Passing AZ-104 as a software developer

The AZ-104 Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator certification is a Role-based Infrastructure certification with no prerequisites and it introduces you in the complex world of managing your personal or your employer's Azure infrastructure. It is a prerequisite to the Expert certification AZ-305 Azure Solutions Architect Expert and it covers 5 major topics:

• Manage Azure identities and governance (20-25%)
• Implement and manage storage (15-20%)
• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources (20-25%)
• Implement and manage virtual networking (15-20%)
• Monitor and maintain Azure resources (10-15%)

The exam itself is challenging, you have to answer 52 questions in 100 minutes. The last 4 questions are part of a case study that mimics a real case scenario of what you would have to handle as an Azure administrator.

I've used the following resources to get ready for the exam and they all are worth going through:

• Microsoft Azure Administrator course
• Study guide for Exam AZ-104
• Microosoft practice assessment
• Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press
• Practice Exam 1 , Exam 2 , Exam 3 and Exam 4 by Total Seminars
• Practice questions from passnexam

Getting ready for this certification was quite a shift from learning about software development in general. Reading about things like managing Azure subscriptions, administer of infrastructure, configuring virtual networking and managing network traffic brought a fresh perspective of how the software we write as developers needs a solid infrastructure in the background that focuses not only on scalability, flexibility, robust security and so on, but also takes into account cost reduction, monitoring, maintenance and visibility.

For me, the biggest challenge was to get hands-on practice of all the topics covered by the exam and it was the main focus of my studies. Having an Azure account and hosting my own app service in it helped me gain valuable insights of how cloud resources should be used. It helped me transition from a costly app service plan to a static web site that reduced costs dramatically, so if there's one piece of advice I would give to anyone trying to get certified is to get hands-on experience in Azure. Go through the screens, get accustomed to the steps of creating resources, remember as much of it as you can.

The second piece of advice that comes to mind is to go through as many practice questions as you can. Understand how they are structured, pay attention to the wording and try to understand the answers. If the answers do not make sense, consult the documentation (the Summary and resources section of each topic in the Microsoft Azure Administrator course contains valuable information that finds itself way in the actual exam questions).

There are this things called "exam dumps" that contain the actual questions from previous versions of the exam. If you want to go through those (you have to pay for them), do so, but make sure you understand the answers and get something valuable out of them and do not transform the experience of certification into a memory test.

I was able to pass the exam today and it was as challenging as I expected. It's important to know the basics of each Azure service and task mentioned in the Study Guide for Exam AZ-104, the basic structure of az cli commands, powershell cmdlets and ARM templates, and also how and when resources can move from one region to another. Communication between resources in Azure, reducing costs and optimal implementation of infrastructure was also emphasized in the test.