11th Feb 2021
I’d seen a few people getting this certification, and it’s been on my radar for a month or so to start to get my feet under the table with Microsoft’s public cloud offering. I had a bit of time on my hands, plus here was a target to kick-start my learning: passing the associated exam. In my career I’ve found many people struggle to get going on something without a tangible goal, and I’m no different here – so passing the exam it is! The kicker is that for now it’s also free. There’s no outlay to attend the Microsoft training days sessions (2x half days in this instance), and that attendance comes complete with a no-cost AZ-900 exam attempt! Sold…
Where to Start?
You can find a link to the UK Microsoft training day sessions here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/events/training-days/ There are also many other training day sessions linked on Microsoft Dynamics, 365, Power as well as Azure – some with their own aligned free exam attempts too.
Here’s another tip that works at the moment – you can take a look at the European sessions too, with loads more available date options, which is what I did. My free exam voucher still did the trick after I’d attended one of the more numerous EU (Republic of Ireland) sessions: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/training-days/ (I tried Ireland just to be sure I’d get an English language session! NB. careful of CET timezones vs. UK if you go this way).
Cost (in terms of time and activities)
Although it might be zero-cost in terms of cash, it needs your investment in time to get to know the Azure technologies, concepts and services. So how long does it take? I’m really pretty new to Azure as mentioned, but I’ve got a bit of experience meddling with AWS so that probably helped a bit particularly with the concept pieces, and I’ve got a few years on the clock with IT infrastructure and particularly networking. Here’s what I did (your own mileage may vary, depending on your background):
Learning Path I took
The Microsoft ‘Training Day’ sessions linked above were about 3+3hrs in reality across two days (no recordings are made available so ensure you take notes). This 6 hours invested was NOT enough to pass the exam by any means for me.
I then tried the associated Microsoft self-paced training referred to in the Training Days sessions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-900?tab=tab-learning-paths. These 6 learning paths seem fine, but I struggled to maximise the training windows, and I saw multiple versions of things when clicking around. That threw me off using just them, and they were dry, so I explored a bit wider too…
I found and completed the free ‘A Cloud Guru’ path: https://acloudguru.com/course/az-900-microsoft-azure-fundamentals on their free plan, which took a day or so and was coherent (and really engaging with Lars!) – again making notes throughout. I’ve seen some of their other materials, and ACG seem consistently good. I think the notes I took from this were the best of the bunch when it came time to prepare for the exam.
Both these latter options allow you to stop and start video to make notes or look something up, whereas the training days sessions don’t and just plough on. You can also change the playback speed on the latter option videos if that’s your thing!
How Long (time invested)?
The path I took probably all added up to about 24 hours (ish!) in total. I also looked for a legitimate practice test. There was a (costly) Microsoft one via Mindhub, but I have a Pluralsight annual subscription (tip: always purchase/renew on Black Friday!) – and I’ve got access to the tests linked there. I found that they didn’t really match the training materials I’d watched, and seemed to be too involved, so gave up and thought “how hard can a fundamentals exam be?”
The Exam
I booked and took the exam (remotely), my wi-fi remained stable – they got me to take photos of the room, my ID and of myself (and locked-down hair) before setting off on the exam itself. I reckon this was a couple of hours in total to prepare, settle down, do the questionnaires and other admin, with the exam itself being 60 minutes. I also spent about and hour before the exam going through my notes. For me, my test was 45 (ish) questions and many of these were multi-part with a mix of styles. Can’t tell you much more than that, but for my exam it wasn’t split into sections, so I could mark and return to all questions across the whole exam. I guess it’s only an hour (and a fundamentals exam) so that makes sense, but I wasn’t expecting to be able to do that.
I ended up with a slim pass. The questions were a mix of cloud and Azure concepts, and specifics. I did a first pass across all questions in about 30 mins, and then returned to the 19 (yes nineteen!) questions I’d marked. These were largely related to the specifics I mention. I struggled more with this type of question having only completed the above training, and after doing the exam I now feel like they’d been skimmed over in those materials. The only saving grace was the fact I’d used multiple training sources, and I think this helped guide my answers a bit where I didn’t know up-front. I finished with about 10 mins to go, finalising my best guesses, and didn’t feel I was struggling for time.
Lessons Learned
If you’re coming at this cold – and are self-studying like me and about the same level – I think I’d recommend an additional day of effort over and above what I did. This would give some more comfort in the exam by having explored more of the details. This would probably total around 30ish hours in all, allowing that extra time to explore each of the services on the syllabus in more detail. I felt I left a lot of marks on the table for details that some more reading and self-study would have assisted me on.
So that’s my AZ-900 certification story. I thought it might help if you’re new to Azure and fancied getting onboard, but have already a decent slug of general IT experience. Trickier than I had thought! You may find some of the same! I was going to just post this on LinkedIn, but realised there are waaaaaaay too many words, so let’s try it in an article :).
Next?
I was always just after an overview of Azure at this point, and aiming at the cert has helped me get this – but it really feels like just a skim of the surface. I guess that’s not unexpected. I’ve got some more challenges to come in my next role that I’ll take the same approach to going forward: setting a specific target to help drive learning and focus, I find this works across a technical team too. If it makes sense to document in the same way and post these other paths, I’ll write them up too.
