AZ-900

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)-based files that define the infrastructure and configuration of an Azure project. A way to declare objects, types, names, and properties that can then become checked into source control and managed as a code file. These can be treated like infrastructure as code. Defines an application's infrastructure requirements for a repeatable deployment that is done in a consistent manner. A validation step ensures that all resources can be created in the proper order based on dependencies, in parallel and idempotent.

Azure Reservations

Provides a significant discount for use of Micosoft-based products on Azure cloud by committing to one-year or three-year plans.

Azure Dedicated Host

Provides physical servers that act as a host to one or more Azure virtual machines.

Azure Test Plans

A DevOps solution within Azure, the solution offering provides all the necessary capabilities to successfully test applications. Developers can also create and run manual test plans, generate automated tests, and collect feedback from users with the solution set available.

Docker

A PaaS-based container engine that uses the Linux kernel to create containers on top of an operating system.

Azure Active Directory

A cloud-based identity service in Azure that allows a user to authenticate and authorize users. Provides services for verifying identity and access to applications and resources. Provides services such as authentication and single sign-on (SSO).

Azure Sentinel

A cloud-based security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that helps investigate threats with artificial intelligence and hunt for suspicious activities.

Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

A collection of documentation, implementation guidance, best practices, and tools created by Microsoft employees, business partners, and customers that are proven to accelerate your cloud adoption journey.

Availability Set

A collection of virtual machines managed together that can provide application redundancy and reliability. These ensure that at least one virtual machine environment stays available during a maintenance event, planned or unplanned. Only virtual machines instances with managed disks can be created using managed versions of these.

Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI)

A command-line interface that allows a user to manage Azure services from key operating systems such as WindowsOS, macOS, and Linux. This requires a user to install a set of extensions and is available across Azure services. An executable program with which a user can execute commands in Bash that call the Azure REST API.

Azure PowerShell

A command-line interface to manage Azure services from the desktop. This supports the use of automated scripting for repetitive tasks to reduce administrative burdens. Leverages lightweight commands known as cmdlets.

Cognitive Services

A compilation of machine learning solutions and algorithms that Microsoft has developed within the Azure platform to solve problems using artificial intelligence. These help users integrate machine learning-based intelligence into their applications.

Cloud Bursting

A configuration that is set up between a private cloud and a public cloud should the resource capacity exceed 100% capacity in the private cloud, overflow traffic is sent to the public cloud.

Foundational Region (Foundational Services)

A core service that is available across every Azure region deemed generally available.

Geography

A defined boundary for data residency that contains two or more regions. The boundaries may be within or beyond national borders, which includes countries or even continents. These are influenced by tax regulation. Each on has a minimum of one region.

Cloud Computing

A delivery model for computing resources where servers, applications, storage, databases, network connectivity, security, and other resources are made available as a service for consumption by a service provider over the Internet.

Azure Cost Management

A free SaaS-based solution in Azure allowing users to monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud spend in one or more cloud environments. Allows you to create and manage cost and usage budgets by monitoring resource demand trends, consumption rates, and cost patterns. It also allows you to use historical data to generate reports and forecast future usage and expenditures.

Git

A free and open source distributed version control system.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL

A full managed-as-a-service relational database service based on the open source Postgres database engine that is known for handling enterprise-class mission-critical workloads with predictable performance, security, high availability, and dynamic scalability.

Azure App Service

A fully managed platform that allows a user to build, deploy, and scale web apps in Azure. Provides PaaS options that support HTTP-based web application hosting, REST APIs, and mobile back-end support.

Azure Database for MySQL

A fully managed relational database service in Azure powered by the MySQL community edition.

Billing Zones

A geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes.

Cluster

A group of connected computers, also referred to as nodes, that work together as a single system.

Availability Zone

A high-availability location offering that protects your applications and data from data center failures. Considered a dedicated, unique location, these are physical locations within an Azure region. Each consists of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. Are primarily for virtual machines, managed disks, load balancers, and SQL databases.

Circuits

A logical connection between your on-premises infrastructure and Microsoft Cloud Services that is configurable in ExpressRoute.

Azure Firewall

A managed, cloud-based network security service that offers protection to virtual network resources.

HDInsight

A managed-data analytics service offered by Microsoft that allows a user to run Apache Hadoop-based services such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache Kafka, and Apache HBase in Azure Cloud.

Apache Spark

A parallel processing framework that supports in-memory processing that can boost performance of big-data analytic applications in Azure by combining big data analysis of applications.

Azure Service Health

A personalized dashboard that provides notifications, guidance, and technical support guidance where there are known issues, updates, or planned maintenance issues that will impact Azure resources. This tool is specific to the regions and resources you are utilizing. After an outage, this provides official incident reports called root cause analysis (RCA) reports.

GitHub Actions

A platform within GitHub to automate, customize, and execute software development workflows right inside a GitHub repository. With this users can create event-driven workflows within the GitHub environment.

Data Protection Addendum

A policy document provided by Microsoft that explores their obligations with respect to the processing and security of customer data and personal data in connection with the online services, notably Azure.

Azure Defender

A premium Microsoft security solution that offers alerts and advanced threat protection for virtual machines, SQL databases, containers, web applications, and endpoint protection for a network when enabled. This tool also offers network hardening, regulatory compliance dashboards, and protection for all non-Azure servers when connected. Considered an extended detection and response (XDR) solution for threat protection.

Alternate Region

A region that uses Azure's existing footprint within a data residency boundary. Under these conditions, the original recommended region may also exist. These help reduce latency. They also supply a secondary region for disaster recovery needs, although they are not used to support Availability Zones.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

A regulatory framework that provides guidance on how any organization or individual who conducts business and handles personal information should protect data for those that live in the European Union (EU).

Azure Functions

A serverless solution allowing you to build task-based applications without having to support all the cloud infrastructure and resources. An event-driven, serverless compute option that doesn't require maintaining virtual machines or containers. Allows you to run code as a service without having to manage the underlying platform or infrastructure.

Azure Files

A service that allows a user to create a virtual file share in the cloud similar to a local share drive. Offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via industry-standard SMB and NFS protocols.

Azure Repos

A set of version control tools within Azure DevTest that is used to manage code.

Apache Hadoop (Hadoop)

A software library framework that supports the distributed processing of large datasets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. This cluster type leverages the MapReduce programming model, a popular open source framework that uses HDFS or YARN resource management. You can process and analyze batch data using parallel compute capacity.

Azure Blueprints

A solution package used to create standards and requirements for governing Azure services, security, and design in a reusable manner to ensure consistency and compliance. Simplifies large scale Azure deployments by packaging key environment artifacts, such as Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, role-based access controls (RBAC), and policies, into a single definition. You can easily apply these to new subscriptions and environments.

Conditional Access

A tool integrated within Azure Active Directory that brings authentication and authorization signals together to make decisions and enforce organizational policies.

Azure Security Center

A unified infrastructure security management system that focuses on your data by offering advanced threat protection across your hybrid workloads in the cloud, either in Azure or on-premises.

Elastic Pools

A way of managing Azure SWL Database where one can apply a simple, cost-effective solution for managing and scaling multiple databases with unpredictable usage demands.

Governance

A way to maintain control over your applications and resources.

Azure Portal

A web-based, graphical-unified console alternative to the command-line tool to manage all Azure Cloud capabilities. This is designed for resiliency, low access latency, and high availability because it is available in every data center.

Georeplication

Ability to automatically replicate content such as blobs, tables, and queues within a regional pair.

Elasticity

Ability to automatically scale hosted resources as needed and on demand against configured parameters.

Fault Tolerance

Ability to continue operating in the event of an operational failure.

Azure DevTest Labs

Allows a developer or members of a team to self-manage virtual machines images and PaaS resources without requiring approvals or built-in workflow requirements. Helps automate the management process of building, setting up, and taking down a virtual machine environment that might contain one or more configuration of your project. Quickly provision development and test environments.

Azure Monitor

Allows a user to review the availability and performance of their applications and services in Azure. A platform for collecting data on your resources, analyzing that data, visualizing the information, and even acting on the results. The data can be used to trigger autoscaling. Application Insights, VM insights, Container insights and Log Analytics are features of this.

ExpressRoute

Allows an organization to extend its on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a private connection using a connectivity provider. Uses a Microsoft Enterprise edge (MSEE) router. These connections offer more reliability, faster speeds, consistent latencies, and higher security than typical connections over the Internet.

Artifacts

Allows developers to easily discover, install, and publish NuGet, npm, and Maven packages using Azure DevOps. These packages can be fully integrated using package management through CI/CD pipelines.

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure's own NoSQL database platform intended for modern enterprise application development. Users can build applications with guaranteed low latency and high availability across multiple geographies. It is possible to migrate Cassandra, MongoDB, and other workloads to the cloud using this. A PaaS offering.

Azure Machine Learning

Azure-based cloud service offering allowing users to build, test, and deploy predictive analytics solutions using their own datasets.

Azure Sovereign Regions

Dedicated physical and logical network-isolated cloud infrastructure to ensure data protection. There are three sovereign regions besides public cloud: U.S. Government, Germany, and China.

Database Transaction Unit (DTU)

Describes a performance unit metric for the Azure SWL Database that is a way to charge individuals for usage. This is a mixture of four metrics: CPU, Memory, Data I/O, and Log I/O. There are three different service tiers; each one offers different scalability and features.

Autoscale

Enables a user to apply the right number of resources to handle the load of an application. A user can specify a minimum and maximum number of instances to run and add or remove VMs automatically based on a set of rules.

General Availability (GA)

Features that have been evaluated and tested that are released to customers as part public availability for the Azure community to use, consume, and potentially purchase.

Azure Active Directory B2B

An Active Directory collaboration feature allowing external identities to connect to internal resources within your network. In other words, you can invite guests users to collaborate with your organization.

Azure Active Directory B2C

An Active Directory service that uses an identity store outside of your company. It is an authentication service for publicly facing applications.

Azure Active Directory Connect

An Active Directory solution that supports the integration of off-premises workloads with Azure identity resources. Syncs user identities between on-premises Active Directory and Azure AD. Syncs changes between both identity systems, so you can use features such as single sign-on (SSO), MFA, and self-service password reset (SSPR) in both systems.

Azure Mobile App

An Azure Portal companion to handle many of the common tasks offered form its web-based companion, including monitoring resources, deploying virtual machines, diagnosing and fixing issues, and running commands to manage Azure resources.

Azure Policy

An Azure service allowing a user to create enforceable and controllable properties for resources. A service in Azure that enables you to create, assign, and manage policies that control or audit resources.

Azure Container Instance (ACI)

An Azure-based service allowing developers to deploy containers on Azure without requiring any underlying infrastructure. With this you can run Docker containers on-demand in a managed, serverless Azure environment. This is PaaS-based.

Composite Service-Level Agreement

An aggregate service-level agreement support level since there is support across multiple services supporting applications, each with different availability terms.

Azure Bot Services

An integrated environment that allows users to build chatbots inside of Azure.

Azure Cloud Shell

An interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell alternative built into Azure Portal for managing resources. This tool is machine and OS independent.

Azure Marketplace

An online store operated by Microsoft that offers products and services to assist those looking to deploy Microsoft Azure-related technologies.

Azure Databricks

As a serverless, PaaS-based solution, this is used for processing and transforming massive datasets as well as exploring the data through machine learning models.

Azure Pipelines

Azure DevTest-based solution that automatically builds and tests code projects for rapid deployment, making applications available to others.

DDoS Protection Defense in Depth

Azure's approach to support security protection based on dedicated monitoring and machine learning. The suite of security solution utilize DDoS protection policies tuned to an organizations virtual network, which profiles its application's normal traffic patters, intelligently detecting malicious traffic and mitigating attacks as soon as they are detected.

AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service)

Azure's open source fully managed container orchestration service. The service is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud. This allows for the deployment, scaling, and management of Docker containers and container-based applications within a clustered environment.

Archive Tier (Archive Access)

Blob storage that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 90 days. Cheapest storage price, but a user should not access their data for a minimum of 180 days to maintain optimal pricing. Use cases include compliance data, auditing data, and long-standing backups.

Compliance Documentation

Centrally located website to locate global compliance and regulatory controls Microsoft Azure complies with across all geographies.

Azure Sphere

Combined with the Azure Micro-controller Unit (MCU), along with its operating system and application platform, this IoT solution enables the creation of secured, Internet-connected devices that support the updating, controlling, monitoring, and maintenance of devices remotely.

Block Blobs

Composed of blocks and identified with a Block ID, this is optimized for uploading large amounts of data efficiently. Best for storing text and binary data. Current limits are 4.75TiB.

AI (artificial intelligence)

Computer-oriented capabilities that emulate human intelligence. Combining math and logic, the system can emulate the logic that humans use to learn new information and make decisions.

Azure Synapse Analytics

Considered the next-generation SQL Datawarehouse, this is a Platform as a Service analytics service that offers data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics either as a serverless-on-demand offering or as a provisioned resource at scale.

Append blob

Made up of blocks and is optimized for append operations. When this is modified, blocks can be added to the end of the blob only, via the Append Block operation.

Fault Domain

More than two virtual machines in an availability set that fail concurrently. This groups your VMs by common power source and network switch. This helps protect against a physical power or networking failure.

Azure DevOps

Offers a suite of developer services to plan work, to support code collaboration, and build and deploy applications.

Azure Advisor

Solution that analyzes various configurations within your Azure instances, including usage telemetry, and offers personalized, actionable recommendations. Metrics that this helps optimize include reliability, security, operational excellence, performance, and cost.

Cool Tier (Cool Access)

Storage that is optimized for storing data not accessed for at least 30 days. Use cases include media files, backup and recovery data, and short-term log files. Lower cost of using, however, access and availability are reduced. When a user must access data there is a charge.

Agility

The ability to rapidly develop, test, and launch capabilities that drive business growth at speed and scale. To deploy and configure cloud-based resources quickly as app requirements change.

Authorization

The act of granting or giving an authenticated permission the ability to act to do something.

Azure SQL Database

The cloud-computing based version of the popular Microsoft SQL Server. This is considered a Platform as a Service but can also be referred to as a Database as a Service. This allows one to host and use a relational SQL database in the cloud without requiring any infrastructure.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

The deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in an Azure subscription. You use management features, such as access control, resource locks, and resource tags, to secure and organize resources after deployment. A visual-based deployment and management service in Azure.

Disk Storage

The only type of block storage to support both Windows- and LInux- based clustered or high-availability applications using cloud-based shared-disk space. Appropriate for a solution that acts as a replacement virtual disk.

Capital Expense (CapEx)

Up-front cost, which has a value that reduces over time, often having no recurring cost after an initial spend.

Authentication

The process of proving that you are who you say you are.

Disaster Recovery

The process whereby when an outage occurs at a primary location, assuming there is redundancy in place, a failover to secondary location takes effect and takes over operations. Once primary operations are restored, the load is distributed back to its normal state.

DevOps

The union of people, process, and technology to enable continuous delivery of value to customers. This practice brings development and operations teams together to speed software delivery and make products more secure and reliable.

GitHub

The world's largest web-based open source code hosting platform for version control and collaboration, letting users work and collaborate from anywhere.

Alerts

These notify a user when an issue is discovered with infrastructure or application using your monitoring data in Azure Monitor. These help to mitigate issues before they become evident to the end user.

Cost Management

This SaaS solution allows permitted users and organizations to monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud spend in their cloud environments.

Application Insights

This is a feature within Azure Monitor that extends Application Performance Management (APM) services for developers and DevOps professionals. A feature of Azure Monitor that allows you to monitor running applications, automatically detect performance anomalies, and use built-in analytics tools to see what users do on an app.

Elastic Computing

To dynamically provision and de-provision computer capacity, which includes processing, memory, and storage resources, in order to meet changing demands.

Azure Boards

Tolos built into Azure to help teams manage cloud-based software projects. Can visualize the flow of activities for a team.

Business Analytics Tools

Tools that extract data from business systems. These tools then integrate into data repositories including data warehouses, where it can be analyzed. These range from spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel with statistical functions to sophisticated data mining and predictive features found in Power BI.

Container Storage

Type of Azure storage intended for massive amounts of unstructured data. Also referred to as blob storage.

Blob Storage

Type of Azure storage intended for massive amounts of unstructured data. Also referred to as container storage. Ideal for unstructured data, including binary files. Low storage costs and unlimited file formats make this a good location to store backups and archives. Can be reached from anywhere by using an internet connection.