This week, I passed my first Azure exam: AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. As the name suggests, this is the most basic Azure exam, and therefore a nice place to start if you want to get certified in one of the hottest topics in IT at the moment. This exam covers the basics of cloud computing, such as what is different between the cloud and on-premises environments, and how to get started in the cloud. You can find a complete description of the exam topics on the Microsoft web site.
If you pass this exam, you will be awarded a certification, the Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals.
Microsoft is also kind enough to provide study material for free. On the Microsoft Learn portal, you can find a complete course for this exam (here). This course should take you a little over nine hours to complete. I had never tried Microsoft Learn before, but I found it quite enjoyable, and easy to follow along. It contains text, video, labs and practice questions. There are also some links to related material.
So probably, you are wondering if this free training is enough to pass the exam. In my experience, it is. Personally, I did not have a lot of hands-on experience working with Azure. I took an Azure boot camp course some six years ago, but in the cloud, things change pretty fast, so practically everything is different from six years ago. Since that boot camp, I’ve not worked with Azure directly, but some of my clients are moving (or planning to move) databases to Azure, so I have been watching these migrations from the sideline.
As far as the level of the course is concerned: it is not that difficult, exactly what you would expect for a fundamental course. If you are new to Azure, but not new to IT, you should be able to follow along quite nicely. If concepts like virtual machine, high availability and firewalls are completely new for you, you will probably require a bit more studying.
After following the course once, I scheduled the exam. I did plan to redo the course once more before actually taking the exam, and just focus on the topics that were new to me, and the topics that were more likely to be asked on the exam. If you’ve ever done a Microsoft exam, you will recognize those topics while studying. In most exams, there are bound to be questions that focus more on lists of options and factoids than on understanding of the material. However, life intervened, and I did not have time to completely go through the course a second time.
Regardless, I passed the exam easily. I will not give any details on the exam itself, because I don’t want to violate the non-disclosure agreement. But if you are interested in taking this exam, I can tell you that the Microsoft Learn course adequately prepares you for this exam. Good luck studying!