As part of the AZ104 Azure Administrator Associate Exam, the next core area of knowledge is based around the Compute resources, covering various types of Virtual Machine, Disks – both Managed and Unmanaged, keeping VM’s updated and deploying them. This area also touches on the concepts of Scalable applications and Microservices running on a Container Management platform such as Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) and using Docker to create the containers that can be stored in Azure Container Instances (ACI). There is certainly a lot of new content added into these sections since the original rounds of these exams, so well worth a review. I have spent some time revisiting the Learning materials that Microsoft have put together, some interesting interactive Azure Sandbox knowledge checks as well in this series. I’m following the MS Learn resources for the AZ-104 exam that can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/az-104-manage-compute-resources/

• Create a Linux virtual machine in Azure
• Create a Windows virtual machine in Azure
• Manage virtual machines with the Azure CLI
• Add and size disks in Azure virtual machines
• Secure your Azure virtual machine disks
• Keep your virtual machines updated
• Build Azure Resource Manager templates
• Deploy Azure virtual machines from VHD templates
• Build a scalable application with virtual machine scale sets
• Protect your virtual machine settings with Azure Automation State Configuration
• Deploy and run a containerized web app with Azure App Service
• Scale an App Service web app to efficiently meet demand with App Service scale up and scale out
• Run Docker containers with Azure Container Instances
• Introduction to Azure Kubernetes Service

Great to see the same focus given to the MS Learn materials on Linux VM creation and management as there is on Windows VM’s. Really interesting subject matter around AKS which is a relatively new area that I am learning, so very interested in the Containers elements and how the end to end solution can be built and stored on Azure as well as managed and run utilising services hosted on the Azure Platform.

So, definitely some changes if you haven’t reviewed the Azure Admin exam criteria recently in the area of Compute, I would highly recommend having a look as walking through these modules today has helped me position a lot of the Compute resource Azure has to offer.

100DaysOfCloud Overview

My Main ReadMe Page is all set up with a bit about me!

The guys at 100DaysofCloud have set up the GitHub repo to be cloned and also have a great repo containing ideas and areas to collaborate on: https://github.com/100DaysOfCloud/100DaysOfCloudIdeas

My Github Journey tracker can be found here: https://github.com/jonnychipz/100DaysOfCloud

Please Watch/Star my repo and feel free to comment of contribute to anything I push! I really look forward to hearing from anyone who is going to jump on the journey around the same time as me! Lets see where I get to in 100 days!

I would encourage others to jump on this journey, I’m not sure that I will be able to commit every day for 100 days, but as long as I can complete 100 days that will be great!