Its Day 65 of my 100 Days of Cloud Journey, and today I sat Exam AZ-204: Developing Solutons for Microsoft Azure.
This was using up my Exam Voucher that I earned for completing the Cloud Skill Challenge from Microsoft Ignite Fall 2021.
The reason I chose this exam was because it was a bit of a challenge – coming from a pure Infrastructure background, the idea of taking a Developer exam was something I never would have thought about a year ago. I’d heard of some of the concepts that were covered in the objectives, and the other exam options were either on the Cloud Infra or Security side, so I decided to go outside of my comfort zone and take on the challenge.
The skills measured list reads like this:
- Develop Azure compute solutions (25-30%)
- Develop for Azure storage (15-20%)
- Implement Azure security (20-25%)
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions (15-20%)
- Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services (15-20%)
Looks like any other Infra-based exam we’ve seen before, right? Well, think again ….
Giving an NDA-friendly review, the exam goes deep into topics such as serverless compute, application and database development, authentication and monitoring. Again, all of this seems very infra focused, but the way I look at it is this – if you’ve done the Infra side of things like AZ-104 where you learn about how the infra works and how to put it together, AZ-204 approaches that from a far deeper dive, looking deep into the concepts and showing how we can programmatically manage these technologies.
And I’m delighted to say I made it out on the other side and passed the exam!
So does this make me an expert in Azure Development or turn me into a devloper? Well no, not overnight but its a big step in that direction. The thing with this exam is that even though I passed, I feel there is LOADS more content, demos and lab scenarios that I can look into – the exam itself will only scratch the surface, but not that I’ve gotten into this and started to go down the rabbit hole, its given me loads of ideas of how to use the content and technologies that I learned!
For learning paths on this one, I used the following:
- Microsoft Learn Modules on the official exam page
- Scott Duffy’s AZ-204 Udemy Course
- Mike Pfeiffer and Tim Warner Exam Prep Course on INE
- Whizlabs Exam Practise Tests
Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!
Michael Durkan 
When i saw the banner image I knew this had to be from an Irish Person! I plan on taking this exam in the next few weeks. Just passed the Az-104 myself.
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