Azure AZ-900 case studies
Azure AZ-900 · Put your knowledge to work in context.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals is a beginner-level Microsoft certification (listed product: Azure; role: Administrator) for technology professionals who want to demonstrate foundational knowledge of cloud concepts in general and Microsoft Azure in particular. Microsoft describes it as a common starting point in a journey toward a career in Azure. The Azure AZ-900 case studies are 5 cases and about 3,592 words.
1Nightly Batch vs. Black Friday Storefront
Northwind Retail runs a nightly reconciliation batch that starts at 22:00 and uses exactly 8 vCPUs for 6 hours, every night, for four years - the workload never varies. Its public storefront is the opposite: 40x normal traffic during a 72-hour Black Friday window, near-idle the rest of the year, and marketing cannot predict the peak to within a factor of two.
675 words, about 3 min2The 99.95% Promise That the Architecture Cannot Keep
Fabrikam sells payroll software to 900 corporate customers under a contract guaranteeing 99.95% monthly availability, with service credits if it is missed. The service is a single-region Azure App Service deployment (published SLA 99.95%) that calls Azure SQL Database (published SLA 99.99%) synchronously on every single request, with no caching and no second region.
663 words, about 3 min3Data Residency, Region Pairs, and the Zone Assumption
Banco Verde is regulated such that all customer account data must remain physically inside Brazil. The team has selected Brazil South as its primary region and proposes two things: (a) a zone-redundant web tier, and (b) geo-redundant storage (GRS) for the transaction archive, arguing that 'GRS replicates the data to another zone in the same region, which also gives us the zone redundancy for free.' Separately, a latency-sensitive trading component must respond in under 20 ms from the São Paulo office.
753 words, about 4 min4Three Workloads, One Migration, One Storage Budget
Tailspin Toys is migrating three workloads. (1) A 12-year-old ASP.NET Web Forms app that keeps session state in memory and generates printable invoices; it must run unmodified and will not be rewritten this decade.
758 words, about 4 min5Forty Subscriptions and Four Governance Symptoms
Contoso has 40 Azure subscriptions - six departments, each split into dev/test and production. Last quarter produced four symptoms: (a) 11% of resources were deployed into a region the data-residency policy forbids, discovered only at audit; (b) a production storage account holding three years of invoices was deleted by a contractor holding the Owner role on the subscription; (c) spend rose 22% with no way to attribute it, because cost-center tags are applied inconsistently; (d) the CFO asked for 'a hard budget that switches spending off at $50,000 a month.' The platform team is three people and is refusing to review deployment requests manually.
743 words, about 4 min