AZ-900 Hands-On: Azure VMs, App Service & Budgets – Part 1, Azure Fundamentals, hands-on: launch a VM, host a live website, and compare IaaS vs PaaS with App Service.
What you’ll learn
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Launch a Linux virtual machine in the Azure portal from an empty subscription, and connect to it over SSH from Windows or macOS.
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Install a web server on that machine and serve a real page on the public internet, at an address you can send to somebody.
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Read a network security group’s rules, and open exactly one port on purpose instead of opening everything until something works.
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Set a cost budget with an alert before you create anything, then delete every resource you built so nothing keeps billing quietly.
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Describe what a virtual machine is actually made of: size, image, disks, network interface, and private versus public IP addresses.
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Deploy a website on Azure App Service with no machine to look after, and say plainly when PaaS is the better answer than IaaS.
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Explain the Azure resource hierarchy — account, subscription, resource group, resource — and where management groups sit above it.
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Recognise the compute, networking and cost topics AZ-900 asks about, in the exam’s own skills-measured wording.
Course Description
One workload. Built by you, end to end.
Most AZ-900 preparation asks you to memorise descriptions of things you have never touched. This course does the opposite. You start from an empty Azure subscription and finish with a Linux virtual machine that you created, connected to over SSH, turned into a web server, and put on the public internet at an address you can send to somebody.
Along the way something breaks — on purpose. Your page refuses to load, and nothing you did was wrong. Finding out why is how you learn what a network security group actually is, and why “open everything until it works” is the habit to avoid.
The whole arc:
- The map you are inside: account, subscription, resource group, resource
- A cost budget and its alert, set before you create a single thing
- A Linux VM: size, image, disks, network interface, public and private addresses
- SSH from Windows or macOS — keys, not passwords
- A web server, a door that is shut, and the one rule that opens it
- The same job the easy way: a live website on Azure App Service, with no machine to look after
- IaaS and PaaS side by side, judged from having built both
- A full clean-up, on camera, so nothing keeps running behind your back
What you need
If you want to follow along on the hands-on labs, you would need an Azure **free** account; we create one together, right after we start the course. The free tier covers everything here.
No prior Azure experience is assumed. No programming. No Linux. If you can use a browser, you can do this.
Who this course is for:
- AZ-900 candidates who have read the theory and never once touched the portal.
- Complete beginners who want to find out whether the cloud is approachable before committing to a full certification course.
- IT and non-IT professionals who need to talk about Azure compute, networking and cost from first-hand experience rather than from a summary.
- Anyone who wants one Azure workload built end to end — created, connected, served, secured, budgeted, and then deleted.
