The author shares his experience of taking the Azure Fundamentals certificate exam. He describes the preparation process, the technical issues he faced, and the areas he struggled with. He also expresses his excitement and gratitude for passing the exam and his plans to pursue the security fundamentals certificate next.
Copilot Summary
I was awarded the certificate for Azure Fundamentals today. Here are my thoughts.
I did the learning path for the AZ-900 certificate first. Going in with no assumptions of my own abilities, I wanted to do all that I could to help myself with what I should know. The learning path was good, and though about a third of it was not anything new given my background as an SRE, I did learn a whole bunch of things which are unique to the Azure platform. It was an effective way to spend my time.
I did end up completing a module that was not a part of the learning path for this certificate. I clicked on some continue link suggested by the site after I completed one of the modules, and it had nothing to do with what I was trying. So, after that mistake, I made sure to check the path after I completed each module so that I would stay on track. The module I ended up doing was about an hour, and it was all about the business and cost side of Azure migration plans, so it was not a complete waste of time, but I would have liked to have not gone through it.
After completing the learning modules, I scheduled an exam. The exam is managed through Pearson VUE. I have delt with them in the past, back in the day when there were no online options and you had to drive to a physical testing center. I am grateful for the online choice now.
There is an executable that you download which walks you through the technical steps for the exam, and a part of it checks running processes on your machine. This is fine and all, except that it started yelling at me about the Razer gaming center and light management programs. So, after mucking about in task manager, I got all that killed, and then the program said that taskmgr was still open and needed to be closed, which is an issue since I use taskmgr to close tasks, and you cannot use it to kill itself. I went to the bathroom at this point. When I came back and tested again, everything reported as good.
It was a rocky start. The proctor had a question about something in my office, and he was hard to understand, so after cranking my speakers up all the way, and asking for him to repeat the question a few times, I found that he was inquiring about a box on my wall. I have a five-port switch mounted to my wall next to my desk, and as it is not normal for people to have networking equipment bolted to their walls. Once that was resolved, I was able to begin.
I don’t test well. I do my best to take my time and read and understand the questions, but I am easily thrown off by certain wordings of questions. It did feel like I was just guessing on some of them, picking the best sounding answer. For the questions about the specific product names as they exist in Azure, and what they do and do not do, I faltered a bit. I certainly could use some more familiarity with that. As for the general cloud concepts, I did very well, not only how it felt in taking the exam, but also according to the nice little bar graph you get at the end. So, I do know where I need a bit more study and experience.
I am always nervous about things like this, about testing and exams and the like. Failure was a possibility, which is perhaps why I get nervous. I am grateful that I was able to recall the information that I had studied and the experiences that I have had.
I was extremely excited once I finished and got the results. I was and am incredibly happy to have passed. Having taken this exam I now have a better understanding of the process and the style of questions that I might expect for future exams.
My next steps are to go through the learning path for the SC-900 security fundamentals and take that exam. I am excited to begin with the hope of a successful completion.
Link to the certificate: