Introduction - AZ-900 Certification Course

[0:00]Hey everyone, my name is John Saville and welcome to my AZ-900, the Azure Fundamentals get certified with John Saville course. This course is designed to give you the information to pass the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam, which will give you that Azure Fundamentals Microsoft certification. This certification really shows that you have a basic understanding of cloud services and how they are provided by Microsoft Azure. I've been working with Microsoft technology about 30 years now. I started with an NTFAQ site to help answer questions about Windows. I wrote a lot of magazine articles, nine books, and now I have my YouTube channel which has a lot of information primarily about Azure, but also other Microsoft technologies as well. I'm really known for my whiteboard and demonstration presentations, which is exactly what we're going to do within this course. So we'll walk through all of the key areas of the exam. We'll understand it through whiteboarding the concepts, through demonstrating the technologies, and hopefully at the end of it, you'll go and take the exam and pass. So let's talk a little bit about the course. This is a foundational exam, which means this is a really good certification to start out with. So you're just beginning with the cloud, and you want to demonstrate some core knowledge. You need to understand the big picture, what the key capabilities are, what key considerations are, without having to know any of the details or really even knowing how to specifically use it. It is a really good first step towards other certifications that then could be part of your continuing learning journey. We could actually start off looking at the training certification poster. So, firstly, this is my YouTube channel. I create a lot of content every week. If you're looking for deep print information on any particular thing, there's probably a video on it. But if we look at the training certification poster, if we look in this far left infrastructure column, this is where the Azure Fundamentals live. This is the AZ-900. It's about mastering the basics. And once you complete this, you may want to go and look at other fundamental certifications, for example, around artificial intelligence, around data, other concepts. Or, maybe you want to go deeper into role-based exams, things like the Azure administrator certification, the Solutions Architect and other specialties. So that's the starting point for really your Azure learning. You take this exam at a testing center or you can take it at home. If you're going to take it at home, make sure you have a nice clear space to take the exam from. You'll need to take pictures of the entire area from all the different angles to show you're not cheating, and you'll need a government-issued ID, in addition to obviously, yourself being present. If you're going to take it at an exam center, give yourself plenty of time to get there, know where it is, you don't want to add stress to your day. You don't want to be shocked by the exam experience. If you've never done a Microsoft exam before, there's actually a sandbox available, so you can try out, well, what's the exam going to be like? If we jump back over here for a second, and all these links are in the video description, but in the main document for the Azure Fundamentals, if you scroll down to prepare for the exam, and then practice for the exam, one of the things you have here is Experience Demo. So this will launch a sandbox that will give you the exact same computer-based interface you'll see in the exam. So you should try that out and just get familiar with all the different aspects so you're not surprised during the exam at all. Now, the basic structure of this course mirrors that of the exam itself. We're going to look at the skills measured, the different study areas that help us get those skills, and we're going to pretty closely align with exactly the same structure as the exam. Now, some of the things may be slightly different. I do update different lessons of this course over time. So some of them are old or newer than others, because there have been changes or there haven't been changes. But if we go and look at the breakdown of what you're going to cover, we can see from the document it talks about, well, currently, there are three key areas, describe cloud concepts, describe Azure architecture and services, and describe Azure management and governance. Then for each of those major areas, it breaks it down into particular types of skill that you're going to need to know. And so I'm going to break the course down into really mapping those same types of things. Make sure after you've done the learning, take the practice assessment. It's free. So you can go through and really understand that. It gives you details about what the exam is. So it's 45 minutes. It is not open book because this is a fundamentals exam. The main page gives you information on how to schedule. There is a study guide. There's also as part of all of these different pieces of information, the skills you're going to cover, a change log available to you. So it's just a really great set of information available. And the other thing you want to do in addition to this is there is a Microsoft Azure Fundamentals course. This is free. And it will again walk you through all of the different aspects that you need to understand. So there's lots of great resources available to you. You can also go and get a free subscription, which gives you some nice initial credit, but also a certain amount of free services every month for the first year, and then other services that are always free. So you don't even really have to pay any money to start and get going with this. So that's the introduction to the course. Now let's get on with the learning.