Azure AZ-900 key terms

Delivery of computing services such as servers, storage, networking, databases, and software over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis, so you rent capacity instead of buying and maintaining hardware.

A billing approach in which you pay only for the resources you actually use, measured by usage such as compute minutes or gigabytes stored, rather than a fixed upfront cost.

Money spent upfront on physical assets such as servers, storage, and data centers that the organization owns and depreciates over several years.

Ongoing spending on services consumed as needed, such as a monthly cloud bill, recorded as a recurring business expense rather than a long-term owned asset.

Cloud services owned and operated by a third-party provider, delivered over the internet and shared among many customers using the provider's own hardware.

Cloud-style computing dedicated to a single organization, hosted either in its own data center or by a provider, giving greater control and isolation.

An environment combining public cloud with private or on-premises resources, where data and applications can move between them under shared management and identity.

A service model that rents virtualized compute, storage, and networking; the provider runs the hardware while the customer manages operating systems, middleware, and applications.

A service model providing a managed environment for building and running applications, including the operating system and runtime, so the customer focuses on code and data.

A service model delivering complete provider-managed applications over the internet, such as email or customer relationship management, used without managing any underlying infrastructure.

A model in which the provider fully manages servers, scales compute automatically in response to events, and bills only for the execution time actually consumed.

The capacity of a system to handle increased load by adding resources, either vertically by using larger machines or horizontally by adding more instances.

The ability to automatically add or remove resources to match demand, expanding during peaks and shrinking during quiet periods so costs track actual usage.

Designing a solution so it stays accessible with minimal downtime, usually by duplicating components and spreading workloads across fault domains and zones.

The plan and replicated resources that restore applications and data after a major outage, described by recovery point objective and recovery time objective targets.

A description of which security and management duties belong to the cloud provider and which belong to the customer; the split shifts across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

A geographic area containing one or more Azure data centers linked by a low-latency network, chosen to meet latency, data residency, and compliance requirements.

A physically separate group of data centers within an Azure region with independent power, cooling, and networking, used to build solutions that survive a single facility failure.

A logical container holding related Azure resources managed as a unit; every resource belongs to exactly one group, and deleting the group deletes its contents.

A billing and access boundary for Azure resources tied to an account, with its own quotas, policies, and invoices, used to separate costs and administration.

A container that organizes subscriptions so governance settings such as policies and access assignments apply consistently to many subscriptions through inheritance.

The Azure control-plane service that authenticates and processes requests from tools and APIs, then creates, updates, or deletes resources as one coordinated operation.

A logically isolated private network in Azure where resources such as virtual machines communicate securely with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks; it is divided into subnets.

A collection of rules that allow or deny inbound and outbound traffic to Azure resources, filtered by source, destination, port, and protocol.

A private, dedicated connection between an on-premises network and Azure provided through a connectivity partner, bypassing the public internet for greater privacy and consistent performance.

A managed platform for hosting web apps, APIs, and mobile back ends in which Azure handles servers, patching, and scaling while you supply the application code.

Azure's object storage service for very large amounts of unstructured data such as documents, images, and backups, held in containers inside a storage account.

Microsoft's cloud identity service that authenticates users and applications and authorizes access to Azure resources, Microsoft 365, and many third-party applications.

A governance service that compares resources with rules you define and can block noncompliant deployments or remediate existing resources to keep environments consistent.

An authorization system that assigns roles to users, groups, and service principals at a scope such as a management group, subscription, or resource, defining the actions they may perform.

A setting applied to a resource that blocks accidental changes: CanNotDelete prevents deletion, while ReadOnly prevents modification and deletion, applying regardless of role permissions until an owner removes it.

A key-value pair attached to Azure resources that stores metadata for organization, cost allocation, and automation, and that policy can require or inherit.

Azure tooling that shows and analyzes spending, forecasts future costs, creates budgets, and raises alerts so an organization can control cloud expenditure.

A service that reviews resource configuration and usage and recommends improvements in cost, reliability, security, performance, and operational excellence.

A personalized service that alerts you about Azure outages, planned maintenance, and health advisories affecting your subscriptions and the regions you use.

A platform that collects metrics and logs from Azure and on-premises resources, then supports analysis, dashboards, and alerts on that telemetry.

A security service that continuously assesses configurations for weaknesses, reports a secure score with recommendations, and detects threats across Azure and hybrid workloads.

Microsoft's published commitment to a service's availability and performance, including service credits granted if the guaranteed level is not met.