Management & Governance (30%)

Cost Management

Azure provides tools to monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud spending. Cost management is 30% of the AZ-900 exam, making it the most heavily weighted domain alongside architecture.

• Azure Pricing Calculator — Estimate costs before deployment.
• Azure Cost Management — Monitor, allocate, and optimize costs.
• Azure Advisor recommendations — Cost optimization suggestions.
• Reserved Instances — Commit to 1 or 3 years for up to 72% savings.
• Azure Hybrid Benefit — Use existing on-premises licenses in Azure.
• Spot VMs — Use spare capacity for up to 90% discount (can be evicted).

Service Level Agreements

SLAs define the guaranteed uptime for Azure services. Different services have different SLA levels. Higher SLA means higher availability but potentially higher cost.

• Single instance VM SLA — 99.9% (managed disks).
• Availability Set SLA — 99.95% (2+ fault domains).
• Availability Zone SLA — 99.99% (2+ zones).
• Region pair SLA — 99.999% (geo-redundant).

Azure Policy

Azure Policy enforces organizational standards and compliance. It evaluates resources against defined rules and prevents non-compliant resources from being created.

• Initiative — A group of related policies.
• Policy definition — The rule that evaluates a resource.
• Effect — What happens when a policy is violated (Deny, Audit, DeployIfNotExists, Modify).
• Compliance state — Whether a resource is compliant or non-compliant.
• Remediation — Automatically fix non-compliant resources.

Role-Based Access Control

RBAC controls who has access to Azure resources and what they can do with them. It follows the principle of least privilege — grant only the minimum permissions needed.

• Owner — Full access to all resources and can delegate access.
• Contributor — Can create and manage all resources but cannot grant access.
• Reader — Can view resources but cannot modify them.
• User Access Administrator — Can manage user access to resources.
• Custom roles — Define specific permissions for unique requirements.

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from Azure and on-premises environments. It provides visibility into application performance and resource health.

• Metrics — Numerical time-series data for monitoring.
• Logs — Log Analytics workspace for querying and analysis.
• Alerts — Automated notifications when conditions are met.
• Workbooks — Interactive reports and dashboards.
• Application Insights — Application performance monitoring.
• Network Watcher — Network monitoring and diagnostics.

Governance Tools

Key Terms to Memorize

• Management group — Hierarchy for organizing subscriptions.
• Subscription — Boundary for billing and resource limits.
• Resource Group — Logical container for related resources.
• Tag — Key-value pair for organizing and cost allocation.
• Lock — Prevent accidental deletion or modification of resources.
• Azure Arc — Manage resources across on-premises and multi-cloud.