Azure Fundamentals Certification (AZ-900)

Last week I successfully passed AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. I thought I would share some thoughts on the experience.

What is it?

It’s Microsoft entry certification for their Azure cloud platform. It’s a non-technical test aimed at understanding the basic concepts of Azure. It is split into the following categories;

• Understand cloud concepts (15-20%)
• Understand core Azure services (30-35%)
• Understand security, privacy, compliance, and trust (25-30%)
• Understand Azure pricing and support (20-25%)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-900

Why did I take it?

Cloud computing is here to stay. It is growing every day and (if not already) will be an integral part of a Developer’s tool kit. We are moving more and more towards an integrated eco-system with DevOps where teams are having a greater awareness of the production environments and further away from isolated Development teams. In fact I believe that Dev teams should be taking the environment in account at design stage to leverage the benefits of cloud platforms to build highly performant and scalable applications with less code in less time (more on this in a future post).

I took the certification as I wanted to ensure that I have the proper grounding in Azure to understand the core basics before getting into the detail of the services. There were many areas that as a Developer I may not use on a daily basis, but wanted to have a general awareness of, such as;

• Subscriptions & Billing
• Azure Policies
• Azure Monitor
• Role Based Access Control 

At this time, my longer term aim is to take AZ-204 Certification next, aimed at Developers, and although AZ-900 is not a prerequisite my belief was this was only going to help me on that journey. Also by passing you get a badge issued by Microsoft and a recognised certification.

How did I Study?

I used multiple sources to give me the best chance of success.

• Microsoft Official Online documentation (free)
• Udemy (paid for course)
• Pluralsight (subscription based provided by work)
• Official practice Exam (paid for)

Surprisingly Pluralsight don’t have a specific path for this particular certification (they do for AZ-203), so I had to be careful to pick and choose the most appropriate material without getting side-tracked.

The Microsoft free online material was very good but could be quite hard to work through as mainly just reading, with a few videos in-between.

The Udemy course I used was ‘AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam Prep -2020 Edition’ by Scott Duffy, this was priced at £9.99 at the time. Its only around 3 hours, so was very high level and fast paced. It also contained updates as the exam scope had recently changed.

The practice exam for me was a must have. It helped me get into the test mindset. I was glad I had spent the time and money on this part of the study.

In conclusion, for me personally I don’t think any one of these on their own was sufficient to pass the exam (it may be different for you of course). The practice exam was really good, although it’s easy to fall into the trap of being good at answering those specific questions.

Was it worth it?

For me, Yes. I booked the exam and did about 3-4 weeks of study. I was really pleased to pass it and I feel inspired to carry on to the next one.  I feel AZ-900 has given me a head start on many of the ins and outs of Azure.

Even if you don’t plan on taking the exam, I would recommend reading through some of the Microsoft free online material to gain a better understand of some of the core Azure concepts.