Passed AZ-104 — the hands-on project that made the theory stick

Passed AZ-104 — the hands-on project that made the theory stick

Passed AZ-104 last week. Microsoft Learn got me through the fundamentals and a question bank taught me the exam format, but the part of my prep that did the real work is the one most "here's what I used" posts leave out: I built a project while studying instead of just watching someone build one on video.

The project below touches the two biggest domains on the exam at once: identities and governance (20-25%) and compute (20-25%), with security and monitoring mixed in. Everything lives in one resource group in East US, and you delete the whole thing when you're done, so the bill stays small.

1. Create the resource group first. rg-project1 in East US. It feels like busywork, but the exam loves asking what has to exist before what, and this is the answer for almost everything else in the project.

2. Deploy a Linux VM into it. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, a small Standard-series size, SSH key auth. Creating it downloads a .pem file. Move it into ~/.ssh/, run chmod 400 on it (yes, really), then connect with:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/vm-project1.pem azureuser@<your-vm-public-ip>

1. Add a Key Vault to the same group. Standard tier, name it kv-project1-<yourname>, tag it Environment=Lab. Then work through who should be able to read secrets from it and how that permission gets granted. That exercise alone covers a decent chunk of the identity questions.

2. Create a policy initiative under Policy > Authoring. Put it in your own category, attach the built-in definitions you actually want enforced, and assign it. Policy questions stop being guesswork once you've watched an assignment take effect on your own subscription.

3. Set a budget in Cost Management. $50/month with alert thresholds at 50%, 80% and 100%. Leaving a VM running overnight by accident happens to everyone sooner or later, and the alert email is cheap insurance.

Then delete the resource group, wait a week, and rebuild the whole thing from scratch without any walkthrough open. The rebuild is where it clicks. On the exam, scenario questions that used to read like a wall of text turned into "oh, this is the step where the vault access gets granted."

The structure I followed is the AZ-104 project track from HandsOnCert (handsOncert). It runs five projects like this one, each committed to GitHub as you go, so you finish the cert with a repo history to show for it, not just a PDF. The first project is the one above.

Happy to answer questions about the project or the exam. Good luck to everyone testing soon