One of my goals for this year was to get the Azure Administrator Associate certificate. On the 3rd September, I sat for the exam and passed. 😀

On my back from the exam centre, all I did was laugh. I felt relieved. I felt joyous. This was a long time coming. I had started preparing for this exam back in April. It took spending three to four hours each weekend at the library and an hour the rest of the days. It took doing that consistently for the last three or so months, with a couple of breaks in between owing to bad health. We had a bout of cough-cold-fever in the house around May.

None of it would have been possible without Prerna. She pushed me when needed. And boy did I need that push. I guess the thing that I am getting at is marry well. 😁

/prep+resources

The curriculum for this cert can broadly be divided into five parts:

1. Identity and Governance
2. Networking
3. Storage
4. Compute
5. Monitoring and Backup

I started with John's AZ-104 course on Youtube. I took copious notes.

Then I started the MS Learn path for AZ-104. I was struggling a bit at this point. I was not feeling excited about the course. It clicked for me one day, while doing one of the labs in the course that I will do all the things they showed on Azure using PowerShell. Eventually, I decided to create basic lab setup using Bicep.

After I was done with the learning path, I did the Azure Labs.

/testing

I used Tutorial Dojo's AZ 104 practice exams for preparing for the exam. The important thing here is to go through all the solutions so that you are sure the reasoning is correct.

A week before the scheduled exam, I started going through Tech with Jaspal's AZ 104 playlist during commute. There are three long videos in the playlist. I used them.

/exam experience

I got 55 questions. The first section was the case study. You can not come back to this section. It was tough. I had originally planned to mark things for review and use MS Learn at the end. I had sort of memorised how the URLs for the Learn reference sections. But the Learn we get during the exam is mostly search based. So it was slightly trickier to manage. Like you can not browse to different sections on a Storage page for example. You have to search to find an appropriate section.

I felt like I spent longer on the case study. For the rest of the exam I had to be on top of how many minutes I had left. I had imagined 1 question per minute would be enough. And so I had to keep that calculation going on in my head.

After submitting the exam, during the time it takes for the result to load I was not sure if I would pass. But then the fireworks started on the page. And I could not stop laughing.