K3 Professional: cloud, quality, DevOps

Who it is for

For developers with .NET experience who want to deliver and run their applications in Azure themselves.

Prerequisites

K2, or a year of professional experience with .NET and the placement test.

Afterward, you can

• Keep Azure resources, permissions and costs under control
• Describe and roll out infrastructure with Bicep and azd
• Run applications without keys in the code, with managed identity and Key Vault
• Observe applications with OpenTelemetry, Application Insights and KQL
• Integrate reliably with Service Bus and Event Grid
• Build pipelines that test, version and deliver only after approval
• Write tests that hold up, also for time, ports and load
• Use timeouts, retries, caching and rate limiting the right way
• Understand Linux, networking, DNS, TLS and mail well enough to clear up incidents
• Write concurrent and parallel code without race conditions and deadlocks
• Measure performance and improve it deliberately, up to Native AOT
• Build serverless flows with Azure Functions and Durable Functions
• Steer reliability with SLOs, error budgets, runbooks and postmortems

Contents

1. 3.0

   Infrastructure from the ground up

   Linux and the shell in a container, TCP/IP and ports, DNS, TLS and PKI, proxies and load balancers, firewalls and NSGs, SSH, mail with SMTP, SPF, DKIM and DMARC

   25 h
2. 3.1

   Azure fundamentals

   subscriptions, resource groups, RBAC, regions and the EU data boundary, costs and budgets

   20 h
3. 3.2

   Infrastructure as code

   Bicep, azd, environments, what-if and its limits

   25 h
4. 3.3

   Security in operation

   managed identity, Key Vault, no keys in code or parameters, Front Door and WAF basics, never printing secrets, cryptography (hashing, encryption, signing, keys and PKI in operation), the supply chain with an SBOM and package audits

   28 h
5. 3.4

   Observability

   OpenTelemetry, Application Insights, KQL, alerts, health checks

   25 h
6. 3.5

   Messaging and events

   Service Bus, queues, Event Grid, idempotency, dead letters

   25 h
7. 3.6

   Data in the cloud

   Azure SQL, Blob Storage, an overview of Cosmos DB and PostgreSQL with vectors, backup and restore

   20 h
8. 3.7

   CI/CD

   Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions, tests in the build, NuGet feeds and versions, approvals before a deployment

   30 h
9. 3.8

   Advanced testing

   integration against real dependencies, test data, flaky tests (time, FakeTimeProvider), free ports, load tests

   25 h
10. 3.9

    Resilience and performance

    timeouts, retries with care, caching, profiling, rate limiting

    20 h
11. 3.11

    Concurrency and parallelism

    threads and the thread pool, the Task Parallel Library, Parallel.ForEach and PLINQ, async versus parallel, lock, SemaphoreSlim, Interlocked, concurrent collections, channels, race conditions and deadlocks, the memory model, the actor model as the way out

    25 h
12. 3.12

    Performance in .NET

    BenchmarkDotNet, Span<T> and memory, the garbage collector, allocations, source generators, Native AOT

    15 h
13. 3.13

    Serverless with Azure Functions

    the isolated worker model, triggers and bindings, Durable Functions, delivery, observability and costs

    15 h
14. 3.14

    Aspire in depth

    the app model, integrations, the dashboard and service defaults, testing with Aspire, delivery

    15 h
15. 3.15

    Operations and reliability (SRE)

    SLIs, SLOs and error budgets, on-call and the incident process, postmortems, runbooks, chaos engineering with Azure Chaos Studio

    20 h
16. 3.10

    Final project

    the Kladde in Azure, delivered fully automatically

    50 h

About 383 hours in all (indicative).

Lessons

You see the text and video of every lesson here on the site after buying the course; the titles and goals are already shown. A self-study course: you work through the lessons in order and check your exercises yourself against the solutions.

You can read the first module (3.0) for free, with text and video, without signing in: so you see how the course works before you buy.

The lessons stand under their modules, in the order of the course. Click a module to open or close its lessons.

Final project: the Kladde

Certifications

An offer, never a requirement: these Microsoft exams fit this stage. You take them at Microsoft; we are not a Microsoft training partner.

• AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals

  The entry point to the Azure certifications.

• AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate

  A prerequisite for AZ-305 and one of the routes to AZ-400.

• AI-200 Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate

  Containers, databases with vectors, messaging, Functions, Key Vault and observability; expects Python skills.

• AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert

  Requires an associate certification, such as AZ-104.

Keep learning with Microsoft Learn

Microsoft's learning paths and documentation that go with this course.

• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Describe cloud concepts
• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Describe Azure architecture and services
• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Describe Azure management and governance
• AZ-104: Prerequisites for Azure administrators
• .NET on Azure Container Apps overview
• Introduction to Bash
• Introduction to Azure Virtual Networks
• Managed threading basics
• Guide for running C# Azure Functions in the isolated worker model
• Architecture strategies for defining reliability targets