Looking to optimize and manage your cloud resources? Join our Azure optimization skills challenge!

Businesses have committed to the cloud for its scalability, agility, and security. Without optimization, however, this flexibility can lead to unmanaged sprawl. Continuous improvement and careful management through all phases of your cloud journey help you to avoid unexpected costs and inefficient resource allocation while improving security and reliability. Strategic optimization delivers the resiliency to efficiently and securely handle fluctuating workloads with ease, ensuring you manage your environment for optimal performance.

That’s why we’re thrilled to bring you our Azure Optimization Cloud Skills Challenge, a curated collection of learning resources and guidance on optimization tools and best practices from Microsoft that can help your business can thrive in the cloud. This track helps you build cloud resiliency, create reliable and secure workloads, manage cloud spend, and modernize to innovate.

What’s an Azure Cloud Skills Challenge?

Part interactive learning sprint, part competition between you and peers around the globe, Azure Cloud Skills Challenges give you a timeframe to complete a set of courses, exercises, tutorials, and assessments with email reminders to help you stay on track. By completing any challenge within 30 days, you’re eligible for a 50% discount voucher on a related Microsoft Certification exam.

What will I learn in the Optimization Cloud Skills Challenge?

Microsoft offers several solutions and tools to help with cloud optimization within the Azure ecosystem to strategically manage cloud spend, enhance efficiency, and stay competitive in the ever-evolving cloud landscape. Our curated Azure Optimization Cloud Skills Challenge provides insight into the organizational and financial efficiency of integrating Azure solutions into your cloud strategy.

Learn about pricing for cost efficiency with Azure Savings Plan for Compute

The main goals of optimizing your cloud compute resources are to promote efficient usage and simplify management while realizing significant cost savings. An Azure Savings Plan for Compute goes beyond just offering discounts—they provide a holistic approach to cloud optimization.

The first module in the Optimization Cloud Skills Challenge focuses on Azure Savings Plans for Compute, aimed at showing you how to significantly optimize the cost of your resources when compared with pay-as-you-go prices. This learning module explores features, benefits, and ideal use cases, then walks you through the purchase process.

By the end of this module, you’ll learn to efficiently utilize resources, simplify management, and realize significant cost savings.

Discounted cloud resources, upfront commitment with Azure Reserved Instances

Azure Reserved Instances (RIs) let you lock in significant discounts on virtual machines and other compute resources by pre-paying for a commitment in a specific region. You can change the scope or size of your RI as needed and combine with Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server licenses for a powerful cost-saving solution.

In the Azure Reserved Instances module of the Optimization Cloud Skills Challenge, you’ll learn how to analyze and buy reserved instances, optimize against underused resources, and understand the benefits provided through compute purchases.

Learn how to analyze, purchase, and optimize your cloud resources for consistent and significant discounts with Azure Reserved Instances.

Free cloud cost and security insights with Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor acts as your digital cloud consultant, continuously analyzing your cloud resources, including configuration and usage telemetry. Advisor identifies opportunities to optimize your deployments across four key areas: cost, security, performance, and reliability.

It recommends ways to reduce your Azure bill by suggesting more cost-effective resources or identifying underutilized services.

Our Azure Advisor learning module will show you how to get the most out of your Azure investment by ensuring your cloud resources are efficiently configured.

Monitor spending using Microsoft Cost Management

Microsoft Cost Management offers detailed insights into resource usage, budgeting options, and cost optimization recommendations. Features like reserved instances and cost allocation reports help you identify areas for savings and ensure your cloud spending aligns with your budget.

The Describe Cost Management in Azure learning module explores different methods to estimate, track, and manage costs in Azure. You’ll be introduced to factors that impact costs in Azure and tools to help you both predict potential costs and monitor and control costs.

Guide your cloud journey to success: Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework

Microsoft offers two invaluable frameworks that provide best practice guidance and checklists to help your team manage and govern your cloud, avoid costly mistakes, and keep your workloads secure. The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and Well-Architected Framework (WAF) are resources your business can leverage to build and manage cloud-hosted applications in a cost-effective way. The Azure Optimization Cloud Skills Challenge goes in-depth on these frameworks to provide a fundamental understanding of optimization best practices.

Getting started with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure: Emphasizing critical aspects of cloud transition, including strategy, readiness, planning, and execution, CAF aligns business objectives with technical requirements, ensuring a seamless transition to the cloud while optimizing for cost, reliability, and security. In this introduction, you’ll learn how to overcome common challenges associated with cloud adoption.

Address tangible risks with the Govern methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure: Any technical change made in the process of cloud adoption and optimization introduces risk to your environment. In this module you’ll see how CAF’s Govern methodology mitigates risks to adopt the cloud with confidence.

Complementing CAF, the Well-Architected Framework offers a systematic approach to evaluate architectures against five key pillars, each of which has their own learning module:

• Operational excellence: Design an Azure architecture that uses modern practices and gives you full visibility into your environment.
• Cost optimization: Apply cost optimization guidance in your architecture to sustain and improve your ROI.
• Performance efficiency: Explore how to scale your system to handle load, identify network bottlenecks, and optimize your storage performance.
• Security: Incorporate security into your architecture design and discover tools to help you create a secure environment through all the layers of your architecture.
• Reliability: Apply reliability guidance in your architecture to improve your workload's availability and resilience.

What can I learn next?

After completing the Optimization Cloud Skills Challenge, you’ll find there’s lots more to discover on Microsoft Learn.

• Our Learn Live sessions deliver technical readiness and skilling programming in a television format, typically broadcasted live with Q&A and available on-demand. 
• Azure Optimization Virtual Training Days aim to funnel Microsoft’s know-how into helping you optimize and manage your cloud investment. Guided by a Microsoft Technical Trainer, you’ll discover how Azure guidance, resources, and practices can streamline your cloud spend, enable modernization, and fuel innovation in the cloud.