I’ve been working with .NET and Azure at Howden for about 9 months now. I recently passed the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification (on the 2nd attempt!) and, after talking to some colleagues about my experience, I thought it would useful with others that are considering the exam.

Why?

I wanted to increase my understanding of what Azure has to offer and how it works. I’ve been using Azure since joining (I’d only ever worked with AWS before) and I wanted to understand the landscape of Azure so I know where to look when I run into a problem. I was also curious to understand what I didn’t know.

I found the general ‘cloud concepts’ were useful (looking at availability zones, IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS etc) and it was good to learn more about VMs at a high-level. However, I think I would have learnt more about the ‘product-specific’ things by clicking around the Azure portal and googling/asking CoPilot when I got stuck.

Thoughts on the exam

I have never taken an online exam remotely, and I was pleasantly surprised at how robust their integrity and ‘anti-cheat’ procedures were but also how frictionless and painless it was. Bearing in mind this process involved me having to take pictures of my Id, myself, my working area, a phone and video call with one of the exam invigilators to check my working area was free from notes etc. I was even reminded during the exam, via chat, not to speak out loud (I was reading questions out loud to myself, but I guess they thought I could be asking the questions out loud to someone in the next room?)

There is something to reflect on here about the user experience that I am working on in my team every day…

How I prepared

I prepared for it by going through the online learning path that’s offered my Microsoft. Its nice and bite-sized and had a few interactive exercises. I have also been using Azure in my daily work, but I haven’t spent much time setting up new things/debugging Azure which is really where you learn things.

I am fortunate that we get some ‘personal development time’ in our work calendars at Howden, which was good to get my head down and learn this stuff.

I spent about 2 hours following the Microsoft dedicated online course with some time googling and checking things out in the Azure portal. The exam was about 40 questions and only took 15-20 mins (with about 20 mins beforehand to login and checkin etc.)

Final thoughts

Would I recommend it?

Thats the key question! I would recommend it to people that are new to Azure and working in roles, like me, as a developer, where I am working with Azure services regularly but not necessarily setting things up services/config myself from scratch (something that an enabling cloud team would usually do). Even if you don’t do the exam I’d say it’s worth reading through the online course and doing some of the mock exams (which would only take you 2-3 hours of reading time).

Signed by Satya

Finally, with my ‘product development’ hat on, I absolutely loved that my digital certificate is signed by Satya Nadella. I thought that was a really nice feature that would have cost Microsoft virtually nothing to build.