Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert exam notes
These days, my members wanted to take this challenge and ask me to share some experience. I have passed lots of certifications and I have certain ways to prepare exams. But as a developer, we also need to learn new things quickly and be able to apply them when solving business problems. There are something in common between them.
Background
I passed with the transition exam 1 year ago and felt that it is one of the most difficult exams I have taken. It contains a lot of questions I usually do not practice in daily job (VM, networking, security). I cannot agree more with this article. But the biggest difference than other exam is that it has labs (which means given a scenario, you need to complete the task in Azure web portal). Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert is an Expert-level certification and role-based. It has 2 exams: AZ-300 (soon will be new AZ-303), AZ-301 (soon AZ-304). From this video, the individual exam still has labs.
Exam format:
40–60 questions, 2.5 hours, multiple choice/true,false/drag and drop/choose from dropdown menu/case study
In summary, you need to be both good at Infrastructure (compute, network, storage, security, virtualization, business continuity, disaster recovery) and application design (database, serverless, integration, messaging). Since it is an Architect-level exam, the focus is when to use what, but it also tests you with very detailed knowledge (especially the networking questions are very challenging). So before taking the exam, make sure you are very comfortable with VM, networking, security and know how to accomplish these tasks from Azure portal.
AZ-300 focus
Heavy
Storage (replication: LRS, ZRS, GRS/RA-GRS, GZRS/RA-GZRS)
Virtual Machines (scale set vs. availability set, load balance, VHD template, ARM template)
Networking (virtual subnet, VPN gateway, network security group, site to site VPN/Point-to-Site VPN, VNET peering, ExpressRoute)
Azure Active Directory (RBAC, AD connect (Password hash synchronization, Pass-through authentication), MFA, single sign-on between Azure AD and on-premise AD)
General knowledge
Azure App Service/Azure Container service
Azure key vault
Messaging service (Event grid, event hub, service bus, notification hub)
AZ-301 focus
Azure costs
Azure monitoring
Identity and Security
Data solutions (RDBMS, non-relational DB, data warehouse, data lake)
Business continuity (RPO, RTO)
Preparation material
Microsoft or recommended by Microsoft
AZ-300 Ignite session, AZ-301 Ignite session
MS learning AZ-300, MS learning AZ-301
Other
