Passing the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals Exam
- Shone Pious
- Dec 18, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: May 27, 2024
In this blog:
My experience:
I passed the Azure Fundamentals exam on the 15th of December 2023 on my first attempt. Now I've always been interested in integrating my cyber security knowledge into cloud technologies, but never known where or how to start. As a result, I began looking into job descriptions for cloud architects and similar roles to see what skills some of these companies were looking for in the ideal candidate.
The two most common words I came across were AWS and Azure. Since I was a devout Windows user and had heard of Azure in the past, I decided that I would start learning Azure alongside my Cybersecurity bachelor's degree. This decision was also taken as my university was giving out free exam vouchers to students. As part of the scheme, I was given access to GMetrix software for practice questions. I started studying September, which gave me a solid two months to get as much preparation done as possible. During this time, my placement job hunt took precedent and I started neglecting revision until about mid October.
Fearing that I may have ruined my chances of passing the exam, I focused the vast majority of my days on studying for the exam, between my university work and other personal commitments. My favourite resource aside from the GMetrix software that was provided by university, was examtopics. The website has hundreds of past questions that were extremely similar, if not identical to the questions that I came across on my actual exam. After watching Adam Marczak's videos on each topic, I went onto examtopics and completed around 40 to 50 questions a day, depending on how productive I was feeling on that particular day. This process continued until the 15th of December, until the time had come to put my knowledge to the test.
I woke up early to finish the last bit of revision, before setting up my workstation and connecting to a Teams call with a staff member at university, who went through the process very clearly and helped me with the secure browser which I had to download using a virtual machine. I had an issue with background processes interfering with the installation of the heavy virtual machine. (Heavy for my particular laptop). A couple of tasks killed in task manager resolved this quick, however.
The exam was around 50 minutes and I finished it in just about 30 minutes, including a full review of each question. I came out with 850 out of 1000. Not too bad, considering the pass mark is 70% or 700 marks. My strongest section was describing cloud concepts with 90%; my weakest section was Azure management and governance with 80%.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed studying for the certification and would highly recommend pursuing it yourselves as it not only gives you a step up into the world of cloud technologies, but opens countless doors to a successful career with Azure.
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