Who this is for
You're comfortable at a terminal, curious about how systems fit together, and want to be the person a team trusts to keep infrastructure up, secure, and cost-sane. No prior Azure experience required — The Stack Floor domain covers the IT fundamentals underneath this path if you need them first.
How this path works
Each cluster below links to its real lesson page. Go in order the first time through — later clusters assume the ones before them. Once you've done a full pass, come back and use it as reference.
The path — in order
1 · Compute foundations
01
Provisioning, sizing, scale sets, availability sets, and dedicated hosts — the baseline unit of Azure infrastructure.
Domain 1 · Compute
02
Docker fundamentals, Azure Container Instances, Container Apps, and the registry that backs them.
Domain 1 · Compute
03
Autoscaling patterns — scale sets, KEDA, and knowing when to scale out versus up.
Domain 1 · Compute
2 · Storage foundations
04
Blob storage, Azure Files, access tiers, and lifecycle management.
Domain 2 · Storage
05
Managed disks, Ultra/Premium SSD tiers, and snapshot strategy.
Domain 2 · Storage
3 · Networking
06
VNets, subnets, peering, NSGs, route tables, and private/service endpoints — everything else in this domain builds on this.
Domain 3 · Networking
07
VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, and Azure Bastion for secure hybrid access.
Domain 3 · Networking
08
Azure Firewall Manager, DDoS Protection, WAF, and NSG hardening.
Domain 3 · Networking
4 · Operations & governance
09
Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and the dashboards that tell you something's wrong before a user does.
Domain 5 · Operations
10
Azure Policy, management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and tagging discipline at scale.
Domain 5 · Operations
5 · Infrastructure as Code
11
Declarative infrastructure — the native Azure IaC toolchain, and why it beats clicking through the portal by hand.
Domain 6 · IaC & DevOps
6 · Resilience
12
13
Availability zones, region pairs, multi-region architecture, and the SLA math behind them — the capstone that ties the whole path together.
Domain 7 · Resilience
Optional, but worth it
Once you've completed the path, Terraform on Azure and Kubernetes (AKS) are the two clusters infra engineers reach for next most often — not required for this path, but a natural extension.
Certifications this path maps to
AZ-104: Azure Administrator
AZ-305: Solutions Architect Expert
Where this leads
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer is a strong base for two directions: go deeper into automation and pipelines toward DevOps Engineer, or go broader into design and trade-offs toward Solutions Architect. Both build directly on everything above.