AZ-900 study guide: what to learn, in what order, and how to test yourself

AZ-900 is Microsoft's entry-level Azure exam. It assumes no cloud experience. This guide lays out the topics, a reading order, and a way to check yourself before you book the exam. It follows the structure of the OmniLearn AZ-900 course.

What the exam covers

Microsoft groups the exam into three areas: cloud concepts, Azure architecture and services, and Azure management and governance. The current skills list, the pass mark and the exam length are on Microsoft's certification page, which is the reference if anything here differs. Our course cuts the same ground into twelve modules:

1. Understand what the cloud is
2. Measure what the cloud brings
3. Tell IaaS, PaaS and SaaS apart
4. Find your way around Azure's architecture
5. Choose where to run your applications
6. Connect your resources with Azure networking
7. Store and migrate your data
8. Control who can access what
9. Estimate and monitor your costs
10. Govern your resources and prove compliance
11. Deploy and manage your resources
12. Monitor what is running

Topics are not equal in size. In our course, "Control who can access what" is the longest module (11 lessons), followed by "Choose where to run your applications" (9). The mock exam is a single lesson.

A study order for beginners

1. Vocabulary first (modules 1 to 3). Shared responsibility, public, private and hybrid cloud, pay-as-you-go. Everything later reuses these words.
2. Map of Azure (module 4). Subscriptions, resource groups, regions and availability zones. Learn how an account is organised before touching services.
3. Services (modules 5 to 7). Virtual machine, container or function; networking; storage. For each one, ask what problem it solves and who manages what.
4. Identity and security (module 8). Microsoft Entra ID and role-based access control.
5. Money and rules (modules 9 and 10). Estimating a bill before deploying; tags, locks and policies.
6. Operations (modules 11 and 12). Deploying, managing and monitoring.

Do the labs, not only the reading

Reading about a virtual machine and creating one are different things. At minimum, repeat these once: create a virtual machine, filter its traffic, publish a file to Blob Storage, and estimate a bill with the Azure pricing calculator. To redo the labs at home you need a free Azure account; Microsoft asks for a card at sign-up.

How to know you are ready

• Review with spaced repetition. Our course has 142 flashcards.
• Sit a full mock exam under time pressure. Ours has 180 questions and is scored out of 1000.
• Re-read the modules where you lost the most points, then sit it again.

If you fail the real exam, Microsoft allows a retake 24 hours after the first attempt. Later retakes wait longer, and the details are in its retake policy.

What a course certificate is, and is not

Finishing the OmniLearn course gives an OmniLearn certificate with a code anyone can check online. It is not a Microsoft certification and does not replace the official exam.

Where to start

The first two lessons of each course open without an account. The AZ-900 course takes about 10 hours, is taught in French, and costs 39 USD once, with lifetime access and a refund within 14 days as long as no paid lesson has been opened.

See the AZ-900 course

Also see the Cloud and AI basics path.