Hands-On Azure Labs: Real Skills & Cert Success

Build and practice real Microsoft Azure skills in a simulated Azure lab environment. Prepare for AZ-900, AZ-104, and AZ-305. No Azure Subscription Required.

No credit card needed. No commitment required.

What Can You Do with the labIT PRO Suite?

With labIT PRO, you’ll practice the same real-world Azure tasks cloud engineers face daily — deploying VMs, securing identities, managing storage, and more. All fully simulated. Zero cloud costs. 100% job-ready skills.

It’s always the same story—you enroll in an Azure course for a few bucks, only to realize you need to pay for cloud resources just to complete the lessons.

With labIT PRO, you can practice real-world Azure tasks without a live cloud subscription. Our hands-on labs provide a fully simulated Azure environment, allowing you to perform tasks like provisioning virtual machines—all without spending a dime on cloud costs.

By the time you complete these labs, you won’t just understand Azure—you’ll know how to actually do the tasks you’ve learned in your courses!

Grow Your Skillset with HANDS-ON Azure Labs

No Payment Required. Completely Free Access.

What You'll Learn

By completing these labs, you’ll do more than memorize concepts — you’ll gain job-ready skills and practice tasks that map directly to Microsoft Azure certifications.

AZURE COMPUTE: Deploy and manage VMs and VM scale sets — core skills for AZ-104.
AZURE NETWORKING: Configure VNets, Load Balancers, and Traffic Manager — real-world tasks tested in AZ-305.
AZURE STORAGE: Manage Blob, File Shares, and Replication — essential for day-to-day Azure admins.
SECURITY & IDENTITY: Apply Conditional Access, RBAC, and Microsoft Entra ID policies — critical for both AZ-104 and real-world security.
BACKUP AND RECOVERY: Protect and restore Azure resources with Backup and Recovery Services — hands-on resilience training.

Three Ways to Learn With labIT PRO

Practice Real Labs

Deploy, configure, and troubleshoot Azure services in a hands on environment — no subscription needed.

Understand the Why

All lab simulations feature complete, step-by-step guidance with built-in technical explanations.

Think Like an Engineer

Advanced labs feature extra context and best practices to connect labs with real-world scenarios.

No Payment Required. Completely Free Access.

This feature is available to labITpro Supporters only.

Azure VM Scale Sets — Quick Reference

Fast lookup for orchestration modes, autoscaling, load balancing, updates & CLI.

Core Benefits

Create & manage groups of identical or heterogeneous VMs.
Automatic scaling based on demand or schedule.
Load balance traffic across instances.
HA across fault domains & availability zones.
Pay only for VMs; no charge for scale set itself.

Scale sets can handle up to 1,000 VMs (Marketplace/Gallery images).

Orchestration Modes

Mode	Profile	Best For
Flexible	Standard Azure VMs	New workloads (default)
Uniform	Identical VMs	Legacy large-scale workloads

Flexible: Full standard VM APIs, dynamic mixing (Spot+on-demand), 1,000 VMs. Uniform: Locked after creation; up to 1,000 VMs (Marketplace) or 600 (custom images).

Orchestration Comparison

Feature	Flexible	Uniform
Standard VM APIs	Yes	No
Mix instance types	Yes	No
RBAC per VM	Yes	No
Azure Backup	Yes	No
Site Recovery	Yes	No
Fault domains	1–3	1–5

Autoscaling Metrics

Host metrics: CPU, memory, disk (no agent needed).
Guest metrics: Custom counters (Azure Diagnostics Extension).
App Insights: Application-level performance metrics.
Rules: Min/max capacity, scale-out/in thresholds, cooldown periods.

Autoscale rules use metrics from Load Balancer, Diagnostics, or App Insights.

Load Balancing

Type	Layer	Best For
Internal LB	L4	Backend pools
Public LB	L4	External traffic
App Gateway	L7	HTTP/HTTPS + WAF

Large scale sets (>100 VMs) require Load Balancer Standard SKU.

Availability & Zones

Single zone: All VMs in one availability zone.
Zone-redundant: VMs spread across 1, 2, or 3 zones in region.
Zone balance: Auto-spread VMs evenly across zones (±1 VM).
Fault domains: 1–3 per zone for best-effort resilience.

Use availability zones for datacenter-level failure protection.

Upgrade Policies (Uniform)

Policy	Rollout	Use
Automatic	Batch	App can tolerate disruption
Rolling	Controlled	Gradual, managed updates
Manual	On-demand	Full control; explicit API calls

Flexible mode uses standard VM updates; no built-in rolling.

Application Deployment

Custom image: Preinstall app; faster provisioning.
Custom Script Extension: Download & run scripts post-deploy.
Azure VM Applications: Package & manage centrally (new).
PowerShell DSC: Desired State Configuration for consistency.

Custom images: 600 VMs max; Marketplace images: 1,000 VMs.

Planned Maintenance & Health

Azure Patch Manager: Automated guest OS patching.
Application Health Extension: Monitor app heartbeat; auto-replace unhealthy.
Health probes (Uniform): Monitor via load balancer.
Platform updates coordinated; typically brief interruption.