How I cleared the AZ-400 certification
And it’s a wrap.
When I look back at the last few months of my professional life, all I can remember are Azure certifications. And the least planned among them was the AZ-400 examination.
This exam for me had a few firsts:
- Didn’t use Whizlabs for practice tests
- Wrote the exam from home
- No thought about failure
Like I mentioned in my previous post, my organization tied up with Microsoft for the certifications. Having cleared AZ-900 and AZ-204 which were required for my competency, AZ-400 was not something I was planning to write until one of my colleague-turned-friend suggested it. Her take was that, when I was working on global applications hosted in Azure and following DevOps practices, why not attempt the exam. Also the syllabus was not completely new, as I attended a week long training organized by our DevOps Manager a few months ago.
And the preparation began.
To obtain the DevOps Engineer Expert certification, one has to either clear the Azure Administrator(AZ-104) or Azure Developer(AZ-204) certification. That’s not to say that Microsoft wouldn’t allow you to attempt the AZ-400 exam if you didn’t clear either of them, but you wouldn’t be able to claim the certificate even if you clear.
The Microsoft documentation divides the syllabus into seven parts:
- Develop an instrumentation strategy
- Develop a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strategy
- Develop a security and compliance plan
- Manage source control
- Facilitate communication and collaboration
- Define and implement continuous integration
- Define and implement a continuous delivery and release management strategy
Coming from a developer background, the last four topics caught my attention first and I was able to score quite well in them. I completed the first three topics post that. I spent two weeks to study from the Microsoft documentation and a week on the practice tests. Unlike AZ-204, AZ-400 does not have sandboxes for every module but we are encouraged to login to the Azure portal and complete each exercise. (Except for GitHub. It needs a separate login.) Having worked with ADO, GitHub didn’t seem extremely new. AZ-204 covers most of the PowerShell, Cloud Shell, Azure CLI commands and AZ-400 just re-iterates them.
I was told that simulation exercises would be there but did not encounter any.
Whizlabs was not part of my preparation this time as Udemy had sufficient practice tests. Also, if you have access, every certification exam has a free practice test. Once clicked, you can write it as many times as you want for one month. Microsoft has a question bank for this test too and provides different questions for each attempt.
I wrote the exam from home due to lockdown. The exam was for 190 minutes. There were 58 questions of which 5 were case study, 6 true or false. The other questions were multiple choice, choose from drop down, match the following, arrange in order, etc.
Truth to be told, I found the AZ-204 exam harder. The depth at which Azure services were explored, the portal, the PowerShell, Cloud Shell, Azure CLI commands, was deeper in AZ-204. DevOps, like its definition, has to bring people, products and processes together and the exam had to cover a lot of these concepts and that could be a reason for the ease. Practically, it’ll be more than what meets the eye(or the exam :P).
Anyway, all’s well that ends well. I do not plan to write anymore Microsoft certification exams anytime soon.(That’s exactly what I told my mother. She smiled and asked, “Should I believe you?”. Well…).
Certifications or not, learning is the real deal.
