Oct27201827 October 201827 October 201817Commentsby Gregor Suttie

New Azure Exams – My thoughts on them

Posted in Azure, AzureDevOps, Blogtober2018

I have sat 6 of the Azure Beta exams in the last couple of months and I just wanted to jot down my thoughts on each of the exams which will hopefully help people who are thinking of doing them in the upcoming months.

You can find out a lot of good info on these exams here:-
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/azure-exams.aspx

I started with the Azure Administrator Beta exams:-

AZ-100 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-AZ-100.aspx
AZ-101 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-AZ-101.aspx

The 2 exams above are now no longer in Beta and are essentially live and good to go.

These exams are the best place to get started in my opinion, recommend you start with these if you haven’t already,

Next up I sat the Azure Architect beta exams:-

AZ-300 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-AZ-300.aspx
AZ-301 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-az-301.aspx

The 2 exams above are still in Beta and wont go live till the start of January 2019.

Note:- There are a few coding questions on this exam, so if you’re an architect that isn’t hands on I recommend you spend some time doing so, otherwise you might feel disappointed/frustrated after sitting the exam.

Next up I sat the Azure Developer beta exams:-

AZ-200 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-az-200.aspx
AZ-201 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-az-201.aspx

The 2 exams above are still in Beta and wont go live till the start of January 2019.

Note:- These two exams were very tough for me, I am a developer, now manager and not hands on writing code day in and day out and unless you really know Azure from writing code against it, I think you will struggle on these exams.

The AZ-200 is hard but the AZ-201 is really hard in my opinion, even harder when you find a bug in a radio button and you can’t select your answer.

Overall the exams are pretty good, there are some cross over questions from one exam to the other which I wasn’t expecting, but probably makes sense.

Question:- Which exams should I take first?
Answer:- Obviously it depends on your skill set, but I would probably say start with the Administrator exams if your starting out,  many people have already passed the beta and there will be practice tests and useful blog posts already available for this exam. https://gregorsuttie.com/2018/07/18/microsoft-azure-infrastructure-and-deployment-beta-az-100/ – so my answer would be do the Administrator, Architect, Developer exams if your able to do them all.

Question:- Are there any new types of exam questions?
Answer:- Not that I have seen so far.

Question:- Are they hard?
Answer:- Again depends on your experience, Administrator, Architect, Dev is for me going up the scale in how difficult they were for me, but that’s my own personal take on the exams. My favourite exam was the AZ-301 exam.

Question:- Why are you sitting all these exams, are you insane?
Answer:- I want to learn as much Azure as possible, yes I wont pass some of the exams, maybe even not ever, but that’s ok,  it shows me where my knowledge is weak and where I need to go learn more.

Final thoughts:-

I would encourage everyone to get hands on, reading material isn’t going to get you a pass on any of these exams, especially the Developer exams, there is a lot of content and they focus on the newer technologies that are out. I spent a lot of time reading and going over some topics that haven’t appeared in any of the exams, that’s fine and at least I have learned these topics.

I think that rather than being an expert in any particular area my overall Azure skills have increased a fair bit,  I now know which tools to use and why, if not the low-level details that sometimes get asked in the exams.

The longer you wait the more study materials and practice tests will appear

Best of luck to you all!, and let me know how you get on and how you thought the exams went.