What a 16-Hour Azure Immersion Taught Me About AZ-104, Terraform and Kubernetes
I spent the last two days in a 16-hour immersion as an Azure Architect, focused on Cloud and AI, with real projects and case studies — no generic course slides. It was led by Guilherme Maia, Microsoft MVP, through High Expert.
What stood out most wasn't any single tool. It was seeing, in practice, how AZ-104 (Azure administration), Terraform (infrastructure as code) and Kubernetes (container orchestration) form a set — you can't master just one of these pieces and call it complete cloud architecture.
AZ-104 makes sure you know how to operate the environment: identity, networking, storage, monitoring. It's the foundation. Terraform comes next, so you stop configuring resources by hand and start versioning infrastructure as code — meaning you can recreate an entire environment predictably, auditable, without depending on whoever configured it remembering how. Kubernetes closes the set, orchestrating the containers that run on top of that infrastructure, with scale and resilience manual configuration can't deliver.
In theory, you can study each one separately. In practice, facing a real case study — not a simplified teaching exercise — makes it clear they lean on each other. A networking decision in AZ-104 affects how Terraform provisions