My Approach to Passing Exam 70–533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
Let me walk you through my experiences of the Microsoft Exam. What is the exam about, how did I study, was it worth it?
DISCLAIMER: The information contained in this blog post is as accurate as possible as of Summer 2017; it is essential that you also validate this with the official reference pages as they will be updated with current exam objectives and guidance.
What is this exam about?
This is a technically focused, multiple-choice exam aimed at a broad range of Azure services, from Desiging and Implementing Azure Service Apps, Azure Virtual Networks, Databases, and more. Here is a link to the 70–533 exam overlay page.
I got the feeling that this exam is either targeted towards experienced Systems Engineers or Systems Architects, who have a fairly considerable amount of hands-on experience with Azure. I think I remember reading between 18 months and 2 years to be the suggested time-frame.
Did I find this exam useful?
I see this exam as a useful validation that I know all the Azure core services to at least an intermediate level — that’s the main reason I take certifications in the first place (to confirm I’ve learned enough about a subject at my own pace). It was useful for me to get MCP status to show I care about the Microsoft ecosystem as well, and when combining it with the very easy Linux Foundation Certified Systems Administrator certification it entitles MCSA: Linux on Azure which seems to be fairly exclusive (Only 16 members in the world on LinkedIn at the time of writing).
Is there lots of useless stuff in the exam? Yeah, unfortunately. The official study guides have you memorize database performance tiers, that nobody in the real world cares if you know in your head — you just look this stuff up online. Some of the questions are really crude as well, asking if certain commands were spelled customizeor customise, or even spotting a missing semicolon or comma in a JSON ARM template.
Was it a useful exam? Yes, still, as a good checkpoint that you know your stuff.
How did I prepare for 70–533?
I’ve identified that over the years, my preferred learning style is very much being self-taught, rather than sitting in a classroom and being lectured. This is mostly a personality thing, I get grumpy listening to other people talk for hours, and I very much like to explore topics and subjects beyond the course material that is often presented to me. While some courses I’ve been on have been excellent, I decided that I’d also attempt this exam after being self-taught.
Structure your learning with the exam objectives and traffic lights
Teaching yourself any subject, especially one as massive as Azure has to be done in a structured way. I started off with the exam objectives and rated myself where I thought I was. This can be very useful to give yourself a quick “heatmap” of how much learning you think you have to do, even if you just use a simple traffic light coloring scheme:
- Deploy Web Apps [RED]
- Configure Web Apps [Orange]
- Configure diagnostics, monitoring and analytics [Green]
…. and many more objectives!
With this heatmap, I always tend to start with the red items first. Why start with the stuff I don’t know well? Simply, as you start to look through these, you often pick up bits and pieces from other topics that you might partially know, and I found this with Azure in particular. In configuring diagnostics and monitoring, it really helped me out diagnosing VM and web app deployment for example.
Practice tests!
Buy the practice tests from the official websites. Do them. Back to back, until you know the answers to every question.
Don’t start the practice questions too early though, you can easily memorize the answers to 300x questions in the whole practice bank, and not really have the confidence that you know the subject yet.
How long did you have to learn for?
This really is different for every person. I’d personally been using Azure (fairly casually) before the exam for several months, and I put in several 4–6 hour evenings prior to my first take of the exam.
It took me a while with this one; I passed on my third attempt which was pretty frustrating! I’ve failed some technical exams in the past, but generally I pass them first time because, if you review the objectives, if you put in the learning hours, passing first time is just a matter of good preparation. However, with this exam I under-estimated on my first 2 attempts just quite how much emphasis it puts on memorizing complex tables and support structures, as well as relatively nit-picky questions about PowerShell syntax (pretty much not used now that the azure cross platform command line interfaces are available). Unfortunately, those are some of the frustrations I had with this exam.
Don’t let that stop you from studying for it though!
