Love your analogy distinguishing the two. To also note, Traffic manager is a solution for inter-regional connectivity. Where as the load balancer is specific to one region. In your example you could just have front end public IP or IP prefix on the LB. But I understand this is an example to clarify between the two. In real world context your traffic manager would punt traffic between multiple load balancers across Azure or even on-prem regions (banking branches) Nice article!

Hi Joseph, thanks for the likes. I do not use either I am afraid. Kind Regards,

Casey Kourofsky oh nice, thanks for the insight :)

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but if you lose the certificates, you're never getting back into the machine unfortunately. Unless you have a system state backup of the host to roll back to. more info here: https://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/hyper-v-2016-shielded-virtual-machines-stand-alone-hosts/

Exam Blueprints, Microsoft Learn and OneNote will be your forever study pals. The 104 is more "Doing" and knowing how to configure and setup solutions. Architect sometimes can be a bit easier as you just need to know what solutions fit what scenarios. MCSA and MCSE back in the day used to be the same format, you needed a completely different mindset for MCSE and oddly found it easier than MCSA. But keep going, keep learning, you will achieve.

Speaking from my networking background, I did a degree in Computer Networks and Security, while I think this helped propel my educational background and skills to get certified after, I don't think it is essential. I would however say certifications are key as well as experience and let me tell you, nothing no matter how much you lab will prepare you for the first time you walk into a datacentre environment! Also thinking back to my CCNA/P Studies and the depth of routing protocols portrayed your unlikely to even remotely touch any of this unless A) you work for a ISP or B) A global enterprise. Heck most companies I have worked for just utilize a L3 switching core with a bunch of VLANs with 1 or 2 static routes out. Do agree with SD-WAN, this is becoming more prevalent and the likes of Fortinet and their FortiGate Firewalls, they implement it well and you see it as a marketing buzzword everywhere! Customers seem to be taking up a lot of cloud options to name a few - Cisco Merkai, Aruba InstantON/central and Ubiquiti. Its also becoming alot more common to shift these devices to virtual compute in Azure/AWS. so knowing how to use these cloud platforms is also becoming essential. Quick touch on Automation, I personally don't do this a lot as I'm installing/base configuring most of the time rather then supporting an environment day by day. Despite all of this I still think the basic knowledge and foundations are not going to go away. There is still a base requirement for example to know what a VLAN is, how to create/delete assign ports etc oh, and trouble shoot spanning-tree for older networks with lack of design thought :D. Hope this helps any new Network Engineers But cool article!