Stage 2 of 10 · 8 lessons · ~2 weeks

Cloud concepts and billing

Learn how Azure is organised and paid for: service models, shared responsibility, regions and availability zones, tenants, subscriptions and resource groups, the free account or Azure for Students, pricing models and the budget you set before anything else.

Start: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

Do this

Read the official free offer page for your cloud and note what is free and for how long.
Create your account and turn on MFA for the owner or root login immediately.
Create a budget with email alerts at small thresholds.
Choose one region near you and use it for everything in this roadmap.
Write your own service map for VMs, storage, databases, networks and identity.
Skim the Well-Architected pillars and note one question from each.

Start with

CourseFree
Microsoft Learn: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) training
Microsoft · Beginner
Free official learning paths with browser sandboxes: cloud concepts, Azure architecture and governance

Keep handy

Azure documentation
The Cost Management and resource organisation pages, for budgets and naming

Also worth your time

Shared responsibility in the cloud (opens in a new tab)Read
A clear table of who owns what across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on Azure
Learn to CloudGo deeper
A free, open curriculum for the whole path to a cloud role, to see where this stage fits

Before moving on: Your own account on your cloud with a budget and alerts set, your free offer and its end date written down, and a one-page service map of the equivalents you expect to use.

Tauseef's advice

Set the budget alert before you create a single resource. Nearly every horror story about a student cloud bill starts with "I forgot it was running". Then pick one region near you and stick to it, so everything you create is in one place when you clean up.