5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to
pass in 3 days
Perth Ngarmtrakulchol
Aug 28, 2019 · 10 min read
All you need to know to pass AZ-900 exam
AZ-900 is the exam that test on foundational level knowledge of cloud concepts and
Azure services.
Those who have experiences in other major cloud providers might find the most of AZ-
900 materials to be very similar to they have learned.
I found the content of this exam to be very beneficial for anyone who would like to
break in cloud computing on Azure.
This exam guide will give you all the information you need to pass the exam in 3 days
or less.
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5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
Information about this exam
The o cial AZ-900 information from Microsoft website
Most of the exam information is on Microsoft website. However, before going into the
exam, I was researching how long is this exam. The Microsoft website does not show
how many questions and how long the exam is.
So I gathered these numbers based on my exam:
Questions: 44 (40–60 questions based on Whizlabs)
Duration: 1 hour (85 minutes based on Whizlabs)
What I like about this exam is: Your result sheet is printed right after the exam, so you
can see which area you are doing well and which area you need to work on.
This is the same study plan I used to pass AZ-900 exam:
2 day for learning from Microsoft Learn Platform
1–1.5 day for exam preparation
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5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
One day means 6–8 hours of work. So it might take around a week to study 2–3 hours
per day after work.
Resources I used for studying AZ-900
I studied from 3 resources and spent around $15 for the preparation (excluding $99 for
AZ-900 exam itself).
The 3 resources are:
[Free] Microsoft Learn platform (11 modules)
Comprehensive 9 hours course provided by Microsoft [ Text-based ]
Microsoft provides a free learning platform for everything you need to pass any Azure
certificate.
Unlike other learning platforms such as Google Cloud’s Coursera or Udemy, Microsoft
Learn platform is 90% text with few short videos here and there. However, the
material is great quality and the learning platform is easy to use.
I found that by having learning material in text, I can take note much faster by copy-
paste the text directly.
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5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
This course took me 9–10 hours including taking notes and research on random
technical words e.g. N-tier architecture.
[$15] Udemy course “Microsoft Azure Beginners Guide”
AZ-900 Video course & Practise exams
This Udemy video course contains all you need to know to pass AZ-900 exam. The
content is more hands-on than Microsoft Learn since you will see the instructor
showing you inside Azure Portal, whereas Microsoft Learn only teach you in text.
The beginners in Azure will learn a lot more from seeing real Azure portal than
reading.
For me, I had some experience playing around Azure portal before. So I skipped to the
last section: AZ-900 Preparation. This section provides 70 questions x 2 practice tests.
I found the practice questions to be very similar to Whizlabs, the last resource I used for
exam preparation. I have heard from my colleague who passed AZ-900 only using this
course.
My recommendation is you could study from videos in this course or from Microsoft
Learn. The content should be very similar.
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5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
At my company Servian, we provide Udemy Business subscription for staffs. So I can
access this course for free.
[$15] Whizlabs AZ-900 Exam Practices Tests
Practice exams by Whizlabs
Whizlabs is the popular website containing a lot of IT exam practice tests. Note that
Microsoft also offers Official Practice Test but at the significantly higher cost and a
similar number of practice questions. So I went for Whizlabs this time.
At the time of writing, Whizlabs has 3 practice tests with 55 questions each. The
questions are surprisingly similar to the real exam, so you can get a feeling of what
kind of questions you would get examined on.
AZ-900 Exam Content
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5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
Azure Fundamentals learning path
This section is based on the list from Microsoft website which is quite accurate to the
exam.
There are 4 main parts. For each part, I am giving summarised information here to
speed up your learning or you can also use them as revision material.
Part 1) Cloud Concept
This part contains general knowledge about cloud computing e.g. what are the benefits
of cloud, the differences types of cloud service offering, and the differences in cloud
deployment models.
Technological benefits of cloud:
High Availability — The major cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GCP) have multiple
data centers spread around throughout the world. Data and code stored in the
cloud are copied to more than one data center. If anything happens to one data
center, the data can be recovered from another data center.
Fault Tolerance — In case there is any fault in the application or infrastructure,
the service can continue to work by moving the work to other healthy servers.
Disaster Discover — The data in the cloud can also get copied to other regions e.g.
copy data from West US to East US. If there is natural disaster happened in West US
and every data center goes down, the data center in East US will still have the copy
of data.
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Scalability — The application running in the cloud can expand its size when there
are more users in the system.
Elasticity — The application running in the cloud can shrink its size when there
are fewer users in the system. The users can also set automatic shutdown during
the non-business hours to save money.
Business benefits of cloud:
Agility — Cloud allows the business to deliver IT system to customers faster. The
machines in the cloud are ready for cloud users to spin up when they need and shut
down when they are not required.
Economies of scale — Cloud is a shared pool of machines and services. As the
number of customer grows, the cloud providers can lower the cost or increase
quality of the services.
Capital Expenditure (CapEx) vs Operational Expenditure (OpEx) — Building a
data center requires large capital investment for hardware as well as the facility. A
data center will also require ongoing electricity and staffs cost for operation. By
using cloud, the capital expenditure for building a data center is not required.
Consumption-based model (pay-as-you-go) — The cloud users only pay for
what they need, by the duration they need.
Types of cloud service offering:
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) — In this offering, the cloud providers offer
barebone hardware in managed data center such as virtual machine or file storage.
The cloud providers will take care of the physical infrastructure e.g. data center
security or hardware repair, while the cloud users need to take care of server
maintenance. For example, Azure VM allows the users to spin up new virtual
machines in any size.
PaaS (Platform as a Service) — The cloud providers will take care of the servers.
The cloud users only need to bring in application code or data. For example, Azure
SQL Database is fully managed service by Azure that the users do not need to /
cannot access anything beyond their data.
SaaS (Software as a Service) — The cloud providers will take care of both servers
and code. The cloud users only need to configure the software to suit their needs.
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For example, Office 365 allows the users to use Microsoft Office software suite.
Differences in cloud deployment model:
Public Cloud — When the companies decided to use all their servers from the
cloud providers’ data center.
Private Cloud — When the companies decided to use all their servers on their own
data center to replicate the cloud services e.g. offering self-service components.
Hybrid Cloud — When the companies decided to use some of the servers in their
own data center, and some of the servers in public cloud.
Part 2) Core Azure Services
This part contains the introduction to different services offering in Azure for each
service category:
Compute — Azure Virtual Machine, Container, Kubernetes Service
Network — Azure Virtual Network, Load Balancer, VPN Gateway, Application
Gateway and Content Delivery Network
Internet of Things (IoT) — Azure IoT Hub, IoT Central
Big Data & Analytics — Azure HDInsight, Data Lake Analytics, Databricks
Artificial Intelligence — Azure ML, ML Studio
Serverless Computing — Azure Function, Logic Apps
Storage — Azure Blob Storage, Disk Storage, File Storage, Data Lake Storage
Database — Azure SQL DB, SQL DW, CosmosDB
Management tools — Azure CLI, Powershell, Portal, Advisor
Azure Marketplace — Azure service for deploying ready to use services by Azure
or the 3rd party. Such as a package to install and setup R Studio
Part 3) Security, Privacy, Compliance, and Trust in Azure
This part contains the security Azure provided for their services as well as Azure’s
commitment in privacy and regulatory compliance.
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Azure services for security in different areas:
Network Security — Azure Firewall, DDoS Protection, and Network Security
Group
Authentication and Authorisation — Azure Activity Directory (AD)
Application Security — Azure Key Vault, Information Protection, Advanced
Threat Protection
Resource Governance — Azure Policies & Initiatives, Role-Based Access Control
(RBAC), Locks, Management Groups, Advisor
Monitoring & Reporting — Azure Monitor, Service Health
Privacy & Regulatory Compliance — Azure Government (for US governments),
Germany (for EU’s GDPR regulation), Trust Center
Part 4) Azure Pricing and Support
This part contains the information about different types of Azure subscription, cost
factors of Azure services, tools for cost calculation, and the support plans in Azure.
Azure subscription types:
Free — New users will receive $200 credits to spend on any Azure products in the
first 30 days. We will also receive free access to popular Azure products for the first
12 months, and the free access to free products forever. This type of subscript
require credit card details, but nothing will be charged until we decide to upgrade
to pay-as-you-go subscription.
Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) — Charge monthly for the services used in the last billing
period. This type is used by individuals and businesses.
Enterprise Agreement — Enterprises can make an agreement with Azure which
would allow discounted price for software license and Azure services.
Student — Students will receive $100 credit to spend in the first 12 months. No
credit card required for this subscription type, but the student email verification is
required.
Cost Factors of Azure services:
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Resource Types — Different Azure products will have different pricing e.g. Azure
VM cost will be based on the virtual machine size, operating system, usage hours,
and storage size. The users can turn off virtual machine temporarily to save usage
hours cost, but the storage cost will always incur.
Subscription Types — Most users will pay the standard price, while the enterprise
customers may have discounted or stable cost.
Locations — For some resource types, the cost will vary based on the server
locations. For example, Azure VM in Japan data center might cost more than in US
data center.
Inbound and Outbound traffic — Movement of data between different data
center (availability zones) or regions might incur cost.
Tools for cost calculation for Azure
TCO Calculator — The service to compare the cloud cost with the Total Cost of
Ownership e.g. how much you need to spend if you are to build the same
infrastructure in your own data center.
Pricing Calculator — The website where the potential customers can plan their cost
before moving to Azure cloud
Azure Cost Management — Azure free service which shows how much have we
spent in this billing period, and also provide the best practices to optimise the cost
Azure Advisor — Azure free service which provides the recommendations in high
availability, security, performance, and cost based on Azure products we are using
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
SLA is the minimum time that Azure commit the service will be available to use. If
the service is offline for longer time than SLA, Azure will provide credits for the
customers.
Azure offers 99.9% SLA on most Azure products
There are some cases that the SLA can be increased. For example, Azure
guarantees 99.99% SLA for the virtual machines that have more than one instance
across more than one region.
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5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
Public Preview vs Private Preview features
Most new features in Azure will be launched as private preview for limited users,
then public preview for all the users
After the feature has been thoroughly tested, it will be out of preview and become
generally availability feature (GA).
Azure provides Preview Portal for the users to test out new features for Azure
portal. For other features that are not related to the portal, the users can access
them from standard Azure portal.
You are now ready for AZ-900!
What you will learn from the recommended courses listed above as well as the
summary in this article will make you pass the exam with flying colors.
Azure role-based certi cations from Microsoft
For the next step, the knowledge in AZ-900 exam is crucial for any Azure role-based
certification in the future. Whether you would like to become Azure Administrator or
Azure Data Engineer or any other roles, AZ-900 will be the great starting point for your
career.
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5/15/2020 Azure AZ-900 Exam Preparation Guide: How to pass in 3 days
Wish everyone all the best for your exam!
. . .
At Servian, we design, deliver and manage innovative data & analytics, digital, customer
engagement and cloud solutions that help our customers sustain competitive advantage. If
you need any help from us in these areas, feel free to ask!
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