Category: Certifications

100 Days of Cloud – Day 65: AZ-204 Exam Day!

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:

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!

100 Days of Cloud – Day 47: AZ-800 Exam Day!

Its Day 47 of my 100 Days of Cloud Journey, and today I sat Exam AZ-800: Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure (beta).

AZ-800 is one of 2 exams required for the new Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification, which was announced at Windows Server Summit 2021. The second exam is Az-801 (Configuring Windows Server Hybrid Advanced Services), which I’m taking next week so will write up a post on that then!

This certification is seen by many as the natural successor to the retired MCSE certifications which retired in January 2021, primarily because it focuses in some part on the on-premise elements within Windows Server 2019.

Because of the NDA, I’m not going to disclose any details on the exam, however I will say that it is exactly as its described – a Hybrid certification bringing together elements of both on-premise and Azure based infrastructure.

The list of skills measured as their weightings are as follows:

  • Deploy and manage Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) in on-premises and cloud environments (30-35%)
  • Manage Windows Servers and workloads in a hybrid environment (10-15%)
  • Manage virtual machines and containers (15-20%)
  • Implement and manage an on-premises and hybrid networking infrastructure (15-20%)
  • Manage storage and file services (15-20%)

Like all beta exams, the results won’t be released until a few weeks after the exam officially goes live so I’m playing the waiting game! In the meantime, you can check out these resources if you want to study and take the exam:

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!