AZ-900

9/25/2021

Background

The AZ-900 is Microsoft’s beginner cloud certification. Cloud computing is a tech that seems to be in demand and since I didn’t take any classes for it in college, I thought it would be a good tech to start leaning and to have another certification on my resume.

A big plus with AZ-900, is that if you sign up for and watch a webinar ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trainingdays ), you get a voucher to take the test for free. This is the main reason I went for Azure and not AWS.

Resources Used

I used 4 resources for studying for the exam: Microsoft’s official training, a YouTube series, ExamPro, and practice tests from Udemy.

Microsoft provides free online training on all the subjects of the exam and the content is good. While going through the sections, if you setup an Azure account, you can get access to a sandbox subscription and complete follow along labs, like spinning up a VM or a WordPress site.

This YouTube series ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGjZwEtPN7j-Q59JYso3L4_yoCjj2syrM ) by the channel Adam Marczak - Azure for Everyone is a little old, so some of the topics are no longer on the exam, but the material is presented very well, and he gives examples and walkthroughs in the Azure portal on many of the topics in AZ-900.

I did, also, buy the AZ-900 ExamPro course, but I would not recommend it. The course is free on YouTube, the author doesn’t go very in depth in the topics and the cheat sheet you get with purchasing the course from their website has many misspellings and grammar mistakes.

Finally, I used practice tests from Udemy from ( https://www.udemy.com/course/az-900-practice-tests ) by XaaS Technologies. The tests are well done and some of the questions on them appeared on my official test.

I ended up with 18 pages of notes from the official training, and 15 from the YouTube series. It took my about 1-2 months of studying to pass the exam. If I have the time I’ll post my notes in another post.

The Exam

I got 41 questions and 41 minutes to complete it. The test is multiple choice, true or false, and a few showed the Azure dashboard and asked you what button should you select to do x. All of the sections in the exam were hit pretty evenly for me. If you go through the official training and the YouTube series by Adam Marczak, and take notes and go through the syllabus, you should be fine. Knowing which services do what, is probably the most difficult aspect to know, as you have to memorize what they are and what they do in order to answer questions about them.

End

I am still debating on whether or not to go for the next Azure certification in the path, the AZ-103 Microsoft Azure Admin, but in the mean time I plan on learning pfSense and Splunk. I always see IT jobs wanting applicants with firewall and SIEM experience and both of theses have free training courses available and seem to be well know in the industry. Thanks for reading!

Recommended Resources Used

(Official Microsoft Training and Study Guide):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-900

(YouTube Series):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGjZwEtPN7j-Q59JYso3L4_yoCjj2syrM

(Practice Tests Used):

https://www.udemy.com/course/az-900-practice-tests/