Three is a charm
Today I passed my third exam in a row. I’m now Azure Fundamentals Certified!
I totally messed up the order in which I took my exams, and I’m not sure it made things easier or harder. Going from DP-900 to DP-203 to AZ-900 is not recommended and it added some confusion for me. So my personal recommendation, when you starting in the Azure Data world and don’t have a lot of Azure experience yet is:
- AZ-900
- DP-900
- DP-203
The most complex part of this certification for me is just the enormous broad range of topics where you should have knowledge, and Microsoft can quiz you about. Here is a link to the Microsoft site for the list.
Just to give you an idea, it ranges from theory of what cloud computing is to knowing what you need to setup for Azure Arc (still high level). What tools are available for migrations from on-premises to the Cloud, how to manage Enterprise level Azure deployments.
For me these are not the topics that you work with on a day to day basis. Most of these topics are covered by teams other than mine. That just makes it hard.
Learned
Although this is an entry level certifications, I’m very happy that I spend the time and effort to get this certification. I learned a lot of new and interesting things from where I can spend a more time to make my life easier and more exciting.
Azure Blueprints is one of the service that I haven’t seen and I theoretically know what it is now (because of this stydying), and look forward of looking into this a bit more.
Missing
During the studing there wasn’t a lot of references or modules about Bicep. And maybe it is because of it is fairly new, and maybe not even officially released. I think Bipec is a cool language and a major improvement over ARM templates, which is referenced.
Maybe I don’t understand well enough what goes into maintaining this learn materials, exams and certifications.
Tools
I again used the tools that were provided to me by my employer, and the free available items. For more information, see my blog post on the first exam.
The result again is that the tooling really adds on to eachother, and I don’t think I could have accomplished the same results only using one of the services.