Spilling the beans — How I cleared the azure developer certifications
Welcome to Part two! Wait, don’t tell me you directly came here without knowing about the part 1 (or you knew ಠ_ಠ).
To begin with, I just want to say that I have not taken any mock or practice tests/ labs for these exams and will not be addressing them but you are free to explore.
Azure has a lot of certifications; I will be talking about the developer path.
AZ 900 — Azure fundamentals
The fundamentals exam covers the basics. There is no pre-requisite for this exam. Microsoft Learn provides a great free course (scroll down to the learning paths in the below mentioned link),
Honestly, this should be enough to pass the exam (given that you take this course seriously). The course includes sandboxes, which are simulation exercises that allows you to create a limited set of azure resources and complete the given tasks. This proves to be really helpful as you get to see the practical side of it.
Pro tip: Go to this link, register and attend an upcoming azure fundamentals training day. The training is the verbose version of the above mentioned learn course. After the training, all the attendees will be given a free AZ 900 exam voucher.
AZ 204 — Azure Developer Associate
The tricky one! I found AZ 204 exam more difficult when compared to AZ 400. There are no pre-requisites for this exam but having some hands-on into azure surely helps. As mentioned in the AZ 900 (and will be mentioned again in AZ 400), the Learn course.
Make the learn course your bible, it’s important. Unlike the AZ 900 course, there are no sandboxes here (o_O;) so I recommend creating a free Azure trial account which provides 12 months usage of resources and a $200 credit upfront (at no cost) for you to mess around with.
Go through the course and during the exercises/ lab part, use your trial account to provision resources.
I understand that the Learn course can be a bit much at times (like this article) which is why as an alternative you can go for a video lecture series.
I did the AZ 204 udemy course by Alan Rodrigues; the course is precise and detailed. Moreover, the author has uploaded all the course lab videos on his youtube channel (he’s too kind).
AZ 400 — Devops Engineer Expert
I’d say take this exam if you have implemented azure devops in your project for everyday use and involved various tools such as azure repos, boards, pipelines, artifacts etc. You should also have a thorough experience of azure where you provisioned, maintained and removed various azure resources for at least a year.
AZ 400 comes with a pre-requisite that you should have either completed the AZ 104 — Azure admin exam or the AZ 204 — Azure developer exam.
We need to thank the Learn team for such beautifully crafted courses (which are free as well!).
For video, well you guessed it correctly the same author has an AZ 400 course.
Pro tip: Microsoft organizes an event called ‘Ignite’ (Usually in November of every year) where they run a Cloud skills challenge. I highly recommend joining this challenge. Through this challenge, you can complete a required set of courses and earn yourself a free AZ 204 or AZ 400 exam voucher.
You can attempt the exam using this free voucher and they usually come with a 3 month validity.
Side note: Make sure to go through the study guide (also available in the same Microsoft Learn link) before jumping into any of the learn courses. It will familiarize you with all the topics that will be covered.
Once you are done with the course and you feel confident with your concepts, look for some sample questions (no, not the dumps!) on the internet and try answering them. This builds up intuition.
I hope this helps. Feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn if you are lost (But then do I need to find you first?).
Cheers.
