My journey to become Microsoft Azure Solution Architect Expert

Last week (Jan 22, 2022) I have completed Microsoft Azure Solution Architect Design (AZ-304) exam. Last year in the month of Oct (exactly 3 months earlier Oct 23rd 2021), I have completed Azure Solution Architect Technologies (AZ 303) exam too. Because i have completed both AZ-303 and AZ-304, I have received Azure Solution Architect Expert certificate too.

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I wanted to share my journey, learnings and experiences during my preparation for Azure exam.

Before going to the training and preparation details, lets take a step back and understand who are all the major players in Cloud space. In my blog on AWS i have clearly mentioned the Gartner magic quadrant for Cloud and in Cloud space AWS has always been the leader with 32 %(as of July 2021) and Azure have reached 21%. In 2020, Azure market share is 18% and AWS market share in 33%. So if we look at the numbers, Azure market adoption has been growing very rapidly.

The above image depicts the magic quadrant for Cloud.

Based on market adoption, it’s imperative that Azure has been gaining a lot of traction especially in the eCommerce world. So it’s important to understand what Azure had to offer and what kind of services that Azure is supporting.

Azure Solution Architect tests our knowledge on the features, services, limitations, cost implications. The Design exam tests our ability to provide a cost effective solution for a given problem statement (or use case).

The advantage with Azure (similar to AWS) is Microsoft’s official documentation. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-304

But before starting thinking about writing Azure Solution Architect exam, we MUST remember the following:

1. AZ 303 and AZ 304 will be retired by March 31st 2022
2. A new exam AZ 305 (Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions) will be introduced from April 1st. Currently it’s in Beta phase.
3. For any aspirant to become Azure Solution Architect Expert, after March 31st, he/she must complete AZ 305 and AZ 104(Microsoft Azure Administrator).

Now coming back to preparation, as i have explained above, Microsoft Azure has a comprehensive documentation on AZ 303 and AZ 304.

Those who have been working on Azure (especially AKS, Azure SQL, Azure CosmosDB etc), it will be slightly easy to complete the courses. I have gone through the complete documentation on Azure. Along with that I had attended Microsoft Azure instructor led trainings for 5 days. This has helped me to focus on the lab exercises and also discuss with the trainer on the queries that I used to have. Azure gives a sandbox environment (which will be available for one day per session and the data will be reset everyday) to play around with the lab assignments.

We have may udemy courses too, pertaining to the exam. But i haven’t paid much focus on the same. When you complete the preparation, it’s important to test our learnings and understandings. Azure has two practice tests that we can write to test our knowledge. It helps us to focus on our understandings and gaps. we also have examtopics.com (https://www.examtopics.com/exams/microsoft/az-304/view/) to go through the practice questions. It has a huge set of practice questions ( over 300). So we can also play around in examtopics.com and understand our gaps.

AZ 304 tests our knowledge on the below:

1. Storage infrastructure
2. Azure Data platform
3. Network infrastructure
4. Compute infrastructure
5. Infrastructure operations

The above five topics needed greater understanding one below aspects:

1. High Availability
2. Disaster recovery
3. multi AZs, multi regions
4. limitations
5. Various features and offerings
6. Cost implications

In the exam (AZ304), I got 57 questions out of which 9 are pertaining to case studies. and the rest of 48 questions are MCQs (multi answer, multiple choice, drag and drop kind of).

The number of questions vary from exam to exam and the questions can go up to 60. sometimes the candidate can get only 55 questions too.

I tried to specify the information at a high level. Hope this information is useful. If any of you have any questions, on the exam, preparation, please feel free to send an email to me - kiran.mvv@gmail.com.

I can share additional information.