How I cleared Microsoft Azure AZ-204 in one month

AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure focuses on design, development, deployment, maintenance and monitoring of scalable solutions on Azure. There is no pre-requisite for this certification. But if you complete AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals before, your learning process will speed up in terms of understanding some of the general concepts of Microsoft Azure. The exam covers each of these aspects with varying weightage. Below are the core skills that Microsoft has outlined on their learning portal.

1. Develop Azure compute solutions (25-30%)
2. Develop for Azure storage (15-20%)
3. Implement Azure security (20-25%)
4. Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions (15-20%)
5. Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services (15-20%)

Detailed exam skills outline can be found here.

Just to give you a glimpse of what Azure services will need to be studied from exam perspective.

1. Azure Virtual Machines
2. Azure Functions
3. Azure Storage Account
4. Azure Web Apps
5. Azure Logic Apps
6. Azure Cosmo DB
7. Azure Container Registry/Docker
8. Azure Key Vault
9. Azure Active Directory
10. Azure Authentication(OAuth 2.0), Security
11. Azure Service Bus/Queue, Azure Storage queues
12. Azure Event Grid, Event Hub
13. Azure API management
14. Azure Cache for Redis
15. Azure ARM Templates
16. Application Insights
17. Azure Monitor
18. Azure CLI, Powershell
19. Azure Batch
20. Azure Search

The exam will require a bit of experience with programming languages supported by Azure (e.g. C#, Python, Java, Node.js). Although the tutorials present out there are mostly using C# for development. But it should not matter much as there are Azure SDKs for each of these supported languages which you can use to develop a solution.

How I prepared for the exam:

I started with Scott Duffy's AZ-204 Developing for Microsoft Azure Exam Prep course on Udemy. This course covers practical guide to develop each Azure services outlined for the exam. It can be completed within a week or two(depending on your speed).

The second course that I referred to was from Alan Rodrigues on YouTube (link). This course is bit more on hours but provides comprehensive knowledge. Alan has developed solutions for each of those Azure services from scratch using C#/.Net in the tutorials.

If you are short on time, I would suggest to take first course by Scott Duffy. But If you really want to learn it in detail, I would really recommend to take Alan Rodrigues's course on YouTube.

As the course covers a lot, it's almost impossible to grasp it by just watching the videos. You must practice developing these solutions using your preferred choice of programming language. That way, it will be easier to understand nitty-gritty concepts which would ultimately help you in exam.

I had practiced azure development using Python. The SDKs can be found on this GitHub link. There are many built in extensions for these Azure services in Visual Studio Code, please make sure to utilize them.

Additionally, you could read Microsoft's official documentation and make use of their learning portal. Details can be found here.

Practice Questions:

Practicing questions should make about 30% of your preparation time. This is very important, as you would get to know the variety of questions that will be asked and how to manage time during examination.

There are about 2 case studies given in the exam with 10-15 questions based on the same. It could take time to read the case study and understand the problem. Trick is to not read entire problem. Instead, read question first and then head back to related specific portion of the case study. This will help in save time during exam.

You must get good grasp on Azure CLI, powershell commands & related arguments, as there are many questions related to completing the command by filling in the blanks. There are few questions on completing the unfinished code as well (e.g importing libraries or invoking methods/classes)

I would recommend below 2 resources to practice questions for AZ-204.

1. Practice tests by Skillcertpro

2. Practice tests by Whizlabs

In fact, even if you complete just the first one, it should be more than enough to clear the examination.

Key is to have as much hands on experience as possible. I hope this will help you to prepare for examination.

Best of luck and Let me know your questions in comment section.

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