I wrote Cloud Administration in Practice for anyone preparing for the Microsoft Azure Administrator (AZ-104) exam. It’s a free, 472-page book with hands-on labs and original practice questions. You can read it in order or start with the topic that gave you trouble on your last practice test.
What you’ll practise
The early chapters cover identity and governance. You’ll trace how a role assignment reaches a resource, see what changes when you narrow its scope, and use Azure Policy to investigate a configuration that falls outside your rules.
The networking, storage, and compute chapters follow the path from a client to a workload. You’ll work with DNS and private endpoints, choose how to protect stored data, and inspect what a Bicep deployment will create. Later chapters use monitoring and recovery exercises to answer two practical questions: what happened, and can you get the data back?
Inside the capstone: one VM, one blob, three checks
In the capstone, a Linux VM uses its managed identity to reach a private Blob Storage container. Imagine the VM can’t read the blob. Before changing any permissions, what would you check?
Start on the VM and resolve the storage account’s normal Blob hostname. Does it point to the private endpoint’s address? Then check which identity the application is using and where that identity has its blob data role. Finally, inspect the Blob service logs for evidence of the request, allowing time for the records to arrive. Each check answers a different question and helps you choose the next one.
A way to use the book this week
Choose one topic and answer its chapter questions before reading the explanations. Pick one answer you were unsure of, write down the result you expect, and try the relevant exercise in a practice subscription. After cleanup, change one detail in the scenario and explain whether your answer still holds.
For more practice, the companion repository has 28 guided labs and 1,250 practice questions. Start with the book if you want a concept explained, or open the lab catalog if you already know what you want to try.
Comments