or higher-level orchestration services. It is ideal for simple applications, task automation, and build jobs.
You should know how to deploy a container to ACI using a container image from a public repository like Docker Hub or a private one like Azure Container Registry. The exam may present scenarios where you need to choose between ACI and other compute services. The key differentiator for ACI is its simplicity and per-second billing model, making it a cost-effective choice for workloads that can run in isolation and do not require complex orchestration features. Understanding the basic commands to create and manage container groups in ACI is an essential skill to demonstrate your proficiency.
For more complex, microservices-based applications, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the preferred solution. AKS is a fully managed container orchestration service based on the open-source Kubernetes system. It simplifies the deployment and management of a Kubernetes cluster by offloading the operational overhead of managing the control plane to Azure. Your responsibility as an administrator is to manage the agent nodes, which are the VMs where your application containers run. The exam will expect you to understand the high-level architecture of an AKS cluster, including concepts like nodes, pods, and services.
While you are not expected to be a Kubernetes expert for the AZ-104 exam, you do need to understand the administrative tasks associated with managing an AKS cluster. This includes scaling the number of agent nodes in the cluster to accommodate application demand, upgrading the Kubernetes version of the cluster to stay current with new features and security patches, and configuring networking options. Familiarity with how to deploy a simple application to an AKS cluster and monitor its health will provide you with the foundational knowledge needed to handle container-related questions on the exam.
The fundamental building block of any network in Azure is the Virtual Network, or VNet. A VNet is a logical representation of your own network in the cloud. It provides an isolated environment for your Azure resources to communicate with each other, the internet, and your on-premises networks. The exam will require you to be proficient in creating and configuring VNets. This includes defining a private IP address space for the VNet using Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation. You must understand how to choose an appropriate address space that does not overlap with your other networks, a common requirement in hybrid environments.
Once a VNet is created, you must segment it into one or more subnets. A subnet is a range of IP addresses within the VNet. Dividing a VNet into subnets allows you to organize and secure your resources more effectively. For example, you might place your web servers in a public-facing subnet and your database servers in a separate, more restricted subnet. The exam will test your ability to calculate subnet address ranges and understand that Azure reserves the first four and the last IP address in each subnet for its own use. You must be able to design a subnetting scheme that meets the needs of your application architecture.
A key aspect of VNet management is IP addressing. You need to understand how Azure assigns private IP addresses to resources within a VNet. By default, resources are assigned a dynamic IP address from the subnet's address range, which may change over time. However, for certain resources like domain controllers or DNS servers, you will need a static IP address that does not change. You must know how to configure a static private IP address for a resource, such as a virtual machine's network interface card (NIC), to ensure consistent connectivity.
In addition to private IPs, you will often need to assign public IP addresses to your resources to make them accessible from the internet. The exam will expect you to know how to create and associate public IP address resources with services like virtual machines, load balancers, and VPN gateways. You should understand the difference between the Basic and Standard SKU for public IPs, including their features related to availability zones and security. Knowing how to manage the lifecycle of a public IP, from creation to disassociation, is a core administrative task you will be tested on.
Securing your virtual network is one of the most important responsibilities of an Azure administrator. The primary tool for network traffic filtering in Azure is the Network Security Group (NSG). An NSG is a stateful firewall that contains a list of security rules that allow or deny network traffic to resources connected to Azure VNets. The exam will require you to have a deep understanding of how NSGs work. You must know how to create NSGs and associate them with either a subnet or a specific network interface, and understand the implications of applying them at both levels.
NSG rules are processed in order by priority number, from lowest to highest. You need to be an expert in creating inbound and outbound security rules, specifying components like the source and destination IP address or service tag, the protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP), and the port range. You must also understand the default rules that exist in every NSG, which include rules that allow traffic within a VNet and from the Azure Load Balancer, as well as a final "DenyAll" rule with the lowest priority. Troubleshooting connectivity issues often involves analyzing the effective security rules applied to a network interface.
For more centralized network security and advanced capabilities, you should be familiar with Azure Firewall. Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. You should understand its key features, such as the ability to create application and network rule collections, built-in threat intelligence filtering, and integration with Azure Monitor for logging and analytics. The exam may present scenarios where you need to decide between using NSGs and Azure Firewall.
Another security layer you should understand is Azure DDoS Protection. This service protects your Azure resources from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. You should know the difference between the Basic service tier, which is enabled by default for free, and the Standard tier, which provides enhanced mitigation capabilities. The Standard tier offers protection tailored to your specific VNet resources, provides attack analytics and metrics, and is backed by an SLA. Knowing when to recommend and enable DDoS Protection Standard is an important aspect of designing a secure and resilient network architecture.
Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical service for translating human-readable domain names into machine-readable IP addresses. The Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam will test your understanding of how DNS works within Azure. By default, Azure provides an internal DNS service for all resources within a VNet, allowing them to resolve each other's hostnames automatically. However, for more advanced scenarios, you will need to use Azure DNS, which is a hosting service for DNS domains that provides name resolution using Microsoft Azure infrastructure. You must know how to create a public DNS zone to host the DNS records for your internet-facing domain.
Within your Azure DNS zone, you will need to manage various types of DNS records. The exam will expect you to be proficient in creating common record types such as A records (for mapping a name to an IPv4 address), AAAA records (for IPv6), CNAME records (for creating an alias), and MX records (for mail exchange). Understanding the purpose of each record type and how to configure them in the Azure portal or via command-line tools is a fundamental skill. You should also be familiar with the concept of a record set, which is a collection of records in a zone that have the same name and type.
For name resolution between your on-premises network and your Azure VNets, or between different VNets, you will often need a more sophisticated solution. This is where Azure Private DNS zones come in. A private DNS zone provides a reliable and secure DNS service for your virtual networks without the need to create and manage a custom DNS solution. You should know how to create a private DNS zone, link it to one or more VNets, and manage the DNS records within it. This service enables you to use your own custom domain names rather than the Azure-provided names for your internal resources.
Troubleshooting name resolution issues is a common task for an administrator. You need to understand the name resolution order that Azure uses. When a resource in a VNet tries to resolve a name, it first checks its local hosts file, then the Azure-provided DNS service, and finally any custom DNS servers you have configured for the VNet. Knowing this sequence is crucial for diagnosing why a particular resource might be unable to connect to another. Being ableto use tools like nslookup or dig to test and validate DNS configurations is a practical skill that supports your theoretical knowledge.
As your Azure environment grows, you will likely need to connect multiple virtual networks. The primary way to do this is with VNet peering. VNet peering enables you to seamlessly connect two Azure virtual networks. Once peered, the virtual networks appear as one for connectivity purposes. Traffic between virtual machines in the peered VNets uses the Microsoft backbone infrastructure and never traverses the public internet. The exam will require you to know how to set up VNet peering between two VNets in the same region, as well as global VNet peering to connect VNets in different Azure regions.
When you configure VNet peering, you need to be aware of several important settings. One of these is the option to allow forwarded traffic, which is necessary if you are using a network virtual appliance (NVA) in one VNet to route traffic from the other. Another key setting is gateway transit. If one of your peered VNets has a VPN gateway, you can enable gateway transit to allow the other VNet to use that gateway to access on-premises resources. You must understand how to configure these settings to build more complex hub-and-spoke network topologies, a common design pattern in Azure.
For connecting your on-premises network to your Azure VNet, you have two primary options: a VPN Gateway or Azure ExpressRoute. A VPN Gateway sends encrypted traffic between your Azure VNet and your on-premises location over the public internet. The exam will test your ability to create and configure the necessary components for a site-to-site VPN, which includes the virtual network gateway, the local network gateway (representing your on-premises VPN device), and the connection object that links them together. You should understand the difference between policy-based and route-based VPNs.
For higher bandwidth and more reliable connections, you can use Azure ExpressRoute. ExpressRoute lets you create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure that is on your premises or in a colocation environment. These connections do not go over the public internet and offer more reliability, faster speeds, and lower latencies than typical internet connections. While the AZ-104 exam does not require you to be an ExpressRoute expert, you should understand its fundamental purpose, its different connectivity models (cloud exchange, point-to-point, any-to-any), and when it is the appropriate choice over a standard VPN connection.
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