Are you one of those people who is aspiring to clear the AZ-400 certification exam? Then this blog post if for you! In this blog post I'll be sharing my experience of how I prepared and cleared the AZ-400 certification exam.
About the exam
AZ-400 is an expert level certification and candidates for this exam should have subject matter expertise working with people, processes, and technologies to continuously deliver business value.
There is no prerequisite as such for giving this exam. However, if you want to earn the Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert badge then you must clear at least one of the following certifications: AZ-104 (Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate), AZ-204 (Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate).
I had already cleared the AZ-204 certification earlier before appearing for AZ-400.
Skills measured
- Develop an instrumentation strategy
- Develop a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strategy
- Develop a security and compliance plan
- Manage source control
- Facilitate communication and collaboration
- Define and implement continuous integration
- Define and implement a continuous delivery and release management strategy
(Note: The skills measured are subject to change as Microsoft keeps updating the exam content over time)
How I prepared for the exam?
I have been working with cloud services for more than 2 years, developing solutions, deploying applications and also migrating applications from on-prem to the cloud. In the process I had gone through a lot of documentations, blogs and videos out there. I also try to stay up-to-date with the latest updates by following the official blogs and YouTube channels. All this knowledge came in handy while preparing for this exam.
This exam tests your knowledge on a variety of tools and technologies, so having hands-on experience is really beneficial.
Below are the resources that I have used in my journey:
- Cloudskills.io AZ-400 course
- Alan Rodrigues's course on Udemy
- Microsoft documentation
- Whizlabs practice tests for AZ-400
The course from Cloudskills really helped me as it contained in-depth lectures and guided hands-on labs. I had then purchased the Udemy course for an accelerated exam-prep.
The practice tests from Whizlabs will boost your confidence for exam preparation as they are designed to be close to the real world exams.
My experience with the exam
I had chosen the option for Online Proctored exam. You can appear for the exam from the comfort of your home using this option.
There were a total of 55 questions and about 140 minutes to solve them.
Below are the types of questions:
- Single-choice questions
- Multiple-choice questions
- Scenario-based type questions
- One case study
In scenario-based questions, you will be presented with a scenario or problem statement. Then you will be presented with multiple solutions for the problem statement. It is also possible that all solutions are correct or all of them are incorrect. Be careful with these as you cannot go back once you've answered them.
The passing score is 700 and my score was 868/1000.
I hope that I have answered a few questions through this blog. If you have any queries don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can comment below as well.
All the best on your certification journey 💪