what's up everybody it's Travis here from travis. media so it's currently October 2023 and there's 3 months left in the year then we're in 2024 and 2024 may be a great time for you to plan to get your first or your next Cloud certification perhaps you're looking to level up your position or your salary or maybe you're looking to add your first certification to your brand new resume as you work to break into the industry as a new developer whatever the case Cloud knowledge in my opinion is a required skill set of every developer nowadays not necessarily a sort of appliation but knowledge in knowing how to navigate the cloud is a requirement go to LinkedIn look up developer job applications they almost all require some knowledge of the cloud and having an actual certification is a way to demonstrate that you have this knowledge prior to anyone needing to see proof up front so I took the a 104 A couple of years ago I did a video on this topic already but some things have changed over the years and I decided to do a brand new video fully updated where I'm going to answer what courses do I need to take how should I do practice exams how do I Pace myself in the exam and it's open book did you know that a couple of months ago they made the Azure role-based certifications open book so I'm going to talk about how to use this to your advantage and instead of it being an a 104 video I think these principles in courses in methodologies can be applied to any Azure certification so let's get started so some stats on Azure um AWS has the largest market share of cloud infrastructure services at 33% in q1 2022 Microsoft Azure on the other hand in that same time period had a market share of 23% so not quite as popular and then there's Google at like 10% and I've had a lot of comments on this channel saying skip Google altogether I've actually heard great things about it but I don't use it much I don't have a lot of experience and I've seen a lot of negative comments I like Azure and I like AWS they're both great but in Q4 of 2022 Microsoft Azure reached a market share of 23% a 2% increase in the last four quarters so Azure is alive and healthy it's used heavily in the gov space there's lots of jobs and any company that uses Microsoft products already will naturally want to integrate into a Microsoft cloud that greatly extends their ecosystem with Services they already use like Windows and active directory net Visual Studio Etc they've led the way in online Cloud security platform as a service hybrid Cloud architecture and things like that so it's a solid option and maybe one you want to pursue in 2024 so what certifications are offered what certification should you take well it depends on one where you're adding your Cloud knowledge and two what field you're in so I'm going to pull up this chart that I found on the whizlabs website that kind of gives you a rundown on all the role based certifications so if you're brand new to the cloud you've never done anything in it you may want to consider one of the foundational certifications like you have this a900 Microsoft Azure fundamentals it's basically an intro to the cloud using Azure Services then there's the data equivalent dp900 Microsoft Azure data fundamentals and then the AI 900 which is the AI fundamentals so if you have no clue about the cloud at all you may want to go this route but when I took my certification I wanted a solid starting point I had used the cloud sum I'd used AWS sum and Azure sum and I wanted my first real industry level certification and that is found in the a104 which is the Microsoft Azure administrator if you don't know what certification you want to take in Azure and you just want a well-rounded overview of azure in all of its products and to be able to administrate the Azure cloud in a professional setting then this is the way to go the a 104 then if you're a developer you might want to take instead the a 204 which is the developer Azure certification so whereas the 104 is like an administrator and overarching administrator if you're a developer specifically you may want to take the 204 instead those are two entrylevel solid certifications and like I said it also depends on what field you're in in so you'll see down here there's a bunch of data Sears like the Azure data scientist data engineer data administrator AI engineer then there's networking there's the Azure network engineer and the security engineer if you're into cyber security so it depends on your skill level it also depends on what field you're in feel look at this PDF here there's a number of training Journeys like for cloud it Pros starts with the a104 hybrid Cloud AZ 104 it Pros expert level starts with the a 104 developers 204 like we mentioned and then when you get into Data you get into the DP exams the data exams I'm personally considering taking the AI 102 this year which is designing and implementing a Microsoft Azure AI solution I have the a104 CT and I want to learn more about the AI side of it so I may take this s this year I don't know next let's talk about the open book policy so this is brand new it's like 2 months old but essentially you can now use the Microsoft learn website during the exam to look stuff up so if you look at the website here at learn. microsof microsoft.
com the section you'll want to use and want to be familiar with is the documentation section so if you click on documentation and then scroll down and click on Azure this is where you'll find all the information and then from here let's say you forgot some information about Azure storage you can scroll down find storage and say it has to do with Azure backup you can click there and get information here about it during the exam now just a side note this angered a lot of people there's a lot of people like hey I worked hard for my certification now these people get to do an open book they get to look up the answer they're dumbing down certifications there's just a lot of negative feedback that have come out of this of course there's positive too but in my opinion this is a great thing why because developers don't memorize all of the stuff we don't memorize all of the VM sizes in the storage parameters in all of these fine details as developers we learn the concepts we know about it we know there's differen size virtual machines we know the details how it works but in real life we go to the documentation and we look it up so this is actually more realistic than memorizing all the data and just spewing it out on the exam and in my opinion reading documentation is one of the most important skills of a developer and also you don't get extra time when I took my Azure certification I finished with like 3 minutes left that's as fast as I could do it if you're going to do something like the devop certification where there's long scenario based questions you're not going to have a lot of free time to go look things up so if I would have looked anything up when I took it I would have failed it I would have ran out of time so this isn't cheating in that regard either but you might be wondering well how is that to my advantage then if I don't have time to look stuff up why do they give me that option well let me give you two tips first while you're learning the material while you're preparing for your exam you're learning how to use Azure make sure whatever tutorial you're using you're also correlating that with the documentation if you're learning about storage you're going through like a udemy course when you're learning about that also pull it up in the documentation that way you can get familiar with where to find this information if you can't memorize the virtual machine sizes then memorize where it's at quickly in the documentation so that when the question comes you can pull it up and consult it so while you're learning correlate that learning with where it's at in the documentation that will not only help you look things up quickly if you forget something but it also shows you where it's at in real life when you get that job and they ask you to do stuff you're going to be in the documentation all day making sure you're doing things properly if you practice that while you're learning in real life you'll also use it properly and then second try not to plan to look anything up try to know all the answers because you don't get a lot of time use that as a fallback but also know where it's at hope that helps so just to point this out here on the exam you'll have this button called Microsoft learn that you can click on and it will open up Microsoft learn to the side then at that point you click on documentation you do what you need to do maybe pull it up at the beginning of the exam I don't know I didn't get to use it when I took it you can open multiple tabs you can adjust how much of the screen shows that website you can even make it full screen but you can't log in you can't go to other sites and you can't go to the Q&A if you try to you'll get access Den n this this isn't like the kubernetes exam where if you did that exam over you failed they have it blocked so if you accidentally click on it it's not the end of the world all right next up what courses do you need to take so I'm going to let you know the path that I would take the path that I did take on the a 104 in the same path that I would take for any other certification so there are lots of different resources and different paths you can take here but remember they're all going to teach you the same thing they're all going to teach you Azure so what I did on the last exam and what I would do again is my first course would would be on UD to me with this guy Scott Duffy he's the Azure expert he has all the Azure courses if you go down here Azure fill in the blank so right here here's the a 104 exam that I took there's a900 a24 a305 AI 900 he has all the courses he's good he updates regularly and it should be your first course you should work through this whole course the a104 is like 17 hours so you can knock it out in a couple of weeks this is going to give you the overview of everything you need to know this is going to be your first full study course for the exam you want to take and what he does is he goes through all of the exam requirements and make sure he covers them if you scroll down you'll see everything that's going to be on the exam and you'll not only want to watch these and watch him do things in Azure you want to do the same things in Azure as well you'll have to create an account you'll go in and get Hands-On and dirty yourself don't just watch do and he has stuff for you to do like right here Hands-On practice then you go to another section uh azure service Hands-On practice you're going to get Hands-On don't skip that but that's number one take one of his courses if you go to buy it and it's like 150 bucks don't buy it you'll see here I'm browsing this during a sale so $18. 99 $12. 99 $12.
99 don't pay more for that don't pay this full 124 or 84 bucks if you can't find a deal go to travis. Media me you'll go to this page here and here you'll find all upcoming udemy deals so today is October 6th that's why there's a a deal 106 courses from $14. 99 click the link you'll get the coupon if it's October 8th or 9th or something there's no deal but the next one will be from October 10th to October 13th I update this regularly I updated it last two days ago and any deals that I find will be on this page so if you don't see a good deal for it come to this page figure out when the next sale is use the link and get the course for under 20 bucks test number one take Scott Duffy's course in the case of a 104 take this course once you're done with that the second thing to do is to go to the Microsoft learn site and in my opinion you want to do this second the Scott Duffy course is your overview this is where you're going to get Microsoft telling you exactly how they want you to learn this now instead of trying to find this on the site I just go to Microsoft learn a104 or whatever exam you're taking and you'll find a direct path to it so here it is exam a 104 Microsoft as your administrator so it's going to tell you what you need to know it's going to give you some information here that we'll get to in a minute but the first thing you want to do when you come here and after taking that Scott Duffy course is go to the section down here that says two ways to prepare go to self- paste and take these modules or finish these modules so the first one is the prerequisites there are six modules second one is identities and governance in Azure it's eight modules then you get to storage you get to compute you get to all of that like if I click on compute it's going to have a number of modules configure virtual machines configure virtual machine availability and you'll take each one of these each one of these is going to be mini courses on the material you need to learn you'll see here I took all this when I did my a 104 I did this as my second step and they don't take long I mean 2 minutes 2 minutes 2 minutes 2 minutes and then at the end of each one you get this interactive lab simulation where you'll have an actual Azure lab hopefully you have an account anyway but you can use their lab to follow along the Hands-On material then you have a knowledge check which is a test and then some resources for further reading but you'll go through each one of these I think it's eight of them uh 1 2 3 4 five six it's six of them that's all and you'll work through that that's number two step two once you're done with this you'll move on to step three step three is your practice tests so you've learned the material in two different places now it's time to test yourself on real mock tests so my recommendation for this is whizlabs decom just go to whizlabs wh I ls.
com they specialize in practice tests for many certifications and they're good and here it says practice tests1 1995 don't pay $ 19.
