What Is the AZ-104? Glossary & Key Terms

Blob Storage
Azure's object storage service optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data such as documents, images, and backups, organized into containers.
Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
The deployment and management service for Azure that provides a consistent management layer, enabling resources to be created, updated, and deleted through templates, the portal, CLI, or PowerShell.
Resource Group
A logical container for grouping related Azure resources that share the same lifecycle, used as the primary scope for applying RBAC, policies, and tags.
Subscription
A billing and access-management boundary in Azure that contains resource groups and resources, and is the level at which usage is metered and invoiced.
Management Group
A container above subscriptions in the Azure hierarchy used to apply governance conditions like policies and RBAC across multiple subscriptions at once.
Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD)
Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service, used to authenticate and authorize users and applications and to manage groups, roles, and conditional access.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
An Azure authorization model that grants permissions to identities by assigning built-in or custom roles at a specific scope (management group, subscription, resource group, or resource).
Azure Policy
A governance service that evaluates resources against defined rules and enforces compliance, such as denying non-compliant deployments or auditing existing resources.
Virtual Network (VNet)
An isolated, logically segmented network in Azure that enables secure communication between Azure resources, the internet, and on-premises networks.
Subnet
A range of IP addresses within a virtual network used to segment and organize resources, and to apply network security groups and route tables.
Network Security Group (NSG)
A firewall-like resource containing inbound and outbound security rules that allow or deny network traffic to resources based on source, destination, port, and protocol.
VNet Peering
A connection method that links two virtual networks to enable private, low-latency traffic between them using the Azure backbone network rather than the public internet.
Azure Load Balancer
A Layer 4 (transport-layer) service that distributes inbound network traffic across a pool of healthy VM instances to improve availability and scalability.
Application Gateway
A Layer 7 (application-layer) web traffic load balancer that supports URL-based routing, SSL/TLS termination, and an integrated web application firewall.
Azure Storage Account
A container that provides a unique namespace for Azure Storage data objects, including blobs, files, queues, and tables, with configurable performance and redundancy settings.
Redundancy (LRS/ZRS/GRS)
The replication strategy for a storage account: Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) copies data within one datacenter, Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) copies across availability zones in a region, and Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) copies to a secondary, distant region.
Shared Access Signature (SAS)
A time-limited, permission-scoped URI that grants delegated access to specific Azure Storage resources without exposing the storage account's full access keys.
Availability Set
A grouping mechanism for VMs within a single datacenter that distributes instances across fault domains and update domains to minimize simultaneous outages.
Availability Zone
A physically distinct location with independent power, cooling, and networking within an Azure region, used to provide higher fault tolerance than availability sets alone.
Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS)
An Azure resource for deploying and centrally managing a set of identical, auto-scaling VMs behind a load balancer.
Azure Monitor
The umbrella platform for collecting, analyzing, and responding to telemetry (metrics and logs) from Azure resources, applications, and infrastructure.
Kusto Query Language (KQL)
The read-only query language used to search, filter, and analyze log data stored in Azure Monitor Logs and Log Analytics workspaces.
Recovery Services Vault
A storage entity in Azure used to hold backup data and recovery points for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery operations.
Managed Identity
An identity automatically managed by Microsoft Entra ID and tied to an Azure resource, allowing that resource to authenticate to other Azure services without storing credentials.