How to Crack the Microsoft Azure AZ-204 Exam

Photo by Chris Hardy

At the beginning of 2021 I was challenged by a colleague to write the AZ-204 exam. Having seen the general move in industry towards cloud computing at scale, it was an easy sell. Several months have since passed and as of the end of June I am now an Azure Certified Developer! For those interested, you can view the Credly link here. I wrote and passed the exam on my first attempt and the aim of this article is to share my experience with you.

This article will not reinvent the wheel. There are already several fantastic articles written by very experienced developers who discuss what you should and should not study (I’ll link these below). Rather, I will try to give you a little bit of insight into my journey to qualifying, what I found useful and tools you can use to best equip yourself for the exam.

Background

The aim here is to provide some context for yourself so that you can compare your experience against mine. I have a bachelors in computer science and have been programming in several languages, such as C#, R and Python, intermittently for several years. In my current position, I spend almost all my time developing in F#. Prior to starting to study for the exam, the sum total of my experience in Azure had been in managing VMs (switching on/off, monitoring performance metrics and RDP’ing into the machine). Not much if you consider what is asked in the exam.

As I started working through the content, I quickly realized that my certification journey was not going to be a one-month sprint, but a sustained effort over multiple months. The aim of the game here was not just to “know stuff” to pass an exam, but to digest information and actively envision a business use case for it.

Expectations

The Microsoft AZ-204 web page mentions that you should have 1–2 years of professional development experience as well as some experience with Microsoft Azure. Given that I had been working professionally for approximately a year on a .Net framework language and had some experience, I was approximately at the start of the window of experience for the exam.

It took me approximately 6 months to fully prepare for this exam (I didn’t measure the exact number of hours, but it was on average 3 nights a week plus a good chunk of a Saturday or Sunday). Some people obviously learn faster than others (I’m not a particularly fast learner), so adjust your expectations as needed. Allow even more time if you have limited programming knowledge. I’ve seen several users on the Azure Certification Reddit thread answering this question – the more you read the better context you will have.

Microsoft Learn

As part of the AZ-204 web page, Microsoft has a learning path which you can make use of to prepare for your exam. The course content is curated into separate learning paths, and it is an excellent start to learning for the exam. Note my use of the word start here…

Unless you’re working in an area that uses some of these technologies, the Microsoft learn path for AZ-204 will not cover the content in enough detail for you to pass (in my opinion). That being said, Microsoft Learn is still a fantastic learning path to gain a baseline understanding of how Azure has pieced several topics together to be used in business. In addition to the content, Microsoft Learn also allows you to practice several topics in Azure using their sandbox functionality (also known as labs). If there’s something that doesn’t have a sandbox, Azure also gives you $200 credit for free to play around on Azure.

My biggest frustration with the Microsoft Learn platform is that the learning path does not cover all topics and doesn’t mention that several topics, such as Content Delivery Networks, Front Door and Azure Redis cache, aren’t in the learning path. Since the learning path isn’t static, I expect this to change in future as Microsoft are constantly evolving their offering. Also, it’s free, so we really can’t complain.

Although not everything is bundled into a neat package, there are a lot of single modules on Microsoft Learn which you can use to supplement your knowledge.

Alternative Learning Mediums

Microsoft learn is not the only place where you can learn content for the exams. The list below is a quickfire set of resources I would highly recommend you use to supplement your knowledge.

1. Pluralsight: I found the Pluralsight videos to be a great starting point in progressing beyond Microsoft learn. The information was well condensed, and the course contained several small tests which checked your knowledge. In addition to the videos, the premium subscription offers practice exam questions which you can use to prepare for the exam.
2. Udemy: I did not make use of this platform during my time studying for the exam, but several people who’ve taken the exam used this successfully to navigate the course content. From what I’ve read in articles, it seems like you need to pick your course with care – two popular courses are by Alan Rodrigues and Scott Duffy.
3. YouTube: There are a plethora of videos on YouTube that were invaluable to me in preparing for the exam. Below is a list of channels you can check out for AZ-204 related content:
   Adam Marczak
   I really enjoyed this channel. The content isn’t always directly applicable to the exam, but Adam is a master at explaining the “why” behind various Azure technologies.
   Microsoft Azure
   Scott Hanselman hosts a weekly Azure Friday show where he chats to people on the Azure team about technologies on the platform and does demos of various features in Azure.
   Microsoft Developer
   Similarly styled content to the previous channel. There are lots of demos where experts walk through different technologies.
   John Savill
   If you enjoy whiteboarding sessions, John is someone you should check out. His teaching style is very different from the other channels which might (or might not) appeal to your personal learning style.
4. Official Microsoft Content: I didn’t use the book for my exam. However, for those of you who are interested in a more formal coursework book, reviews of this book suggest that it is quite detailed.

Articles by Those Who have Passed the Exam

As I mentioned earlier, my aim is not to reinvent the wheel. Others have done a fantastic job in giving highly detailed lists of what you should study. Rather than reiterating what is already there, I am going to point you to their websites.

1. Thomas Maurer: Widely cited as a resource to use for the exam and for good reason. He provides a very detailed overview of what you should be studying for the exam.
2. Madeleine von Hausswolff: This article provided me with a great checklist that I could work against on what I should be able to do before writing the exam.
3. Shane Bart: I never fully understood nor valued the power of a mind map until accidentally stumbling onto this article. In addition to a well-written article, the author attaches a mind map that you can use as a visual learning aid when preparing for your exam.
4. Ravikran Srinivasulu: Srinivasulu’s articles can be used in addition to the articles mentioned above. He provides a thorough list of links to important resources you can use, he also has some practice questions you can make use of. The reason why I liked his articles was for the comments sections where he has answered many questions that you are likely to have.

Practice Exams

When preparing for the exams, it’s natural to want to practice questions of the same format and standard as the exam itself to not be surprised during the exam.

1. Official Microsoft practice exams: When signing up for the exam you have the option to sign up for a practice exam. Although I did not make use of this functionality, it is good to know about it ahead of time.
2. WhizLabs: I found that their practice exams were slightly easier than the questions in the actual exam. However, I would definitely recommend using WhizLabs.
3. Pluralsight: Pluralsight offers practice exam questions as part of its premium package. I found these questions to be significantly more difficult than the Whizlabs questions and slightly more difficult than the actual exam questions. Personally, I found a good balance in using a combination of this and Whizlabs questions.

Tackling Microsoft Documentation

A lot of your valuable studying time for the exam will be spent trying to wade through the Microsoft documentation to find information applicable to your exam. There is a lot of good documentation, but not all of it is useful in your quest to pass the exam. If I were to do this all again and had myself as a mentor, I would give myself the following tips:

• Read the overview and understand the context. Do not dig any further until you’re comfortable with this first page.
• Be on the lookout for concept sections of the documentation – this will be a good indication of how well you understand certain concepts and where you need to look further to supplement your knowledge.
• Look for anything related to “Quickstarts”. This is important as you’ll learn how to implement the technology in a particular language. Beyond the exam, this is great documentation for implementing software “in the real world”.
• Refer to articles from people who’ve passed the exam who can point you to specific parts of the documentation.

A Word on Azure CLI and Azure Powershell

Don’t try to memorise anything – rather understand the general structure of the syntax and memorise the weird edge cases where the code to use isn’t obvious to you. Powershell makes use of a verb-noun syntax. For example, to create a new virtual machine, the New-AzVM command is used. Understanding the general structure will drastically reduce the amount of code you need to memorise.

When to Book the Exam

My advice to those looking to write the exam is to only consider booking an exam slot once you’ve gone through all the Microsoft Learn paths. Doing this will give you a good idea of how fast you’re progressing through the content and how long you’re likely going to take to prepare for the exam.

Taking Advantage of Microsoft’s Free Exams Offers!

I didn’t realise this at the time, but Microsoft offers free exams from time to time which you can make use of. I’m going to list out all the times in the past year that Microsoft has given out free exams in the hope that they will repeat this in the years to come.

• Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge: 30 Days to Learn It
• Microsoft Ignite Cloud Skills Challenge
• Microsoft Build Cloud Skills Challenge

Conclusion

And that’s it – thanks for reading this far! Hopefully you’ve gained some useful information that you can use to tackle the exam. Although the exam takes quite a bit of work to pass, you learn so much in the process. Not passing this exam, although painful, is not a failure if you’ve gained something useful that you can implement “in the real world”. All the best for your exam prep and let me know in the comments if there’s something specific you’d like to know!