Azure 204 (AZ-204) developer notes, my path towards the certification

Last updated Jul 11, 2022 Published Jan 6, 2022

The content here is under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license

Before we start, this is a collection on what I went through to get the 204 certification from azure. The process was similar to the one I did for AWS. The idea is to get some structure on how to get started with the subjects needed to pass the exam.

Before anything else a bit of context is always welcome, before taking the exam I started to work with azure services for about one year. Also I feel comfortable on how to navigate the integration between terraform and azure (terraform is not related by any means to azure exam).

Then I started collecting resources and also got some help from different people on the journey, this is also an attempt to document and share how the process was for me and which areas of the exam are covered. I know that most of the content here is already shared in the internet, but the approach I am taking is more personal, instead of a course or an overview.

Before starting

While I was starting with the content and what is covered in the exam, I started to poke around and get everything I could (the result is the next section), so from blog posts to official Microsoft material and so on, it was more an exploratory thing.

Next up, as I started to feel more familiar with the exam topics and how much they weight in the exam I went for a more structured way. In a structured way, I focused on some resources from that first around exploring. The result was the resources in the next section.

Takeaways

  • The courses are starters, most of the questions are not related to the courses
  • Mock exams are the best way to understand what the exam asks
  • Fill in the gap going between mock exams and support material

Resources

General concepts

Exam topics

What to watch out for

The exam covers different topics and there are specific subjects that are worth double-checking before taking the exam. In this section, there are four: Azure CLI, Azure Graph API and Templates ARM and Powershell.

Azure CLI

  • Commands that are executed to create virtual machines, webapps, service plans,you can do the same steps that you would’ve done in the web interface.
  • The cli has a az find an AI service that offers advise based on the official documentation

Azure Graph API

Templates ARM

ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates are declarative files that allows the automation of resources management in azure (it can be creation, deletion, update or what ever). According to azure docs, any feature available in the portal is also available through ARM templates [1].

There are questions related to the ARM itself, so knowing what it is and how to use it is helpful to score a few questions.

Powershell

Some of the questions are based on Powershell commands, as I am a Linux based developer I wasn’t familiar with Powershell the book “PowerShell 101 The No-Nonsense Beginner’s Guide to PowerShell” by Mike F Robbins [2] also helped me to get a basic understanding (it is also recommended under the official Microsoft documentation).

Are you on linux? Microsoft has powershell for linux as well, the installation instructions are split by distro

Powershell is always required in the exam, so understanding and knowing how to handle that is also useful.

Other sources

References

  1. [1]Microsoft, “What is Azure Resource Manager?,” 2022 [Online]. Available at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/overview. [Accessed: 06-Jun-2022]
  2. [2]M. F. Robbins, PowerShell 101 - The No-Nonsense Beginner’s Guide to PowerShell. Leanpub, 2018.
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