Short, honest write-ups of the ideas that come up in interviews and on the job. Each one teaches the concept properly, cites the Microsoft documentation, and points back to the class that drills it until it sticks.
A practitioner's map between the three clouds — subscription vs account vs project, resource group vs folder, RBAC vs IAM, VNet vs VPC, Blob vs S3 — and the handful of places the 1:1 mapping quietly breaks.
Azure CLI is the az command tool you install and run anywhere. Azure Cloud Shell is a browser-based, pre-authenticated shell in the portal that already has the CLI installed. They aren't competitors — here's how they fit together, with a comparison table.
Azure PaaS vs IaaS vs SaaS, explained by who manages what — with real services (Virtual Machines, App Service, Microsoft 365), a side-by-side table, and how to pick one under a cost and control tradeoff.
PaaS in Azure means you deploy your code or data and Microsoft runs the servers, OS, patching, and scaling underneath. App Service, Azure SQL Database, Functions, and Container Apps are the headline examples. Here's the full list, grouped by what they host, and how to know when PaaS is the right call over a VM.
Yes — pick the ephemeral 'no storage account required' session and Cloud Shell opens with no mounted file share. The catch: nothing persists. Here's how to launch it, and when the throwaway shell is the right call versus the persistent mount.
The three service models by who manages what, with a clear comparison table and real Azure/AWS examples — VMs, App Service, Microsoft 365.
Free vs paid, and the most cost-effective path: Microsoft Learn and a free account cover the content; paid mainly buys structure, mentorship, and a deadline.
The three exam domains, a 14-day study plan, and the real tactic: drill timed practice tests to the mid-80s before you book. Confirm live specifics on Microsoft Learn.
The first time you build in the cloud, you click: open the portal, fill in forms, press Create. It works. Then someone asks you to build the exact same thing again — and that is where code beats clicking.
They share a portal and get confused constantly, but they answer opposite questions. Backup is a time machine for your data; Site Recovery is a standby engine that keeps the whole workload running when a site goes down. Most estates need both.
A datacenter losing power and a whole geography going offline are two different disasters. A zone protects you from one, a second region from the other — here is which insurance your workload actually needs.
Three services move data between components, and picking wrong makes a system lose things it needed or over-engineer things it didn't. It gets easy once you learn one distinction: an event is not a message.
You pick one in every create dialog and never think about it again. But the subscription is three boundaries wearing one name — management, billing, and scale — and where you draw it shapes everything inside.
Not a folder, not a billing bucket, not a security boundary — although it touches all three. A resource group is a lifecycle boundary, and once that clicks, half of Azure's organizational rules stop feeling arbitrary.
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