What you'll learn

Most teams can create a virtual machine. Far fewer can prove it's configured correctly, keep it healthy, lock it down, recover it when something breaks, and reproduce it on demand, and that gap is where midnight incidents live. In this course, Azure Virtual Machine Operations and Lifecycle, you'll gain the ability to operate Azure virtual machines the way production demands: deliberately, observably, securely, and repeatably, against one realistic line-of-business workload. First, you'll explore how to configure a VM for a real workload, matching the size and Gen2 image, choosing a network and reachability posture, attaching managed identity and Premium SSD v2 storage, bootstrapping at first boot, and verifying it matches the intent beforehand. Next, you'll discover how to operate and secure a running VM: confirming health and reachability, reading platform diagnostics below the OS, monitoring with the Azure Monitor Agent, diagnosing and fixing failures, and locking access to least privilege across both the network and identity planes. Finally, you'll learn how to manage the VM lifecycle and standardize it, control costs and data across power transitions, recover from loss with Azure Backup, and turn one hand-built VM into a versioned Azure Compute Gallery image and a Bicep template that reproduces it identically. When you're finished with this course, you'll have the skills and knowledge of Azure virtual machine operations and lifecycle management needed to run VMs that are correct, secure, recoverable, and reproducible, and to prove it at every step.