Yesterday I passed the AZ-900 exam for “The Azure Fundamentals” certification. This is the most basic Azure certification and is suggested as the first step to more serious certificates in that area.
But why?
I worked with Azure last two years. Why would I pass the most basic certification? Currently, I’m working together with my colleague Marcus Mazur on the development paths for the developers in our company as a part of our knowledge package. Times, when tretton37 has been a purely .NET shop, are long gone, but Azure and Microsoft stack are still an important part of our offering. I’m not really a “certificate believer”, but our customers are. They either believe they represent skills or have contractual or legal obligations to use consultants with skills confirmed by certificates. And so we encourage our developers to obtain certificates and we help in that process. And since I’m the one planning the paths for the people, I also want to test them on myself.
Why is this a good first certificate?
It’s a relatively low body of knowledge and easy to pass, but you get familiar with the process. Currently, due to Covid-19, the exams are done online and it’s a bit different experience. The check-in process went ok, but the actual exam tool has some issues and it adds to the stress of the whole experience. So starting with the relatively non-important and easy exam is a good way to get familiar with the process. In future, I’ll know that the exam tool has some problems and I will be more emotionally prepared for that, so I can focus on the harder exam.
How, if you’re new to Azure?
Many people will approach this as a newbies in the Azure/Microsoft world. I highly suggest going through this official Microsoft learning path:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/azure-fundamentals
And also watch this 3hrs video from freeCodeCamp that goes through all the topics necessary to pass the exam:
Now – they may or may not be sample questions available on the internet. They may or may not be similar to the ones on the actual exam. If I were you, I’d look at them ;)
How, if you’re Azure veteran(ish)?
I approached this exam with around 2 years experience of running software projects on Azure. In that time I used a decent amount of available services, but not all of them. So most of the questions that asked if service X is good for Y were relatively easy for me. But I’d still suggest looking at those potentially-probably-close-to-real sample tests because there’s a bunch of tricky questions about how you can do operation X on Azure using Google Chrome laptop or if SLA for service Z is 99.99% or 99.95%. You know, things you’ll never need nor care about when using Azure, but apparently they’re important.
What’s next
I’ll be passing a few more Azure exams in the near future. Let me know if posts like that are interesting for you.