Azure Administrator Readiness (AZ-104): Run Identity, Networks and Workloads in Azure
Signature Course No. 310 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Azure Administrator Readiness (AZ-104): Run Identity, Networks and Workloads in Azure course, in the Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Nothing in Azure is administered one resource at a time. Everything inherits from somewhere — role assignments and policy assignments both flow down the hierarchy — and the administrator who does not know from where is guessing. This course teaches the operating discipline that follows from that one fact: scope before action, verify then declare, and least privilege granted at the height the work actually needs.
It starts with scope. Every object you will ever administer in Azure sits somewhere in a hierarchy — tenant root, management groups, subscriptions, resource groups — and the scope you choose is the decision. You will learn to place subscriptions so governance inherits instead of being remembered, run identities across their whole life, and replace stored secrets with managed identities.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Identity, Governance, and Storage: The Estate's Foundations — work through Concepts 1–9 (Scope Is Destiny; Entra ID Run Properly; RBAC at the Right Scope; Azure Policy; Managed Identities and Workload Access; Storage Accounts; Blob, Files, and Lifecycle; Storage Security and Movement; Cost as an Operating Discipline), finishing with The Estate You Can Defend; then, Module 2 — Compute, Networks, and Keeping It Running — work through Concepts 10–18 (Virtual Machines; Virtual Machines at Scale; App Service; Containers Without the Guesswork; Virtual Networks; Connectivity Between Networks; Network Security and Traffic; Monitoring That Catches Trouble; Backup, Recovery, and Readiness), finishing with Run the Whole Estate.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — an identity and governance operating plan for Fenwick Fabrication, a precision metal fabricator with four subscriptions, 450 identities, 48 TB of data, and an $18,640 monthly bill, written to be tested line by line by customer auditors; and a production operations plan for Fenwick's new product-line launch — compute, networking, security, monitoring, and recovery, designed to be run.
The honesty standard is part of the course. Readiness is not a guarantee: Microsoft sets its own examinations, changes its skills outlines, and scores its own papers, and no course can promise you a pass. What this course builds is readiness in the only sense that matters twice over — able to answer examination questions that describe real administrative situations, because you have practiced the real administrative moves, and able to walk onto a live estate on Monday and do the work. The portal changes constantly, so the course teaches the durable moves — what object you are changing, at what scope, with what effect, and how you will verify it and undo it — in words that hold in the portal, in PowerShell, and in the Azure CLI.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Azure Administrator Readiness (AZ-104): Run Identity, Networks and Workloads in Azure is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with your hierarchy. Draw your estate's hierarchy — or Fenwick's — and say at which level the broadest role assignment sits, and whether anyone chose that height on purpose; name three things a new subscription inherits automatically from above, and one thing it does not; pick a resource group and say exactly what would be gone in the morning if it were deleted tonight. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Estate You Can Defend for Module 1 and Run the Whole Estate for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Scope before action — in that order, every time. Almost every administrative error in this course is the same error wearing different clothes: the right move made at the wrong scope — a role granted too high, a policy assigned too low, a rule applied to one resource that needed to govern a subscription. Each concept names the scope its move belongs at, the scope it tempts you toward, and the check that tells you which one you actually used.
Module 1 builds the ground the workloads stand on. The hierarchy and its inheritance; Entra ID identities across their whole life; RBAC at least privilege; policy guardrails with tags and locks; managed identities in place of stored secrets; storage designed, aged, and locked down in proportion to what its loss would mean; and the bill read as an operating instrument instead of a monthly shock.
Module 2 puts workloads on that ground and keeps them running. Virtual machines sized from measured hunger and run at scale; App Service releases by slot with rollback in seconds; containers placed on the smallest platform that fully carries them; networks addressed without collision, connected under inspection, and guarded in depth; monitoring that finds a human on its own; and recovery that is proven by restores actually performed.
And it holds its boundary throughout. The fundamentals level — what the cloud is and what the main services are — is taught in its own neighboring course. This course assumes that ground and teaches operation: assign the access, set the guardrail, size the machine, route the traffic, read the alert, and restore the workload when the morning goes wrong.
What you will learn
- Structure an Azure estate — management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups — and reason correctly about scope and inheritance
- Manage Entra ID identities: users, groups, devices, guests, and administrative units
- Control access with RBAC at least privilege — built-in and custom roles, correct scope, timely removal, and review
- Enforce standards with Azure Policy, tags, and locks — and operate subscriptions and costs with budgets and alerts
- Implement and manage storage: accounts, redundancy, blob and file services, lifecycle, security, and data movement
- Deploy and manage compute: virtual machines and scale sets, App Service, and container services
- Configure and manage virtual networking: address space, peering and hybrid connectivity, network security, and traffic distribution
- Monitor and maintain Azure resources: metrics, logs, and alerts; backup, recovery, and update operations
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Azure Administrator Readiness (AZ-104): Run Identity, Networks and Workloads in Azure, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Estate You Can Defend and Run the Whole Estate
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for administrators who own real subscriptions
Working administrators — on-premises systems administrators, help-desk leads, and infrastructure engineers whose organizations have moved, or are moving, workloads into Azure, and who now own subscriptions they did not design; and AZ-104 candidates who hold, or could pass, the fundamentals level and are preparing for the administrator examination with practice that resembles the job, not just the question bank.
Small-team generalists — the one or two technical people in a mid-size company who are, in effect, the cloud department: identity, network, backup, and bill all land on the same desk.
Career changers with a technical base — support and operations staff who can already work a console and a command line, and who need the Azure-specific operating discipline to step up into an administrator role. This course assumes the fundamentals level, and no production estate of your own — the running company in this book lends you one.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with Scope Is Destiny
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Azure Administrator Readiness (AZ-104): Run Identity, Networks and Workloads in Azure is Signature Course No. 310. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.