I’ve been using AWS for years in my own business, mainly S3 for content delivery. However, as a longtime Windows Admin, I wanted to dig into Azure because it was something new, I like learning new stuff! Plus I felt like it would be a good way to build upon my MCSA skills.
Though it isn’t a one to one similarity with Active Directory, a lot of the concepts within Azure are very similar. Tennents, directories, and resource groups, remind me of Forests, domains, and OUs (organizational units). As I said, they aren’t exactly the same, but the concept and knowledge of how they all separate and organize things transfers quite nicely. Of course throw subscriptions in there, which is another form of organization and separation in Azure.
Anyway, if you can’t get hands on with Azure in your job, Microsoft has plenty of labs you can go through for free to get your hands dirty. They map them out by certification, learning paths, or simply by individual modules on subjects you want to learn.
You get access to 10 “sandbox” sessions a day. At first I thought they were 1 hour each, but I’ve noticed different times when starting them up. So maybe it depends on the lab you’re doing, or maybe there is a set time and it just counts down in the background daily.
All I know is that if your time runs out, you have a total of 10 sandboxes that you can access to learn the Azure portal or for using the Azure Cloud Shell to try Azure CLI and Azure Powershell commands. I find myself spending quite a bit of time going through these labs, along with simply trying things out in my own Azure account.
Sure there are plenty of premium/paid options for learning Azure and getting access to labs, and I enjoy those as well! I just think it is super cool that Microsoft is providing such high quality training material for free. Of course they want as many people to learn and use their technology as possible….but I’m not going to complain.
I’ll probably share more of my learning and exploration in Azure in the future, but I definitely wanted to share this resource with those who may not be aware just how complete the training can be.
It is definitely worth taking a look at in my opinion.
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