Back (way to long ago) when I got laid off one of the first things I did was buy a couple of books and then looked online. Udemy had a sale going on so I bought a couple of courses. One of them being a course for AZ-900. One of the books was for AZ-900. I did this to learn something new during down time.
My thought process was this. My last couple jobs had dedicated teams for security, route/switch, wireless, cloud, collaboration, etc. The short story is at some point it all overlaps. Being a network engineer I often had to work with the security, wireless, and cloud teams. I’d be in meetings and hearing cloud terms and concepts and collaborating how to combine everything. So I figured it wouldn’t hurt to learn the high level concepts of Azure as it’s one of the popular cloud platforms.
I let it slide as being laid off I ended up feeling defeated and didn’t really want to do much other than apply to anything and everything I could. Well last month I got back on my horse and decided to go down the drain and study for AZ-900. I figured it would at least be nice to know the terminology and concepts at a high level. So I started down the path.
The first thing I did was start the Udemy course. The course was – https://www.udemy.com/course/az900-azure/?couponCode=ACCAGE0923 by Scott Duffy. I’m most certainly a visual learner and struggle to just read books/documentation. It wasn’t the longest course ever but had well built demonstrations and labs to follow along with your free Azure account or built in labs. I think it did a good job at giving you a high level overview of AZ-900.
As an addition to the Udemy course I had purchased the AZ-900 exam reference book: https://www.informit.com/store/exam-ref-az-900-microsoft-azure-fundamentals-9780137955145
I read the topics I watched during the Udemy course as a backup/enforcer to the content I was seeing. Overall I think the book was a great help to my studies and covers the topics well. Again not being the best at reading I leveraged the book in evenings/at night as opposed to watching terrible cable television.
After I finished the course and reading I turned to Microsoft’s free training website. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/courses/az-900t00 It gave a great refresh overview of the topics on the exam. I’m quite impressed with the coverage of topics and content of a free training course offered by a provider. The practice tests were a decent exam of the topics and I think helped out immensely. I certainly recommend checking out Microsoft Learn for content you want to brush up on or just get a concept of.
On to the exam itself. I won’t talk about the Pearson virtual exam experience because that’s it’s own topic. I booked the exam through the Microsoft website and was lucky enough to book the exam the same day for an evening session. This was just after I finished the MS Learn training so everything was still fresh. Lucky me!
Overall I found the exam to be quite fair. I can’t talk details naturally but I feel it did a good job of covering the exam objectives without throwing in alternative topics that you didn’t study for. The questions were to the tee and concise and not written to pull the wool over your eyes.
Coming from an install career of route/switch networks I think AZ-900 is a great exam to study for to get your feet wet in the Azure cloud and obtain a high level understanding of it’s concepts and offerings. Naturally as it’s called Azure Fundamentals it doesn’t go deep into topics but is a great starting place. It was surely worth the time and effort to get that terminology and concepts down for someone that doesn’t play around in the cloud.
Overall I recommend anyone in the I.T. community study for and take this exam to get a bearing. Cloud is certainly relevant today and whether you are security, route/switch, or server dedicated it is a great intro to the environment.