How to lab for Microsoft Exams
Why lab for Microsoft Exams?
Section titled âWhy lab for Microsoft Exams?âRole-based Microsoft exams (associate, expert, specialty) test your ability to use Microsoft products and understand them. Labbing is the only way to get close to working with the products unless you actually work with them at your job.
Labbing in Azure is one the easiest but also the most dangerous way to lab Microsoft Cloud. You can very easily set up a free or pay as you go account and start creating resources.
However, if you are not careful, you can easily create resources that will add up to a huge bill. Always make sure you are familiar with product pricing, set up cost controls, monitor your usage and delete resources when you are done.
Product Pricing
Section titled âProduct PricingâAzure product pricing lists are publicly available. The prices are also shown in the Azure portal when you create a resource but they are usually incomplete because there are many features that donât have the pricing displayed.
The Azure Pricing Calculator is a tool that allows you to estimate the cost of your Azure resources. You just select products you are interested in them, fill in the usage parameters, and it will provide an estimated cost.
Cost Controls
Section titled âCost ControlsâBudgets allow you to set alerts on your Azure subscription. These can be both for current cost and predicted cost by the end of month. I recommend setting up both types of alerts to make sure both your current and predicted cost makes sense. Besides normal alerting, you can also set up automations that will react on the alerts. For example some students have set up automation that automatically deleted everything in the subscription when they reach budget.
Anomaly cost alerts work similarly to budgets but they alert you when there is anomaly cost increase in your subscription. This is useful to alert you in case you miscalculated product cost but it is also very sensitive if your baseline azure subscription price is really low and you deploy basically anything that costs money.
Microsoft 365 labbing is a lot less accessible than Azure labbing because there is no way to just spin up an instance as part of your personal account. You need to create tenant and sign up for M365 trials or subscriptions.
There are 2 ways to get a tenant. You can either sign up for a trial using one of the links below, or you can create a fresh tenant. These are not all available trial options, but they are some of the most useful ones for labbing.
Be extremely careful when creating tenants in M365 because your credit card will be tied to them and it is very easy to let licenses run and get charged for them.
M365 E5 license currently costs $60 a month and E7 $100 a month. Always make sure you cancel licenses before they convert to paid. Also when buying subscription be careful about what you are buying.
Microsoft offers discounts if you commit your licenses to a year but it also means you wonât be able to cancel and will be on the hook for the whole year.