hey everyone in this video i wanted to provide just a quick overview of thinking about learning azure in 2022. i created a version of this last year and nothing significantly has changed but i did create a couple of new resources that may help with that overall path as always this is useful please do like subscribe comment and share and hit that bell icon to get notified of new content now azure is vast there's a huge array of different services and technologies and i don't really think there's a right way to learn everyone learns differently some learn just by reading some will learn by watching many people need to get their hands on and try it to really absorb and understand it but in terms of the areas of azure i really do think there's a few key areas everyone should at least have a grounding in i think about things like identity so we think about for example azure active directory conditional access authentication authorization seamless on understanding those grounding concepts and how azure ad plays in the overall azure architecture and then think about governance and that may seem a little bit strange but understanding the idea of role-based access control and policy and budgets and tagging and naming management groups subscriptions resource groups have that again foundational knowledge of those really key constructs i think about infrastructure having a grounding understanding of networking of compute resources of storage because what we'll see is many other types of service will sit on top of these so if i understand the basics of networking and storage and compute and the types of vm skus and scale sets that's going to really help me with many many other things now previously i had a whole list of links and instead of going through a whole list of links what i did was i created a site learn.onboard to azure.com so my recommendation i'm going to kind of go through some of these is if you head over to this site what i actually do is i go through what i think is a good curated path so people kept asking me what is the recommended place to start hey you have so many videos on your site where do i begin so i basically created this page it's just a very simple javascript page that's how i would think about learning azure and obviously this learn azure in 2021 i'm gonna replace with this video so step one is you want to be able to get hands-on i do think there are some people that say hey i just read things and i can learn it great most of us humans will need some hands-on maybe i have access through work maybe i have like a visual studio an msdn you get a certain amount of credits a month or you can actually go and sign up for a free account so i've got that kind of link here for the free azure sign up that's going to give you a certain bucket of money for a month then there are some services that are free for a year and some that are always free so i definitely recommend you go and get that it's going to help you to get some of that hands-on now realize whether it's free or visual studio or work you always want to be efficient with how you spend the money and the whole point of azure is it is consumption based i pay for what i'm using so really think about when you go and create your resources one of the things you're going to learn very very quickly is something called a resource group and what i would recommend is for every kind of lab exercise you do create them in their own resource group so everything you create be it a vm the disk of that virtual machine maybe it's network interface card maybe a public ip maybe it's a database a load balancer they're all going to be grouped together and why that's really important is when you finish with that lab rather than trying to scour around and find things that's all mixed together i can just go and delete that resource group which will delete everything in it because for example a virtual machine i may think okay i'll delete the vm but i've left the disk behind and the disk may actually cost me more than the virtual machine so you want to leave things behind thinking about optimizing that money make sure you do shut things down when you're not using them shut them down in a de-allocated way if i was to jump over for a second and i was to go and look at my virtual machines you'll notice one of them just says stopped so in the guest operating system i stopped it but that doesn't de-allocate it from the azure fabric i.e i am still paying for it i want it to say stopped deallocated at which point i'm no longer paying for that resource for the computer i still be paying for his disk but i'm not paying for the resource anymore so i would want to do is come in here and actually do a stop then that would be allocated from the fabric and i will stop paying for it so make sure we stop things when we're not using them so again stretch out and really optimize our spend if it's dev test hey pick small resources pick burstable virtual machines that are just big enough to do the job pick standard hard disk drives for the disk so it's as cheap as possible we just want to really uh optimize our spend now when you're starting out the portal is a great place to go it's really nice and intuitive you can kind of look around you can work things out so it's good to try and get some familiarity actually with that the microsoft docs are absolutely fantastic if you're trying to learn saying i definitely would recommend going through the microsoft docs so i think about go and get that free account if you're interested in azure ad there's actually a microsoft developer program that gets you a 90-day rolling sandbox so it can keep being renewed if you're actually using it and then okay well how do i learn what do i want to think about and i do think the certifications can be a great place to start so they have an azure fundamentals so there's an az900 azure fundamentals if i was thinking about just in general learning and i think about some of these topics for most of us a great place to start would kind of be the az900 so that's going to cover a lot of the grounding things at a very basic level just so we understand what they are but it's a really good place to start and microsoft have a full certification learning path around that so if i was to kind of scroll down in the site so what i did is i created my own course so i've got a eight and a half hour there's no adverts it's just a youtube playlist so that will give you great info there's a repo the full handout i create a study cram you can watch just before the exam but then if you actually go and look up here so there's learn modules so if i go and click this link it's going to take you to the microsoft page and it's got all these great learn modules so that's more text-based there might be a couple of videos but there might be some labs you can go and try in that free subscription you've done you can kind of watch my again learning course if that's useful to you the study cram there's a few extra little things about what to expect if you're nervous about what was my first exam there's actually an exam environment simulation so this will actually kind of show you hey what i'm going to expect during that actual exam i'm just going to shrink that down so i can see the buttons so this is it's going to tell you how many questions there are how long you have the required score and you can just go through and get a nice little feeling for okay what is it going to ask the types of questions they just select one maybe it's selecting multiple answers maybe it's dragging the right answer into an area maybe it's putting them in a certain order but that's a really nice place to go to maybe remove some tension about well exactly what am i going to expect what is it going to expect me to know so use the learn modules they're really good use the documentation now things do change very very frequently microsoft has a nice blog that goes through the updates and what i do is i create a weekly video of what the last week's updates are so if you don't want to read the blogs and find it over azure and azure id in other areas i kind of summarize that each week so kind of stay up to date once you've done the az 900 another nice fundamentals one i think is the sc900 which again is more about the identity security elements and then at that point it depends completely on what you want to do maybe you want to go and be more in the admin space so hey admin maybe i'll go and do the 104 but there are ones about data there's ones about security and there's devops there's obviously the architect cert which i get admin which is actually a nice path now so then there's architect which is in beta 305 so i go and get 104 there's 305 and i get my architect sir it's actually a nice poster so if i jump back over for a second i've got the link to it on the learn site so if you're curious about what are all my options there is this certification poster and if you go and look at that it shows all the ones for azure so we can talk about these fundamental ones there's like azure fundamentals that az-900 ai fundamentals azure data fundamentals um if we just kind of keep going up we can see there are some other ones down here security compliance down the bottom there's that sc900 i was talking about but then you can get into maybe certain specialities azure virtual desktop sap iot some of them are role-based hey security engineer admin associate developer associate ai data huge numbers and then as part of those as well we have the experts so the expert certs again as their architect and the devops so there's a whole set of different options available to you there's no right or wrong it depends on what is your interest but i would say the key point is get some hands-on if you're starting out completely fresh i think it would be good do that az 900 i think the sc900 is also very applicable to most things and then you go off in whatever direction be it administration data development iot a whole slew of different things and maybe the end goal is kind of get the architect to get the devops expert certifications but it's really down to your interest but i hope this helps hope it gives you some place to at least start and yeah just good luck with all your azure endeavors in 2022 and beyond you