Cloud Concepts

The Six Benefits AZ-900 Names, and How to Tell Them Apart

Microsoft lists specific benefits and then asks which one a scenario describes. Several are close enough that guessing from intuition goes wrong, so learn the distinguishing phrase for each.

Exam tip. If the scenario mentions demand rising and falling on its own, choose elasticity. If it mentions surviving a failure, choose high availability.

Who Owns What, Row by Row

Microsoft's shared responsibility diagram is a table, and the exam asks you to read specific cells of it. Three rows are always yours, three are always Microsoft's, and three move with the service model.

Exam tip. Decide the service model first, then read the row. Answering from intuition is what makes these feel ambiguous.

The Words AZ-900 Uses Precisely, and the Ones It Confuses You With

This exam is unusually vocabulary-driven. Several wrong answers are near-synonyms of the right one, so knowing the exact distinction is worth more than any amount of hands-on intuition.

Exam tip. When two options both sound right, one of them is the near-synonym. Go back to these definitions rather than to intuition.

1. Which characteristic best describes the consumption-based pricing model used by public cloud providers?

• A. You pay only when a workload fails to meet its service level agreement
• B. You pay only for the resources you use, with no upfront capital purchase of hardwarecorrect
• C. You buy servers upfront and pay a fixed annual maintenance fee
• D. You pay a flat monthly fee regardless of usage

Consumption-based pricing converts capital expenditure into operating expenditure: you are billed for what you consume, and you stop paying when you stop using it. Fixed fees and upfront hardware purchases are the on-premises model the cloud replaces.

2. Who is responsible for ensuring that data sent from a customer's own application to an Azure service is encrypted in transit?

• A. Microsoft alone, because it operates the network
• B. Nobody, because internal cloud traffic cannot be intercepted
• C. The customer, who must use the secure endpoints and settings Microsoft providescorrect
• D. The internet service provider carrying the traffic

Microsoft supplies encrypted endpoints and the settings that require them, but a customer application can still be written or configured to use an insecure connection, so the choice and its consequences belong to the customer. Traffic can be intercepted, which is why encryption in transit exists at all, and the connectivity provider carries packets without any responsibility for whether their contents were encrypted.

3. Which is a genuine disadvantage of the public cloud for some organisations?

• A. Less direct control over the physical infrastructure and its exact locationcorrect
• B. Inability to scale
• C. No security certifications
• D. Requiring a capital purchase upfront

Giving up physical control is the real trade, which is why regulated workloads sometimes stay private or hybrid. Public cloud scales well, holds extensive certifications, and avoids upfront capital purchases.