Azure Certification — My take on AZ-204 Exam (Azure Developer Associate) and learnings you can benefit
How I prepared for AZ-204 and what I learnt from the experience in navigating through the various services inside Azure
Motivation
I started exploring Azure at the start of 2020 when my Google Cloud credits expired and I had to explore alternative platform for demonstrating hands-on usecases in TechPrimers. I got impressed initially with the developer experience in accessing the Azure Portal. And also,
The push Microsoft is taking to climb up the Cloud Wars!
In September 2020, I took the “Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge” by Microsoft as part of their Ignite conference. This earned me a free exam voucher to take up an Azure certification — It lead to the increasing curiosity to explore about Azure services.
Preparation
I have been using AWS for a while now and I’m yet to take a AWS certification exam as of today. :)
The documentation and learning path for Azure are hosted on Github and the explanation and simplicity gartered my interest towards learning Azure service. The real time example scenarios with the right mix of technical/hands-on commands/steps with a sandbox in their learning paths made me stick to finishing Azure before any other certification/learning.
The resource I used had a mix of Official learning path from Microsoft, Ravi Kiran’s study guide and the Udemy course by famous Alan Rodrigues. More than preparing for the exam, I learnt how Azure is different from AWS in many aspects.
Environment
The learning path has sandbox environments which can be spin up within the learning page and can be tried via the Cloud Shell in the right side of the documentation. This gives a clear hands-on experience for some of the labs inside the microsoft learning path.
I created a free-trial account in Azure wherein I tried some of the resources. Microsoft provides 200$ credits for a 30 day period in the trial account.
Learning from the exam
The exam is almost 3 hours long. However, you don’t have to sit through the whole period. The exam consists of different categories of questions eg., Match the following, arranging the order of commands, filling in the gaps, etc,. The challenge doesn’t lie in the time of the exam, but the trickiness in the questions and how do you react to those.
I liked their block questions, where you cannot go back and revisit that question once you have answered it. This really tests our decision making and shows the risks in choosing right vs wrong solution in a matter of few seconds.
I learnt lot of services and their in-depth features and basics. Service Bus, Queues, Event Hub, Storage accounts, Managed Service Identities, etc,. were some of the services where I strengthened my understanding with Azure offerings.
The result for the exam is instant and you get your certificate in the next 1 hour in the exam certification portal.
Note: This is not a hands-on exam, however your hands-on knowledge is tested by means of case-studies and CLI/Code based questions which tests your developer instincts :)
Of course, I learnt a lot of .Net code too :)
What’s next?
If you have completed AZ-204, you can complete the AZ-400 to get the Azure DevOps Expert certification, which tests your end-to-end cloud knowledge.
Conclusion
It felt extremely satisfying to clear a Developer certification which covers a wide variety of areas. The focus and dedication in learning is required to user any concept and that in turn helps in clearing any exam.
Meet you in the next article. Until then, thank you for reading..!
Happy Learning!
References
- Official learning path from Microsoft
- Ravi Kiran’s study guide
- Alan Rodrigues
