Hello and welcome to Microsoft Azure Infrastructure and Deployment. The focus of this learning path is to prepare you for Microsoft's AZ-100 exam, but even if you're not going to take the exam, this learning path will help you get started on your way to becoming an Azure administrator. My name's Guy Hummel. I'm the Azure Content Lead at Cloud Academy. The AZ-100 exam tests your knowledge of five subject areas, and that's how we've structured this learning path as well. We'll start with managing Azure subscriptions and resources. Although this might seem like a pretty simple topic, it's actually very important because if you don't get this right, you could end up with security holes and cost overruns. You'll learn how to maintain governance by applying policies to subscriptions and resources. 

Azure enforces these policies to prevent actions your organization doesn't want to allow. You'll also learn how to monitor resource consumption so you don't end up with unexpectedly large bills to pay. Next, we'll get into implementing and managing storage. This section includes more than just Azure Storage. It also covers how to set up file shares using Azure File Sync and how to implement backups using a Recovery Services Vault. Then you'll learn how to deploy and manage virtual machines running either Windows or Linux. 

Creating a new VM on Azure is pretty easy, but this section shows you how to deploy VMs at an enterprise level. You'll learn how to automate the deployment of VMs using Azure Resource Manager, automate configuration changes using Desired State Configuration, and back up your VMs using policies. You'll also see how to set up high availability and autoscaling. After that, we'll go into configuring and managing virtual networks. Again, this is about setting up enterprise-grade networks. You'll learn how to connect virtual networks together using VNet peering and network gateways, how to configure both private and public DNS zones for name resolution, and how to secure your VNets using Network Security Groups.

 Finally, we'll cover how to manage identities. This section is all about Azure Active Directory, which is a managed version of Microsoft's tried and true directory software. Of course, you'll need to know how to add users and groups to it, but Azure AD has lots of other goodies to help you manage your organization's directory. For example, if one of your users falls victim to a phishing attack, AD Identity Protection may be able to detect the breach and even take action automatically. You'll also learn how to sync up your on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD and enable single sign-on. That's a lot to cover, so let's get started.