Well it’s been a month since I started this blog and i’ve done nothing with it. The past month has been a crazy one! I’ve attended two weddings, did a short vacation down to Destin, ohhh and I passed AZ-900! BAM! This was the first exam i’d taken since the CCNA so felt good to get a win. Let’s see if we can get another one before the end of the year!

The plan after passing AZ-900 was to jump back into my CCNP studies with ENSDWI (Cisco SDWAN), not one week after locking down the win Microsoft announced the release of AZ-700! What is the AZ-700 you might be asking? Well that would be Designing and Implementing Microsoft Networking Solutions.

“But Michael, you’re a network engineer… why are you studying all this cloud stuff???”

This exam awards the Microsoft Azure Network Engineer Associate Certification and covers the basics of Azure Networking, Networking Appliance offerings, and Application Delivery tools… and what sounds cooler then being a Network Engineer? A Cloud Network Engineer! So lets dive in!

Exam Topics!

Design and Implement Core Network Infrastructure

Let’s start off with the Core. From the Exam Outline this section appears to be covering the basics of Azure Cloud Networking. Design and creation of VNET’s, DNS (it’s always DNS), Cross VNET connectivity, and lastly the new Azure Virtual WAN Architecture. This portion of the exam will make up 20-25% of the content so should be pretty solid foundational information. Really looking forward to learning more about VWAN as i’m actively deploying this in my day job.

Design, Implement, and Manage Hybrid Networks

This next one looks like a lot of fun! It’s covers the main thing Network Engineers do and that’s connect people, places, and things! There’s lot of different ways to connect into the cloud and this one is going to cover them all! Site-to-Site (S2S) and Point-to-Site VPN’s as well as Expressroute which is Azure’s dedicated peering services incase you want to get some Azure goodness into your MPLS Network. This will cover bout 10-15% of the Exam which sounds about right. Wish this would cover a bit more about SDWAN solutions and Network Virtual Appliances, but i’m assuming that might be stuffed into the VWAN section.

Design and Implement Routing

The big bambino of the Exam. This topic is covering 25-30% of the exam and is gonna be probably the most challenging. Topics cover design, implementation, and management of VNET routing, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Application Gateways, Azure Front Door, and Azure Traffic Manager. There’s a lot more to the cloud to just spinning up resources and connecting to them. Azure gives you a ton of options and this will be a lot of fun to learn as the only resources i’ve actively used is Azure App GW’s and basic VNet Peerings.

Secure and Monitor Networks

Security, Security, Security! We all know it’s important, but most of the time we don’t put in the effort to make things secure and a lot of times Security is restricting or blocking resources… I’m a Network Engineer! My job is to connect people!!! But alas our Director of Information Security says.. “Security is everbody’s responsibility” which is very true! I want to keep my job after all and not be all over MSM for allowing PPI out into the dark web.

Enough babbling, this section covers Azure Firewall Deployments, Network Security Groups (NSGs), Web Application Firewall (WAF) Deployments, and Monitoring Azure Networks. All very important parts of the Cloud because it can indeed be compromised! Remember…

Design and Implement Private Access to Azure Services

As the final topic and covering 10-15% of the exam this topic will be pretty new to me. Microsoft has services they’ve built out to streamline use. Things like IaaS and PaaS which Developers can quickly jump in and start using make my job easier, but what if those services need to only be accessible from VPN or your WAN. This section covers that! Azure Private Link Service, Implementing service endponts, and VNet integration with PaaS services such as Azure Kubernetes (AKS) are all things they will be covered here. Not gonna lie i’m not looking super forward to this one, but should learn a thing or two.

So with that! I continue my journey with the cloud! Hopefully to be an Azure Cloud Network Engineer and be able to leverage some of these skills to make better networking decisions and securing infrastructure! If you’ve made it this far with me thanks for reading! I’m hoping to get more real world experience and walkthroughs in the coming blog posts so stay tuned!

TL;DR

I’m going all in on Cloud Networking. That’s it. Cloud. All the things.