Preparing for Az 204
I decided a few months back to add a couple of certifications to my profile. After working with cloud technologies for a while, the Azure certifications seemed a good fit. This was about 5 months back when I started with AZ 900 , azure fundamentals certification. The successful experience of that test encouraged me to move up a level. Having worked in software development for over 20 years, the next goal was the Az 204.
Just a couple of points on the difference between AZ 900 and AZ 204. There is a world of difference between the effort required to obtain the two certifications. The 900 is a a fundamentals certification with a much broader audience profile while the 204 is aimed at developers with 1–2 years of azure experience. With the 900, I spent a couple of hours a day during the weekdays for about a month with Scott Duffy’s courses on Udemy that my company had access to. The practice papers by the same author on Udemy helped me as well. With AZ 204, my effort was at least four times and some of that extra effort maybe related to the path I took to prepare for the test. I was able to clear the test and I hope this article helps others wanting to do the same.
When I started preparing for Az 204, my first attempt at preparation took me the Udemy route with courses from Scott Duffy, the same path I had taken for Azure 900. The Az 204 course from the same author exposed me to a wide range of topics that the certification requires you to know in depth. Fyi, I have been working on Azure for over three years now but my focus was primarily on App services, storage, caching, and authentication. That is certainly not enough to get you through the exam even if you know the inside out of those topics. For reference here are the topics.
- Develop Azure compute solutions (25–30%)
- Develop for Azure storage (15–20%)
- Implement Azure security (20–25%)
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions (15–20%)
- Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services (15–20%)
These topics are from the following link Exam AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure — Certifications | Microsoft Docs
The course did help me get started and introduced me to topics in Azure I had never dealt with like cosmos DB and Azure API policies but when I tested myself using MeasureUp, I fell flat. I was getting nowhere near the passing marks required for the exam. More on Measure up later. That made me think that my approach was not working and this would require a lot more preparation than I had anticipated.
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I next moved on to Microsoft’s official preparation guide which is in the link I shared above. The free training which I initially rejected since watching videos is preferable is preferable to reading text (at least for me) does bring you closer to the final test preparation. It is by no means complete since the test can have questions on topics that are not mentioned. And you absolutely have to do the exercises in Azure if you have to succeed.
So I went through the topics in the official Microsoft learning guide and took notes as I went along. Also a free or paid azure account is essential to play with different services and the options available to configure them. And then you need to either write code or pull down samples from github to interact with these services. A fair number of questions are on code. The code is by no means intense but requires you to know the different classes (and some basic methods) to access and interact with the different Azure services.
Finally, the thing that really helped me most was the test preparation using MeasureUp. If I could go back, I would use this sooner than later. For one, MeasureUp lets you select which areas you wanted to be tested on using practice mode. Also you can select the number of questions you want in a test in practice mode. So instead of taking a couple of giant tests, you can take a lot more mini tests. And for all answers, it gives you a good explanation and links to read on that topic. For me, taking mini tests of about 20 questions at a time and using the wrong answers to improve my knowledge on different areas helped me. Also MeasureUp familiarizes you well with the format of the questions from the drag and drop to the sequencing to the case study navigation and others.
The test for me was 41 questions for a 100 minutes. The case study is the most intimidating part of the test and it was the first thing for me. Its really important to pace yourself since you could end up spending a lot of time on the case study and not have enough time for other questions. Also the case study requires a lot of clicking back and forth between tabs for different pieces of information as you answer the questions. Once you complete the case study, you cannot come back to review your answers and the system will let you know that as well. There is another kind of case study where you are given a situation and you need to determine if the proposed solution is correct or not (yes/no). The subsequent questions will change the solution but the situation will be the same. You cannot review these questions once the answer is submitted. Anyway after submitting the final question and skipping the survey request, I closed my eyes and prayed for a nerve racking 15 seconds before the computer confirmed that I had cleared the test.
So just to summarize my tips here:
- Follow the official Microsoft link for preparation.
- Use MeasureUp to test yourself.
- Create a free Azure account to try out different services.
- Exercise the API with Azure CLI and Powershell.
- Download or write code to interact with different Azure services.
- Keep notes as you go along.
- Pace yourself during the test and do not skip a question. Remember intelligent guessing is better than no answer at all.
Good luck and hope this helps!
