Certifications for Azure Developers

Editor's Notes

• #4: Good Morning Everyone to the Azure Certification preparation session on Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure. I am Krunal Trivedi. I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer as well as MCT India Regional Lead. Since 12 years I am working as Corporate Trainer for IT Corporates in India as well as around the globe. I am also Microsoft MVP for Azure. I am a CTO of a company called Spanlabs. So that was my brief introduction and now let us begin our session. Whether you’re in your first IT job or you’re a seasoned professional, you’ve worked hard to get where you are. You take your role seriously, and so does Microsoft. As we know, now a days Microsoft is changing their certification path to role based to help you and your career keep pace with today’s business requirements. Microsoft is evolving the certification program to better offer what you need to skill up, prove your expertise to employers and peers, and get the recognition—and opportunities—you’ve earned. So as the session tile says, the session is about Exam Prep for Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure, In this session, I am going to talk about Apps – the certification path is known as Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure with the Examination number AZ-203 or you can say AZ-204 which is in beta as of now. If you are a developer, you need to clear the examination number AZ-203/AZ-204 and if your job profile is associated with infrastructure or IT pro side or technically said, IT networking side, you need to clear AZ-103/AZ-104 and such that.
• #5: I am hoping in this session to give you a lot of concrete, real-world examples you can take away. It will give you a lot of value in terms of figuring out how to crack this particular exam. I will start with basics and will also give you some study tips. Key take away from this session would be number 1 obviously help you prepare for this exam but along with that discuss the topics and give you a breakdown of what is in the test, what you should prepare for the test and also some study tactics.
• #6: Well for many people, it is surprising like why it is AZ-203 or AZ-204 and not AZ-200 or AZ-201 or AZ-202? Well originally the intent was to have two exams, AZ-200 – known as Microsoft Azure Developer Core Solutions and AZ-201– known as Microsoft Azure Developer Advanced Solutions to get the certification for development track but then Microsoft decided that it would be too much and so they decided to keep one exam but again AZ-202 is transition exam and that one was also retired and so 203 is the current one and 204 would be the next one. So one test get you certified as Azure Certified Developer.
• #7: Well, this is the current structure. AZ-900 is the Fundamental One and there are few Associate level certifications such as Microsoft Certified : Azure Administration Association OR Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate, Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate. There is no prerequisites for any of the Associate Level or Fundamentals certification. So you can directly jump in for Developer level certification, if you like to. If you feel comfortable of taking AZ-900 first, the fundamentals exam , that’s also a good idea. Here you can see on the screen, we have Role-based certifications. We have two roles mentioned here : Associate and Expert. So here you can see, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert Certification (AZ-400) that does required Associate certification.
• #8: Well, now let us move-in for AZ-203 or AZ-204 which is in beta as I told you already, this is for Developers. Here there would be few infrastructure related services we need to understand. So you can see here folks who are working with cloud solution architects, cloud DBAs, cloud administrators and other people in IT to deliver applications. The Exam is for the job role of Azure Developers who design and build cloud solutions such as applications and services. The developers would be part of the entire product development cycle from solution design, to development and deployment, to testing and maintenance.
• #9: Well from the beginning of the session I am saying AZ-203 or AZ-204. So what is this mystery. Let us discuss this. Well currently we have AZ-203 is existing and most popular exam amongst the Azure Developers but at the same time Microsoft has recently announced AZ-204 which is in beta and which would be future of this role specific exam. Now, what is the difference between AZ-203 and AZ-204 as well as comparison between these two – all these I will discuss in a while. But here keep in mind, keep in mind these dates. AZ-203 retires on August 31,2020 and that means you can still take this exam till August 31. While AZ-204 became available on February and still is in the beta. Some of the content for this test would be updated on May 18, which on coming Monday.
• #10: Now, again the question would be --- hey , we have two exams available – one would be expired and one is in beta. Which one should I take? Which one I should focus on? So here is some hints or rather say, guidelines for you while taking the decision. AZ-204 is still in beta. No study material has been specified for this test yet At the same time, there is no experience of other test takers. Length of the test is longer and some questions do not count. Generally we know, that when we appear for Microsoft certification, we get the result at the end of the test, on the screen with the score but for this beta exam, there would be delayed in results. It might take up to 6y weeks. You will only get , thank you for appearing for this exam on the screen.
• #11: While on the other hand, AZ-203 is still valid till August 31st, 2020. Plenty of study material is available. We have plenty of test-takers available in the market, who can share their exam experience with you. And very important thing is. Certification is valid for the next 2 years. And yes, if you have already passed AZ-203 or would be passing AZ-203 till August 31, your certification would be valid for next 2 years and you don’t need to worry about it. But again what is the difference between AZ-203 and AZ-204, which we will discuss shortly.
• #12: These are the pillars essentially, which make up the content for this exam. This exam covers wide range of topics in various ways. You can see starting with the left hand side top, one need to understand Azure Infrastructure as Service compute solutions. So what happens is a lot of the time you develop an application and many times you need to deal with infrastructure team who provision VMs, IP ranges, or plan hybrid connectivity. Just underneath that, there is a Azure Platform as a Service offerings. Things like App Service, Azure SQL, App DNS and SSL would be a part of it. These stuffs going to have bigger weightage. After that, Azure Storage and Azure Security is kind of a middle wear here. We will dive into all these in depth later on these topics. After that, it comes, monitor, troubleshooting and optimizing solutions. And Azure Services and third-party services These all are high level sharpers and now let us take a look in to low level pieces of all these things.
• #13: First of all let us discuss Exam basics. There would be about 40-60 questions approximately. Nice thing what I have noticed here, in comparison with Microsoft exams in old days, there is a partial credit for some of the questions. Along with the MCQs here we have some questions with 2 or 3 answers and we have to pick all those apply and we get credits to the partially selected answers. You will also get some questions of drag and drop, some kind of interactive questions, so there is a different kind of format for some of the questions with partial credit and there is no penalty or negative marking for wrong guessing. So I would like to tell you that, please make sure you attend all the questions even if you don’t have idea about the particular one. Some times, you can’t skip questions and some times you can’t go back, well its depends on the scenario. In AZ-203, you will get multiple type of questions as we mentioned, some might be MCQs, some will be drag and drop, some would be case studies. It would be like few MCQs and than there would be a case study and again some more intense MCQs based on that case study. A case study contains bunch of information about say, some kind of customer, what they are currently running, their intense, what is there goal, what they are trying to achieve and then it is up to you to consume that information and go for questions based on that scenario. In AZ-204, Even there would be some performance based questions. Performance based means hands-on. It is like you will log-in to portal and perform some hands-on to pass the test. Also make sure, you plan your 180 minutes properly. Like, this is what generally I do, I spare, 150 minutes to answer questions and 30 minutes to read instructions, comments and score reporting.
• #15: Let us take a look on the Exam AZ-203 objective domains. It starts with Develop Azure IaaS compute solutions that takes 10-15%, yes you read correct here. You have to understand a little bit of infrastructure and containerization stuff here to clear this exam. Second one in the list is Develop Azure Platform as a Service compute solutions which takes 20-25% of the exam questions. It would be your PaaS stuff and it would be very easy and favourite to developers. Things like Azure App service ,Web Apps and Azure SQL would be part of it. The third one is developing for Azure storage. 15-20% exam questions would be from this section. Like working with storage accounts, manage blobs in Azure storage and databases would be part of it. Than it would be about Azure security which is again 10-15% where it might asks you questions about Role-based Access Controls, Working with Azure AD and integrate your application with it, maintaining Azure key-vault, encrypt and decrypt data at rest and in transit, create, read, update and delete keys, secrets, and certificates by using the Key Vault API etc… Beyond security it would be monitoring, troubleshooting, optimizing solutions which is around 10-15% of exam questions. And finally, connecting to and consume Azure and third-party services would be around 20-25%. Things like developing an App Service Logic Apps, Integrate Azure Search within solution would be part of it.
• #16: Now Let us take a look on the Exam AZ-204 - beta objective domains. It start with Develops Azure compute solutions will take 25-30%, yes you read correct here. You have to understand a little bit of infrastructure and containerization stuff here to clear this exam. The second one is developing for Azure storage.10-15% exam questions would be from this section. Like working with storage accounts, manage blobs in Azure storage and databases would be part of it. Than it would be about Azure security which is again 15-20% where it might asks you questions about Role-based Access Controls, Working with Azure AD and integrate your application with it, maintaining Azure key-vault, encrypt and decrypt data at rest and in transit, create, read, update and delete keys, secrets, and certificates by using the Key Vault API etc… Beyond security it would be monitoring, troubleshooting, optimizing solutions which is around 10-15% of exam questions. And finally, connecting to and consume Azure and third-party services would be around 20-25%. .
• #17: Now, let us understand what is there in Develop Azure Infrastructure as a Service compute solutions.
• #18: Now, let us understand what would go inside Develop Azure Infrastructure as a Service Compute Solutions. Here you need to understand how to provision VMs, create ARM templates, how to implement Azure Disk Encryption for VMs. Then there would be stuff related to Azure managed Kubernetes Services cluster and like how to push container image to the ACR, how to set service principal, how to run container using ACI, how to scale up and scale down AKS cluster nodes, how to upgrade master and how to implement monitoring and logging for the ACI or AKS. After that, it would be about implementing batch jobs using Azure Batch service. How to run and manage batch jobs by using Batch Service API, Azure CLI, Azure Portal and other tools. Along with Azure portal, the knowledge about the Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI and ARM templates would be very useful here. Probably you don’t need to remember how to write entire ARM templates or don’t need to remember PowerShell cmdlet, but still little bit of knowledge would be helpful here.
• #20: Now, it’s time for the second one, Develop Azure PaaS compute solutions. Creating Azure App service web apps covers task like creating an Azure App Service web app, implementing background tasks by using web jobs, enable diagnostics logging, implementing health monitoring as well as hosting your web apps on azure with Azure Web App for containers. Creating Azure App Service for mobile apps covers implementing push notifications, enabling offline sync for mobile app and some services which would be in preview mode and always remember when you go to docs.microsoft.com and you see the services with preview option, would not be a part of your examination. Then, creating an Azure App Service API app, creating a documentation for API by open source and other tools would be there. By the way, as you all know, Azure API apps are having swagger definition implemented and this how it is different from an Azure web app. Implementing Azure Functions, Azure Durable Functions, Azure Function apps by using Visual Studio as well as Python Azure Functions, how to implement function triggers, implementing timers, web books, data operation would be very important to focus on here.. There might be some case studies based on all of these mentioned and how customer can achieve more, how can customer meet their end goal etc. You will spend your lot of time on these section in AZ-203 examination.
• #22: The third one is developing for Azure storage. Azure storage covers wide range of topics such as Developing Solutions for storage tables which covers design and implement policies for tables. Query table storage from code and implement partitioning schemes. Also you need to understand how to work with different command line options and C#. You should spend time on learning how do I create storage account from C#, how do we upload and download objects using C# and stuff like that. Develop solution that uses a relational database – Azure SQL, where it discuss provision and configure databases, elastic pools for Azure SQL database. Knowing the pricing models, and various ways of securing your databases would be the points to keep in mind. You should also understand about Azure SQL database serverless instances . How to work with blob storage, and move items in blob storage between storage accounts and containers, bob retention policy, shared access signature etc should be considered while learning this topics. Also how to develop solutions that use cosmos DB storage, and what APIs in cosmos DB you want to use, Graph API and Casandra API and all.. Partitioning strategies and consistency stuff… So understanding of right kind of storage accounts with right features is important to remember here.
• #24: In Implementing Azure Security section, you can see there is a whole authentication topic there which talks about implementing authentication with certificates, forms-based auth tokens, how to implement multi-factor authentication with Azure AD. If you go to web app resource, there would be an identity section and how to manage identity for your application. How to implement Access control with Role-based access control, create shared-access signature and then how to secure your data solutions with the encryption and decryption of data at rest and in transit, and how to implement key-vault to store your secretes and certificates.
• #26: You also need to spend some time to understand about autoscaling. Like we have autoscaling in Virtual Machine Scale Set and we have autoscaling in app service. You need to understand the patterns like, how do we configure auto-scaling rules. based on the metrics, and based on the schedule and all. You also need to learn how to implement AKS scaling strategies. And then here it comes caching which is part of optimizing your solutions. Here we should learn and understand how to store and retrieve data in Azure Redis cache, and how to impalement CDNs and all. And finally in the bottom is that , instrumenting solutions to support monitoring and logging. App service provides Application Insights by default and then analyse and troubleshoot solutions using Azur Monitor and deploy Alerts and Application Insights web Test.
• #28: And finally, couple of things about what falls under consuming Azure and third party services which covers around 20-25% of the exam questions. Well, there is developing a logic app and developing logic app is very simple and graphical but you need to understand about custom connectors and templates for Logic apps. And then integrate Azure Search within Solutions and here it covers creating an Azure search index, import data and query the index. And then developing event-based solutions would be very important for the examination where it coves Azure Event Grid, Azure Notification Hubs and Azure Event Hub. And then one more important topic for the test would be developing message-based solution. How to build loosely coupled architectures and how to implement messaging between these applications are important. Here I recommend you to understand Azure Service Bus and Azure Queue Storage queues . Even understanding of these two topics and practical understanding of it is very important in the industry and in daily jobs.
• #29: So, now here you can see the difference between AZ-203 and AZ-204 beta. Before we go ahead and take a deep dive into Exam Topics, let us discuss the difference. The key point to keep in mind is, percentage weightage has slightly changed. You might have observed here that, two sections (IaaS and PaaS) of AZ-203 is merged into one in AZ-204, beta. Along with that, there is no Azure Search is part of AZ-204 beta. At the same time, Azure Batch, Mobile Apps, and API apps are removed from AZ-204. Also SQL Database and Storage Tables are removed. And absolutely there is no new topics have been added to AZ-204. In my understanding, AZ-204 beta or you can say in future AZ-204 is more developer focused. It has become easy and there are less topics with different percentage weightage.
• #31: So now how to prepare for the examination? I would suggest to use Microsoft Learn. I would suggest you to search for AZ-203 and first check the skills measured and if you scroll down you will get a section called Two Way to prepare, and here you can see Learning Paths. I would highly recommend to go through all these learning paths before you appear for the examination. I must say the content here is much deeper and rich and you will definitely learn a lot of things. Also you can take Microsoft Official Practice Test. https://in.mindhub.com/az-203-developing-solutions-for-microsoft-azure-microsoft-official-practice-test/p/MU-AZ-203