Passed AZ-900 today – review

Hi all, good news (for me) is I passed, first time!

As of Monday AM I knew nothing about Azure itself, only cloud concepts and business level understanding of cloud technologies – no idea how to actually implement features in Azure and what Microsoft have named certain services etc.

On the exam itself there are 42 questions over 60 minutes.

The exam centre was a bit shabby to be honest (but was a new one about 2 miles from my house – the alternatives were 2-3 hour round trips) and my exam crashed with 16 minutes to go, just as I was finishing the review of questions I’d marked. The moderator had to come and reset it and I noted I’d lost of couple of minutes when it restarted although that didn’t really matter as I was pretty much done anyway.

Clicked finish – congratulations you passed, you needed 700 to pass and you scored…. 700. So yeah couldn’t have been tighter and this actually disappointed me a little as I’d been marking down with ticks on a bit of a paper as to the number of questions that I thought I had confidently answered.

With those and then figuring that most of the questions I wasn’t really confident on were those multi-choice ones where you tick 2 or 3 options and get a point for each correct choice – I’m certain on those I always got a couple of points and there was possibly one choice open to interpretation – so I was estimating around 80-85%.

But a pass is a pass I guess and as I said I started from zero on Monday. This was also my first exam in 12 years.

(Funny side note – the first IT cert exam I ever took was the Windows 95 MCP exam back in 1998. If I recall correctly you needed 659 to pass that and I scored…. 659! The exam centre then said they’d never seen that before so I like making it a close call I guess!)

At the end after the congratulations page the exam crashed again and the Microsoft learning dashboard now just gives me a blank page when I click on it in Chrome and using Safari downloads a pointless empty file with a bizarre extension so I literally have no idea if my certification/pass has actually gone through all the way. Bit of a waste of space that.

Anyway….resources I used were:

The Cloud Guru course obviously! An enjoyable watch and well done Lars & team for making it engaging & fun.

I skim read the content at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/azure-fundamentals/ mainly focusing on areas I felt less sure on after the ACG course.

Went through the exam blueprint here https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE3VwUY

Please note another ACG member posted pretty much the same advice 9 days here https://acloud.guru/forums/az-900-microsoft-azure-fundamentals/discussion/-Ly0ETpZU2FroSSaH__f/Passed%20AZ-900%20Microsoft%20Azure%20Fundamentals

Which I followed so respect to Karlos for that.

In terms of actual content, obviously there is a non-disclosure so I can’t give details of actual questions I can remember but the list Karlos gave in the post above is pretty on the money, also know how to calculate average monthly uptime.

Thanks all and keep up the awesomeness!