Passed AZ-900, thank you Lars (… and Nick)!

I have no background on Azure but passed the three Associate AWS certs in 2019 so the cloud concepts are familiar. The team I’m currently supporting is considering Azure vs AWS so I felt I needed to get a more balanced perspective of the two services. The exam is very doable and likely a very good stepping stone to a more substantial 103 or beyond cert. 

My preparation consisted of Lars wonderful course, the quizzes and AWS practice exam. I also did something that was helpful on the AWS certs which was to "audit" the next exam up, in this case I went through all the videos and labs of Nick Colyers AZ-103 course. I also did all of the Whizlabs practice exams.  If you do whizlabs I recommend doing them as practice, not as a timed exam, answer each question one by one, and then read the answers and supporting documentation as you go. 

Azure has more of a feel towards windows legacy technology and compatibility, things like what types of machines and devices you can run the various CloudShell, Powershell, CLI and portal options, lots of Active Directory questions, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and how services fit into those models, and of course lots of questions on the expected topics of virtual networks, security groups, serverless vs virtual machines, basic functionality questions of load balancers, API gateway, and definitley know the support levels and what you get with the different accounts, and know where to find things in the menu. In contrast, prepping for the AWS certs seemed more focused on services vs compatibility with a legacy architecture. This is not a right or wrong / good or bad thing, if you’re coming from a windows architecture that may be the most important thing in the world to you.

The questions are different from an AWS exam with more drag and drop, click on an icon, True / False or yes/no questions where you can’t go back to change a prior answer, and in questions where you have to select more than one answer you get a point for each right answer, it’s not an all or nothing. This means the exam might only have 36 questions but the total number of points is still something like 55, for example. I had an hour, finished in about 35 minutes, reviewed all my answers in 15 and pushed the submit button at 50 minutes with 10 minutes left feeling that I had answered everything as best I could.

There were some questions that I just had no idea what the right answer was, don’t lose sleep over those, keep moving on to the next one. I was a little nervous at points but I had time to review all of my answers and it all made more sense second time through and I didn’t change any of my answers. Score was 894 which was a wee bit higher than my highest Whizlab practice exam, which were all in the 800-890 range. 

Go for it, you won’t regret it, the classes offered here will get you through it. Best of luck!