Tag: azure

How to pass AZ-900 exam? And why?

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.

Setting up quick API with F# and Azure Functions

As mentioned in my last week Elixir blog post, I produced some quick fake API based on Azure Functions. I thought it’s gonna take a couple of minutes, but it turned out to be a whole adventure in itself.

The creating of a function is a breeze.

  1. Go to Portal, click big green “+” sign and search for “Function App”Screen Shot 2017-04-17 at 16.34.00.png
  2. Pick Function App published by Microsoft
  3. Fill all the necessary fields like App name (must be globally unique) or location. For hosting plan I used “Consumption plan” which means, I pay only for the time that function is running. I also like to pin my stuff to the dashboard, so it’s easier to find.Screen Shot 2017-04-17 at 16.37.38.png
  4. It will take several minutes to deploy.
  5. Now you can create your functions for the app. F# is hidden in small print just above “Create this function” button. So click “create your own custom function”.Screen Shot 2017-04-17 at 16.40.40.png
  6. Then with Language drop-down, pick “F#” and for Scenario – “API  & Webhooks”. There should be on the F# function triggered by HTTP request. That’s the one you want for API.
  7. You’ll get premade piece of code with a simple function that is triggered by HTTP POST with name object and responses “Hello “.

Then I started writing the logic I wanted. I made an array of hard coded airport data. I made the function to accept only GET requests (you can change it in function.json file). In code, I parse query strings and get the airport IATA code. If I have this airport in my array, I response 200 with JSON containing the data. Otherwise, I return 404. If there’s no parameter in the query string, function answers with 500.

It’s relatively simple and straightforward F# code. I just struggled a lot with debugging. The small editor on Azure doesn’t give you static analysis, nor type information and no squigglies. You need to run the function and check for compilation errors or runtime errors. There was also some weird scoping behaviour, that forced me to declare the Airports array within the function. Anyways, after 2hrs I had an API that did what I wanted. You can see the code below. It’s not bulletproof, but it does the job. And I got to play with Azure Functions a bit.

https://gist.github.com/mlusiak/5053aabbc1c6e76db082dc8daa952c81

If you want to read more about other types of F# Azure Functions, Mathias Brandewinder wrote recently two posts about timer and queue triggered functions.

That’s all for today. Tune in next week for another part. Also, check previous episodes. And if you’re interested in machine learning, look into my weekly link drop.