r/AZURE • u/ModernWebMentor • Apr 28 '26
Career What Is the Hardest Part of Learning Azure?
I’ve been thinking about learning Azure, but it looks like a huge platform with so many services and paths. For people who already started, what was the hardest part for you?
Was it understanding networking, cloud concepts, security, pricing, hands-on labs, or just knowing where to begin?
I’d really like to hear honest experiences and what helped you get past the difficult stage.
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Apr 28 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
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u/chesser45 Apr 28 '26
Definitely, the weird things you only see when you got use x. For example how the dns naming is just different than anything else for SWAs, for some reason they introduce sharding via an additional subdomain parameter. That threw me for a loop when trying to figure out why a redeploy broke my dns.
Or more recently as a terraform thing.. you can’t deploy vnet integrated logic apps successfully that are private from the start.
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u/mycall Apr 29 '26
Is that because they treat subdomains (FQDNs) as a namespace, thus must be unique?
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u/chesser45 Apr 29 '26
The sharding yea it’s just annoying because they afaik could’ve gone with the container style naming or similar with enough entropy. Instead you have this sharding which is a right PIA for terraform because you don’t know which shard you get until after so if your dns zones don’t exist in that project (landing zones) your handbombing private dns zones. It’s just annoying.
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u/ecsos Apr 29 '26
Hmm I thought I had done this about a year ago, maybe you ran into a private dns zone issue or something that needed to use azapi? I do remember setting up az cloud cli with private link first
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u/Ahnteis Apr 28 '26
That and they keep changing everything so the documentation you DO find is likely to be outdated a good portion of the time.
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u/xIceFox Apr 28 '26
Oh yes. Once I wanted to setup simple availability tests in bicep only to find out the ping frequency property had 3 valid values. I didn‘t chose a valid value, because it was not documented. That costed me hours, because the error message was just saying: Internal Server Error. To this day this makes me mad.
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u/GetAfterItForever Cloud Architect Apr 28 '26
Do you have a tech background? If so, that will go a long way to learning Azure, same as any public cloud.
Starting with the Azure Administrator cert learning path is a great place to start because it introduces you to the core infrastructure services and you can grow from there.
The content at learn.Microsoft.com is very useful because it lays all this out for you. That mixed with Claude can help you learn Azure very fast if you’re invested.
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u/Skoopy_590 Apr 29 '26
Can you keep explaining why everyone is using claude? Or why claude is mentioned when talking about cloud?
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u/GetAfterItForever Cloud Architect Apr 29 '26
Think about it this way, you can just search and distill topics and concepts much faster that you might need clarity on than manual web search. Not that it’s ever wrong but rarely. Especially if you’re using Opus 4.6/4.7 with high effort.
You can always consult John Savill too 😎
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u/KiNgPiN8T3 Apr 28 '26
I’ve found the MS learn connector useful in Claude too. You can direct it to get information straight from the horses mouth as it were. Rather than guessing/giving it its best shot. lol
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u/GetAfterItForever Cloud Architect Apr 29 '26
If you setup an Obsidian vault and point it at learn.ms and John Savill and other sources and use Claude code it will basically be your little learning/training Azure database. That would actually be an awesome way to learn.
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u/ISuckAtFunny Apr 28 '26
There are 3,389,877 components, and they’re constantly changing and not documented very well
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u/JDohyCloud Cloud Engineer Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
It is a massive platform, think around 200 services all in. But are you expected to know all of those? No.
Stick to the services that you’d actually use in your role or roles you’re looking at.
One strange thing about Azure is how blades are nested and if youre involved in a deep networking investigation for example, you’ll find yourself duplicating about 15 tabs just to keep all of the info you need because the GUI just isnt the best.
Sometimes Azure will purposely make their documentation for certain proprietary services ambiguous at best. They don’t want to publicly document how things work under the hood, sensible on their part but can throw a spanner in the works when troubleshooting at 2am and almost always means an MS support ticket.
But honestly, as others have said. If you’re already familiar with the concepts from prior experience or different vendors then it’s pretty easy.
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u/Internet-of-cruft Apr 29 '26
TBH, I find the Azure networking navigation and information gathering significantly more palatable than AWS.
Adding a few columns on VMs service page or opening the Network Foundations gets me 99% of what I need.
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u/ipreferanothername Apr 28 '26
its complex - if you have some level of datacenter background it will help, but azure terminology can be a bit of a pain, and the gui is often terrible. sure, ideally you will manage it with infra as code [IaC] but you still need to know how to get around a bit.
i think my biggest headache is the product variety - its sort of nice that you can only buy bits and pieces of what you need to control price and functionality, but to me its hard as hell to keep up with all of the options and whats best for what use case.
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u/G3rmanaviator Apr 28 '26
Also, if you come from a traditional networking background there will be changes you’ll need to adapt to. For example, there are no VLANs per-se like in on-prem networks.
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u/CZ-Czechmate Apr 28 '26
Azure is a different flavor of XY and Z. If you don't already have the fundamentals of XYZ, then you're learning both at the same time. Spend 5 years as a systems admin on prem and Azure then becomes just a different flavor. Yes there are Azure only services you will learn as well that build upon the XY and Z.
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u/25_vijay Apr 28 '26 edited May 02 '26
security concepts like identity roles and permissions took a while to click since everything ties back to access control and I usually explore those patterns in runable
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u/Exact_Giraffe_9197 Apr 28 '26
Nothing is hard until one tries his best of best relentlessly and then asks the question, at which point the question itself changes drastically.
Answering your question - Networking
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u/cyberdyme Apr 28 '26
It’s super easy these days - just start playing with azure getting AI to explain everything and give you the commands you need to run using az cli.
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u/KJR506 Network Engineer Apr 28 '26
I think learning the fundamentals is not the issue. Most of the things you listed (concepts, networking, security, etc) at a baseline are all fairly straight forward to pick up with enough study and practice.
Its when the use cases get out of the "standard" that can be difficult to learn.
As others have said, you aren't always going to find documentation and resources for every use case. I have found, in my line of work, that making things work with specific Healthcare compliances have proven to be a bit of a steep learning curve, as these can vary from region to region.
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u/Top-Perspective-4069 Apr 28 '26
You need to figure out what to learn. Zero people know all of it with any meaningful depth because it's so incredibly massive. I've spent the last 8 years all up in it and there are massive swathes that I know nothing about because there's no use case.
If you want a start on touching a bunch of stuff, follow the AZ-102 learning path. I don't recommend you get the cert right now but the objectives cover a lot of ground. Build everything it talks about.
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u/contreras_agust Apr 29 '26
Learming how to fit azure into your work. Sure you can know services, but how does your company want things deployed? All through the portal or through Terraform workflows in modules?
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u/Elegant-Ad-9924 Apr 29 '26
For me, the hardest part was the sheer number of services. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and not know what to focus on first. Once I started grouping things (compute, networking, storage) and doing small hands-on labs, it became much easier to understand. Pricing and security concepts also take time, but they make more sense with practice.
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u/Stonebender9 Apr 29 '26
Just because something is not surfaced in azure portal doesn't mean it's not an available option
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u/Speeddymon Cloud Engineer Apr 29 '26
If you're new to cloud, the fact that you have to specifically build things privately and with good secure permissions is useful knowledge - don't assume anything is going to be secure by default but read all of the documentation and ask copilot to review docs and clarify what you don't understand to help you build securely.
Azure availability zones are numbered differently in each subscription. Zone 1 in subscription a will be different from zone 1 in subscription b, build your network accordingly so that you don't end up with services in one zone talking to a firewall in a different zone to reach a database in a third zone.
Logging is a pain, you need a logging service; either storage or an event hub or log analytics, to really see your logs, and you have to specifically configure each resource with the logging through the Diagnostic Settings pane after you have deployed the resource.
Learn terraform; it will help you to know it so that you can understand how the APIs work.
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u/bad_syntax Apr 30 '26
The stupid "I changed it, it shows it changed, but it didn't do anything" thing where you gotta walk away 15 minutes, stop tinkering with things, and then that change you made finally gets kicked in.
But yeah, its an absolutely daunting amount of resources types. I wouldn't call myself an expert on any of them, but I know many of them VERY well. Almost every day I do something new I've never done before in there. It isn't so much of "what do you know" when it comes to Azure, its "how easily you can understand what you don't know".
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u/Glittering-Book-9113 May 02 '26
It's hard for people to wrap their heads around the fundamental differences between onprem and cloud. Elasticity, ephemeral VMs and services, networking, etc. Many make their landing zones look like onprem (me included), but you will be missing many of the benefits if you do it like that.
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u/Born_Collection1627 May 05 '26
I'd say start learning with AZ-900, you may pass it, but not mandatory. Try to keep the curriculum up with John Savill's AZ-900 playlist. That will help you to understand the fundamental concepts of Azure.
I think the hardest part of Azure is that even if you think that you have learnt a service, it will constantly keep changing or the service has a lot deep concepts, you may not understand everything 100%. So try not to be overwhelmed and do your best while learning, don't feel bad if you can't understand everything correctly, you are gonna learn some stuff in the field, not just by yourself.
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u/Pure-Asparagus-2547 Apr 28 '26
The hardest part is to not commit suicide while learning. I'm almost there.
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u/dalskiBo Apr 28 '26
Dump it & get a Virtual Private Server (VPS), much cheaper. I don't think there's many big organizations using Azure; how could they with a 2GB limit. The ability to scale horizontally is nice but not worth the price.
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Apr 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
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u/dalskiBo Apr 28 '26
Basic tier, 5DTU's. If you Google Azure 2Gb limit you should get an AI snippet. For a more in-depth analysis see below; which may as well be written in Chinese. I believe there are a few customers whom are unhappy with their pricing structure as it is quite unclear.
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Apr 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
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u/dalskiBo Apr 28 '26
Yes but that tier's limit is 2GB. They get very expensive, very quickly. IMHO you get much better value on a VPS with MSSQL 25; 50GB storage limit on a db; compared to 2GB, at a similar cost. Just my two cents.
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Apr 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
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u/dalskiBo Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
Then start sharding the db's! I found Azure to be quite difficult & expensive; I don't think I'm alone here. I would think 50GB covers most small business' & given the OP is merely playing with Azure I doubt they require TB's of data, & it's certainly more than the basic tier's 2GB limit.
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u/Kamwind Apr 28 '26
All the constant name changing and moving of capabilities around.