Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900) Azure Management, Governance, Pricing and Trust (AZ-900) Syllabus

Azure Management, Governance, Pricing and Trust (AZ-900) syllabus — full chapter and topic list

Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics. This is the whole examinable outline for Azure Management, Governance, Pricing and Trust (AZ-900) in Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900), not a summary of it.

1. 1

   Cost Management in Azure

   3 topics

   • Factors affecting cost
     • Resource type, region and bandwidth/egress charges
     • Influence of consumption versus reservation
   • Pricing and cost estimation tools
     • Azure Pricing Calculator
     • Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
   • Microsoft Cost Management and billing
     • Budgets and cost alerts
     • Cost analysis and recommendations
2. 2

   Governance and Compliance Tools

   3 topics

   • Microsoft Purview
     • Data governance and cataloguing
   • Azure Policy
     • Policy definitions and initiatives
     • Compliance evaluation and remediation
   • Resource locks and tags
     • ReadOnly and Delete locks
     • Tagging for organisation and cost reporting
3. 3

   Monitoring and Service-Level Tools

   3 topics

   • Azure Service Health
     • Service issues, planned maintenance and health advisories
   • Azure Monitor
     • Metrics, logs and Log Analytics
     • Application Insights
     • Alerts and action groups
   • Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
     • Interpreting composite SLAs
     • Service lifecycle: preview versus general availability
4. 4

   Management and Deployment Tooling

   3 topics

   • Azure portal and Cloud Shell
     • Portal navigation and dashboards
     • Cloud Shell (Bash and PowerShell)
   • Command-line and SDK tools
     • Azure CLI
     • Azure PowerShell
   • Infrastructure as Code and automation
     • ARM templates and Bicep
     • Azure Arc for hybrid management

Azure Management, Governance, Pricing and Trust (AZ-900) flashcards for Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900)

21 of 51 cards from the Azure Management, Governance, Pricing and Trust (AZ-900) deck — real questions with worked answers.

1. What are the main factors that affect the cost of Azure resources?

   Resource type, consumption (pay-as-you-go vs reservation), maintenance/management overhead, geographic region, network traffic (especially egress bandwidth), and the subscription/billing type all affect cost.

2. Why does the Azure region you choose affect cost?

   Prices for the same service vary by region due to differing local infrastructure, energy, labour and compliance costs. Choosing a cheaper region (and minimising cross-region data transfer) can reduce spend.

3. How is data transfer (bandwidth) billed in Azure?

   Inbound data transfer (ingress) into Azure is generally free, while outbound data transfer (egress) leaving an Azure region/datacentre is charged, with rates depending on volume and destination.

4. What is the difference between pay-as-you-go pricing and a reservation in Azure?

   Pay-as-you-go charges for consumption with no upfront commitment; a reservation commits to a resource (e.g. VM) for 1 or 3 years in advance, giving a significant discount in exchange for the commitment.

5. What is the purpose of the Azure Pricing Calculator?

   It lets you estimate the cost of a proposed Azure solution before deployment by selecting and configuring services, producing an estimated monthly/annual price. It does not analyse existing or on-premises infrastructure.

6. What does the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator do?

   It estimates the cost savings of migrating an existing on-premises workload to Azure by comparing your current on-premises costs (servers, storage, networking, IT labour) against the equivalent Azure costs.

7. Which tool would you use to compare on-premises costs against Azure costs: the Pricing Calculator or the TCO Calculator?

   The TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator, because it is specifically designed to compare existing on-premises spend with the equivalent Azure cost.

8. What is Microsoft Cost Management used for?

   It is a suite of tools to monitor, allocate, analyse and optimise Azure (and multicloud) spend, including cost analysis, budgets, alerts, and recommendations to reduce cost.

9. What is the function of a budget in Microsoft Cost Management?

   A budget sets a planned spending threshold over a time period and can trigger alerts (or automated actions) when actual or forecasted spend reaches defined percentages of the threshold; it does not by itself stop resources running.

10. What is the difference between Cost Management and billing in Azure?

    Billing concerns invoices, payment methods and the account/subscription you pay through; Cost Management concerns analysing, monitoring and optimising the spend within those subscriptions.

11. What is Microsoft Cost Management cost analysis used for?

    It is an interactive tool to explore and visualise accumulated and forecasted costs, broken down by dimensions such as resource group, service, location, or tag, to understand where money is being spent.

12. What is Microsoft Purview?

    A unified data governance and compliance solution that helps organisations discover, classify, map, catalogue and manage data across on-premises, multicloud and SaaS sources.

13. Name two core capabilities provided by Microsoft Purview.

    Data governance (data discovery, classification, lineage and a unified data catalogue/map) and risk & compliance management (sensitivity labelling, data loss prevention, information protection).

14. What problem does Microsoft Purview's data map/catalogue solve?

    It automatically scans and catalogues data across an organisation so users can discover, understand the lineage of, and trust their data assets, improving governance and compliance.

15. What is Azure Policy?

    An Azure governance service that creates, assigns and manages policies to enforce rules and effects over resources, keeping them compliant with corporate standards and service-level agreements.

16. How does Azure Policy help with compliance?

    It evaluates resources against defined rules and reports which are compliant or non-compliant; it can also deny non-compliant deployments or automatically remediate them (e.g. add a missing tag).

17. What is an Azure Policy initiative (policy set)?

    A grouping of multiple related policy definitions managed together toward a single overarching goal (e.g. an entire compliance standard), simplifying assignment and tracking.

18. Does Azure Policy control what a user is allowed to do, or what resources must look like? How does this differ from RBAC?

    Azure Policy governs resource properties/configuration (what resources can exist and how they must be configured), whereas RBAC governs user permissions (what actions a user may perform).

19. What is the purpose of a resource lock in Azure?

    To prevent accidental deletion or modification of critical resources by other users, regardless of their RBAC permissions.

20. What are the two types of Azure resource lock and what does each do?

    Delete (CanNotDelete): resources can be read and modified but not deleted. ReadOnly: resources can be read but not modified or deleted.

21. At which scopes can resource locks be applied, and how do they inherit?

    Locks can be applied at the subscription, resource group, or individual resource level, and they are inherited by all child/contained resources.

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