James Elsey

Random nuggets of usefulness

4 minute read

During the depths of winter this year, I decided to set myself a challenge, my performance review was coming up in 1 month, could I achieve 3 Azure fundamental certifications by then, and use this as a stretch goal.

Coming from several years of hands on AWS experience, I already had a decent grasp on building in the cloud, I knew about high availability, redundancy, designing for failure and so on, so I could focus on understanding how the Azure ecosystem differs.

AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals

This is where you want to start, it’ll give you a good understanding of the core Azure concepts. I started by watching the John Savills AZ-900 course on Youtube, this is a great course that covers a bit of everything. The course is about 9 hours, with each topic being split into 5-20 minute videos. After Johns course, I went through the Microsoft Learn modules that are recommended on the AZ-900 certification page. The Learn modules take you through the basic concepts with great explanations, and even have you spinning up virtual machines in sandbox accounts. There were some things covered in the Learn modules that weren’t covered so well in Johns course, so I recommended doing both just to cover the bases.

Lastly, I did the mock test on the Microsoft Learn page, this is very close to the difficulty of the exam, and again there were a few questions I hadn’t seen touched upon in Johns course of the Learn modules, so I had to do a small amount of research to cover those things.

I felt that was more than enough to get me through the exam

DP-900 Data Fundamentals

I took the exact same approach as the AZ-900, although this time I did the MS Learn modules first, then Johns course. No particular reason, it was just easier to me to watch videos at the time as I had lots of downtime so it was easy to put these up on a second screen.

Honestly, this one was the most fun, lots of questions on SQL and NoSQL which I have a keen interest in, it was the data analytics capabilities that I found the most challenging part.

Again, I felt this approach was more than enough to get through the exam, the mock exam is very close to the real exam in terms of difficulty.

SC-900 Security, Compliance, Identity Fundamentals

Same approach again, the John Savill course and then the MS Learn modules. This one I found the hardest to get through, not necesarilly the difficulty, I just didn’t find the content particularly interesting. The security aspects were ok, but governance and compliance was rather dry! Still, it’s good to have an understanding of these areas in case I ever need to run a compliance score check on an Azure subscription.

r/AzureCertifications

I found this subreddit immensely useful, people post their certification experiences and give tips on how to prepare, it was how I found the John Savill course. I saw several posts suggesting that these 3 exams require about 10-15 hours of study each, which is roughly inline with my own experience.

The schedule

About that 1 week… Here’s a run down of how much time I spent

Total time for the above is about 29 hours, add in 3 hours to cover sitting the exams, then another 3-4 hours of general research or playing with a personal Azure account and you’re close to a 38 hour working week. I actually spread my study out over 3 weeks, taking a week of evenings to study, then doing the exam on a weekend evening, but I could have done it in a single week if I had the time free.

Closing thoughts

This was a fun personal challenge that I really enjoyed, and would recommend others try. I was very impressed with the Microsoft Learn website, it’s easy to use and the content is great and all in one place, unlike AWS. I also enjoyed how they’ve gamified it and you can set challenges and level up.

The demand for Azure seems to be increasing so I think it’s good to have a basic grasp of it. By no means do I consider myself fully capable with Azure, but I feel that I’ve had enough of an introduction that I could be thrown into an Azure project and find my way through it. Remember what Einstein said, you don’t need to know everything, just where to look when you need it. Paraphrased, maybe.

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