Cross-Cloud Certification: From Non-Cloud to Professional Architect - Azure Edition

This is Part 3 in a series of articles for practicing IT professionals looking to gain broad cross-cloud expertise, with the end goal of earning Professional Architect certification with all three major cloud vendors. Understanding multiple cloud platforms can significantly enhance your career prospects and equip you to at least participate in the conversation on the design and implementation of robust, scalable, cloud solutions.

This guide specific to Azure will cover the three exams that are in your path to achieving Azure Architect Expert certification, how I personally prepared for them, and suggestions for how you can get ready to take this exam.

As I stated in Part 1, solely taking these exams is not, despite their lofty titles, going to fully prepare you, Day 1, to actually practice as a Professional Architect. It no more qualifies you for such a senior position than getting a Computer Science degree equips you to single-handedly create large and complicated software the week after graduation. After taking these tests, you'll have a solid foundation to build from, but I can say from personal experience that there is so much more to learn!

Part 1 of this series covers my professional background, motivation for undertaking this process, and offers general study tips that apply to any cloud certification exam.

Part 2 went over earning AWS Architect Professional

Part 4 has all you need for Google Cloud Platform Professional Cloud Architect

(Note: I do not work for any of the cloud vendors, nor am I being compensated for any recommendations or links in this series of articles.)

TL;DR : This is a long article; if you read nothing else, scroll down until you see the big boldface text with the word DOOMED! in the header. It has some vital information on Case Studies, which are probably the parts of MS Exams most responsible for test failure.

Getting to Azure Architect Expert is a process that took me about 120 hours of study. There are three exams you'll be looking at, and a couple more that might be handy to earn.

I'm going to structure this article a little differently from my AWS Professional Architect tips; instead of going over materials and techniques for each exam individually, instead I'll go over general study materials across the board first, and then discuss the individual tests.

Study Materials

Like AWS, there's a wide variety of study materials available from a selection of different providers, and they vary wildly in both cost and quality. Poor-quality study materials can waste a very large amount of valuable time, not to mention any expenses incurred.

MS Learn

I am being perfectly honest when I say that MS Learn is excellent for a free resource! I won't claim that you can just go through the suggested lessons, read/do nothing else, and be ready to pass, but it is absolutely usable as a primary means of study.

My primary study for AZ-104 and AZ-305 was an "instructor-led" mass course offered under the now-defunct Cloud Weeks for Partners program; that is a bunch of hours of my life I'll never get back; the instructors were terrible.

For every MS Certification test, the curriculum/materials for the "official" in-person classes is nothing more than the MS Learn content, broken up into slides, and the labs you can access for free on GitHub. Please, please, don't pay $$$$ for an official in-person course, unless you absolutely cannot learn via online classes. (I'm serious: MS Learn's home pages for the curriculum tracks literally have the in-person course code on it, with links to either self-study, or signing up with an official training partner.)

We have the Internet now; there are a ton of places online to ask questions if something in the MS Learn materials is unclear; you don't need an instructor. (An instructor who, in many (most?) cases, won't have any more technical knowledge about Azure than what they needed to know to pass the exam; there isn't any kind of Mega-Test required to become an Azure instructor. They just have to pass the exam they plan on teaching, along with a general "Instructional Skills" course.)

Unlike most for-pay courses, MS Learn is almost strictly text-based. For me, that's not a bad way to learn; I actually prefer it to video lectures. (Though it being based on text doesn't mean you shouldn't take notes! You should take no fewer notes than you would for a video lecture of the same material to aid in memory retention.)

MS Learn is, despite the name, also Microsoft's reference documentation repository. By the time I finished my Azure course of study, I'm sure there were hundreds of "MSLearn Azure [feature name here]" searches in my browser history. The MS Learn study materials lean heavily on you doing some exploring of your own, which is certainly a pretty healthy way to learn. It's a well-designed site, and easy to navigate.

The "GitHub Labs"

Microsoft has written hands-on labs for the Associate-level exams; these are available just by Googling "[Exam Code] GitHub"; for example, the first search result for "AZ-104 GitHub" returns this; the link to the right side of that page leads to the labs themselves.

The labs are designed to be performed alongside live classes by official MS-certified trainers, but there's nothing stopping you from using them yourself; you'll just substitute your own machine/account when it talks about the "Classroom PC" or "The Account Credentials you've been provided."

These labs are pretty lengthy and do a good job covering the breadth of topics in the exams they exist for. (Notably, they are only consistent for the Associate exams; some of the fundamentals exams have a scattering of sandboxes on MS Learn, and Architect Expert has no labs at all, though they do use GitHub for some Case Studies to get you thinking.)

Hands-on Practice

If you aren't digging into the Azure console to practice what you are reading about, you aren't really learning; there's no better way to spot things you don't understand than seeing a config option in the console, and realizing you have no idea what it does, or being puzzled over which choice to pick.

You should absolutely sign up for an Azure account. Your new account will come with many of the same "one year free" options as AWS. (Free small servers, storage, databases, etc.) You'll also receive a $200 use-it-on-almost-anything credit! Yay! ... It expires after one month. Boo!

And, unlike AWS, you are limited to one Azure account with a Free Tier. AWS will let you sign up for as many as you need (within reason.) Azure keeps track of your name and credit card billing address and won't let you do that. If you've signed up for an Azure account a couple years ago, and are still at the same address, you aren't getting another one.

Important Azure Hands-on Tip: Azure has a fundamental concept called the "Resource Group". Unlike AWS tags or applications, every Azure resource is in a Resource Group; they are intended to be used to group any resource with the same lifecycle together, and they inherently come with an ARM template (similar to a CloudFormation template.) They are a really useful concept!

Well... the "lifecycle" for your hands-on practice resources is "I need to delete them at the end of every study session to avoid piling up Azure charges." While you wouldn't do this in real life, put every resource you make into the same resource group (I used the classic "foo") and then at the end of your day, make it a habit to delete that resource group. ARM will do all the magic of getting things deleted in the correct order to avoid error messages.

I think I created and deleted the "foo" resource group over one hundred times during my studies.

(I really, really, wish AWS had something similar, and not just as a learning aid. Having an auto-generated comes-with-every-resource automation template would be super-handy, and would make the process of turning an ad-hoc implementation into a production, change-controlled, deployment a lot easier. They recently implemented a CF generator, given a list of resources, but this is a very new function.)

John Savill (YouTube)

John Savill is a gentleman who publishes Azure-related videos on YouTube. They are, in a word, excellent. (And they are ad-free!) He has a couple types of videos:

The first is his "exam crams". These are single videos (often several hours long!) that provide an overview of the topics in a particular test. For fundamentals-level exams (the -900 series) they can suffice as a complete, if very-brief, course of study. For the others, they are a decent way to organize your thoughts, look for gaps in your notes, and help prepare yourself mentally for the test, though they will not replace more-detailed study.

He also has extensive single videos on particular Azure topics and features. Many of them are organized into playlists for particular certifications, though they are generally not exam-focused videos. They can be an excellent way to learn Azure, and may help solidify particular concepts, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend watching the whole AZ-104 playlist and then sit down and book your exam.

Truly remarkable and useful for a free online resource that isn't even sponsored by the vendor.

TutorialsDojo (Practice Tests)

As with AWS, TutorialsDojo should be your first stop for practice exams. (Again, that's not an affiliate link; I just really like their stuff, and I'm not getting paid to say that.) They are well-written, have excellent explanations, they are the only Azure practice test vendor that simulates the case-study questions (more on those later!) and they are also the only vendor that... and this is hard to believe, actually scores the exam correctly. (Microsoft offers partial credit for multi-item questions, and every other vendor (at least at the time I was taking these tests) inexplicably doesn't take that into account.)

MeasureUp (Practice Tests)

MeasureUp is the official Microsoft-endorsed provider of practice exams for their tests. These used to be offered for free as part of the Enterprise Skills Initiative program for partners and larger customers (this program also provided unlimited free exam vouchers!)

I found their test questions to be far-harder than the real thing, which can be a colossal de-motivator when you are preparing to schedule the test. I took my TutorialsDojo exam, was doing okay, and was getting ready to book the test... then cancelled when my first MeasureUp test only scored 35%. (As an example of "harder than the real thing": the actual exam might ask you to put four steps of a process in order; MeasureUp might want six or seven and will give you a 0 on the question if any of them are wrong.)

MeasureUp also does not feature case studies (which are an important part of all Associate and Expert MS exams), and they do not score the multi-answer test questions correctly (not-offering partial credit), and MS really likes their multiple-answer questions... ordering, matching, etc.)

At $60 (and that's the sale price!), I do not feel they are a good value. If there's an Azure exam you want to take, and TutorialsDojo doesn't offer a practice exam for it (e.g. AZ-700, Networking Associate) then it's better than nothing, but just keep the limitations in mind.

That said, I'd pay $60 to MeasureUp for an exam before I'd give $1 to WhizLabs (another somewhat large practice test vendor, but one that I do not recommend you use unless you have no other choice.)

Commercial Online Courses

Understand that I passed with the MS Learn materials; I learn pretty well by reading text and I often find it a chore to go through online videos. But I'm not everyone, and there are several online courses with good reputations for Azure.

If you read my AWS article, you'll see that I'm a huge fan of Adrian Cantrill's AWS courses. Well, he doesn't do Azure, but he does work with someone who does, James Lee. I have heard that they have the same excellent style and depth as Adrian's AWS courses, and they are the same (very-reasonable) price. ($40 for Associate, $80 for Expert, $100 for both.) If I had to choose a video-based course, that would be the first one I'd try.

Udemy has two courses about which I've read decent reviews, Scott Duffy and Alan Rodrigues. Though reports of those who have taken them state that their teaching styles are not to everyone's taste. "On sale", they are certainly not expensive; under $20 for AZ-104. (Udemy runs "sales" all the time; don't ever pay "full price" for them.)

The Official "Exam Ref" Books

MS Press offers books in the "Exam Ref" series for most of their certification tests. As with any book, these often go out of date between revisions (e.g. the AZ-104 book didn't get revised for three years.) However, they do have some use.

I used the DP-900 Exam Ref to study for that test, and while it was absurd overkill for such a simple exam, it had a lot of really good information in it that you'll probably want to understand fairly well before taking AZ-104 or AZ-305. (As an example of "absurd overkill", it went into some fairly-complicated SQL commands that I just glazed over trying to read. I guarantee there are zero questions ever asked in a -900 exam that ever require that level of knowledge.)

If you have access to them through a subscription service (e.g. O'Reilly Books Online), they might at least be worth a peek, but I'd hesitate to pay full price for them unless your employer will reimburse.

The Exams

At a minimum, you must pass Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) and Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305) in order to earn the Azure Architect Associate Certification.

Strap in, because if you are an IT architect already (I am), this is going to require you to learn a lot of administration details you probably never wanted to know and are unlikely to use. They used to have an "implementation" test specifically for architects (AZ-303?), but they discontinued that when AZ-305 was released.

Fundamental/Foundational Exams: The -900 Series (optional)

In addition to the two required tests to get Architect Expert (AZ-104 and AZ-305), there are some optional foundational-level exams you may want to consider taking (especially if your employer is footing the bill!)

Even if you don't take these exams (for cost reasons), I'd still suggest going through at least the MS Learn curriculums for them; you'll need to know a lot of this for the exams you do have to take.

The fundamentals exams are designed so working IT Professionals can complete an entire course of study in 8-10 hours (the duration of the MS Learn curriculums for the exams.)

These tests are useful in that they'll get you used to how Microsoft asks exam questions, and they are a nice little intermediate goal during a longer course of study. If you are already an experienced IT Pro (and you should be if you are reading these articles), and a job you are applying for requires more than the most cursory knowledge of Azure, I wouldn't even bother listing any of these on my resume; they are just too easy.

Azure Fundamentals - AZ-900

This is the first test most people take on their Azure journey. To pass (as with any of these), the course curriculum in MS Learn is entirely adequate. The course is designed to take a single day, and it's reasonable to believe you'll complete it in that amount of time.

I haven't reviewed the materials in a while, but I believe that it includes adequate built-in Azure sandboxes that you don't even need an Azure account to perform the few hands-on labs. (There are no GitHub labs for this one.) The few portions of the test that require familiarity with the console are really basic, like "Which button do you push to pull up a shell prompt?"

If you want to be really prepared, John Savill has an Exam Cram, and even a full 9-hour video course. And TutorialsDojo does offer a Practice Exam. But to be perfectly frank, if you have trouble passing this one, being an IT Architect is probably not for you.

Azure Data Fundamentals - DP-900

This test covers Azure's extensive library of Data Storage and Database products. There's a lot of them, and it's not necessarily easy to keep them straight. I didn't take this one until after Azure Administrator, but I wish I had. It's not that the AZ-104 materials didn't cover this stuff, but it would have been nice to have a gentle introduction first.

As with all of these -900's MS Learn is likely enough, with GitHub to be thorough. As I mentioned above, I used the MS Exam Ref to study for this exam. It went into way more depth than the exam required, but it's not necessarily bad information. (And if you feel you really don't need or want to know something the book's trying to teach you, skip it.)

If you want a practice test for this one, MeasureUp does have one, but sheesh, a $60-$100 practice test for an easy $100 exam; I'm not seeing the value.

Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals - SC-900

SC-900 isn't Azure-specific. If you are a seasoned Microsoft Server pro, you can probably skip this one. I've been an IT Infrastructure professional my whole career, so believe or not, the fundamentals of Active Directory (and the "Entra") off-shoot were new to me (beyond "How do I log into my laptop?") I thought this was useful to me.

I'm not going to repeat myself; same advice as for DP-900... MS Learn, GitHub, John Savill's Cram, and MeasureUp if you feel like wasting your employer's money.

Azure AI Fundamentals - AI-900 (really, REALLY, optional... as in, completely unnecessary)

I only took this one because I had a long weekend, my wife wasn't at home, I had just passed AZ-305, and I was bored, there was a last-minute test slot available, and ESI was still handing out free vouchers.

Neither AZ-104 nor AZ-305 will test you on a single thing in this exam. So why am I mentioning it? Studying for it was fun. I thought it was very engaging topic, the hands-on exercises were fascinating, and the test was a refreshing super-easy breath of fresh air.

Take it if your employer has some kind of "All Employees Shall Have an AI Certification of Some Sort" requirement for you. Certainly don't take it if you will have to personally pay the exam fee, it's too simple. I have heard of people taking this exam by accident because they signed up for the wrong exam code, not studied even one minute for it, and still passed the test.

What do you need to pass? MS Learn and GitHub labs... that's it. Yes, John does have a cram (and a GenerativeAI-specific supplement), and TutorialsDojo has a practice exam (and so does MeasureUp, but you'd have to be nuts to pay that much for it) but really, none of that is needed if you are the target audience for this article.

Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)

I'll be honest, I've taken a lot of exams over my long career (and even co-written a few!) and never, since college, have I felt so uncertain I'd pass. I've been an Infrastructure professional starting with my first job, never an administrator, so this exam was hard, and I didn't feel real confident. That said, I did pretty well on it (869, with a passing score of only 700.)

I think in total, it's reasonable to expect you'll spend 80-100 hours studying for this test. (That makes it literally 10x the work of a -900 exam.) It covers a lot of ground, and more than any other tests (by any of the three major cloud vendors) you are going to be expected to remember low-level details on some of the offerings. As in they will want you to read a scenario, and then pick a particular SKU that offers X of a certain performance metric, or Y storage capacity, or Z feature, or whatever.

Personally, I think questions like that are kind of silly to ask on a certification test; in the real world, you'd just Google it. However, during the test, you sort-of will have the ability to access MS Learn, so you can look it up. (More on that later!) I can sort of see why they ask (you need to know that the SKUs often make an important difference, and frequently have wildly different features), but asking you to actively remember all that stuff (or slow yourself down checking MS Learn during the exam... again, more on that later), is a bit much.

I used the MS Learn course, and the GitHub labs. Officially, it's four full days to complete it. I think six is more realistic; you'll be spending a lot of time in the documentation, and maybe doing the labs more than once. (Like I mentioned above in the Study Materials section, there are several other reputable online courses for this one; I'm just relaying what I did to study.)

I topped it off with the both the TutorialsDojo practice exams (a complete must! Do Not Skip! Worth every penny of the $15!) and the one from MeasureUp. (It's the same $60-$100 as the rest of their exams; I guess it's less-bad of a deal than paying that much for a -900, but still not a great value. But this practice exam definitely is challenging! If you can easily pass one of their banks on the first try, I can't imagine you won't pass the real thing.) With either practice exam, expect to spend a lot of time reading docs about things you got wrong, and taking more notes.

John Savill has an exam cram for it (it lasts four hours!), although unlike the -900's, you certainly can't use it as a replacement for more-complete study. He does offer a "video course" but since his non-exam cram videos aren't necessarily course-focused they may not be an efficient use of your time. I'm not saying they aren't good information; far from it! Just that if your goal is to pass the class, it may not be the best choice.

Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305)

You'll need this one and AZ-104 in order to earn the Azure Architect Expert certification. You don't necessarily have to take them in order but passing AZ-305 by itself awards no actual credential.

I'm an IT Infrastructure Professional, and I found this one a lot easier than AZ-104. Maybe your experience will be different. Despite it being the final/only architecture exam, I found it to be more of the difficulty of AWS Architect Associate; it was much easier than AWS Architect Professional.

You'll definitely spend a lot less time in the console; this is truly an architecture-focused exam, though you'll probably want to still use the console to verify things you think you know or give things a test run.

I'm sure you are seeing a pattern by now. I used the MS Learn course as my primary study materials. There are no GitHub labs for this one, but there are some case studies there. (There are no answers posted, and they aren't exactly like the case studies on the exam; they are more like thought exercises.)

John Savill has a... you guessed it, exam cram available. At the time I took AZ-305 (soon after the exam was released for the first time), the only practice test available at all was MeasureUp; it was... not great; several vague and or incorrect questions. That said, I'm sure they've fixed it by now. However, (and if you've read this far, I'm sure you can see this coming) TutorialsDojo now has a practice exam available, and I have no reason to think it doesn't meet the same high standards as the rest of their practice exams. (And, again, is the only practice exam to feature case studies.)

Taking the Azure Exams

The first four paragraphs here have been shamelessly stolen from my AWS Article. However, keep reading after this introductory bit, because I have some VERY important information for you.

Microsoft uses the Pearson Vue platform to administer certification exams; you'll have the option of taking the exams in a Pearson Vue exam center, or at home, with the Pearson OnVue software.

I've taken many exams at home with OnVue, and overall, my experience has been positive. There are, however, plenty of reports online of people with software problems, overly-strict proctors, long queues to start the exam, and so on.

To give you the best chance possible of a successful exam with OnVue, I've actually written an entire article on that exact topic.

I'm not guaranteeing you'll have problems if you take the exam at home (I haven't!) but certainly the risk for mishaps and heartache is greater than if you take the exam in an exam center. Exam centers are usually located at trade schools and community colleges. While there is no additional charge to take it in an exam center, it may be harder to get an appointment there than booking an online exam.

Some special Microsoft-specific quirks of their exams

Discounts

Larger MS Customers and Partners should be eligible for the Enterprise Skills Initiative. This provides 50%-off discounts for any Microsoft Exam. (The exams used to be free under this program, but that led to a high failure rate, and a high rate of no-shows.)

Occasionally MS offers various training events that provide free vouchers for certain exams (like the AI series of exams.) You'll just have to make sure you are on the MS Learning mailing list to get notified.

Matching and Ordering Questions

Microsoft loves, loves, questions where you match things on the left with the correct thing on the right; gives me flashbacks to middle-school... don't think I ever saw one of those in college!

They also ask a lot of questions where you have to put the steps to do something in the proper order. I think these are a little silly, because during actual implementation later steps will have some required field/attribute that you can't possibly fill out if you haven't done the earlier step, so in real life this is unlikely to trip you up. (If you take the MeasureUp practice tests, you don't need to be as afraid of them; the MeasureUp versions will have six or seven subtle steps; the real ones usually four.)

If I have to regurgitate the list of the proper steps to set up a Point-to-Site VPN again, it'll be too soon! I got asked that one on three different exams. (AZ-104, AZ-700 (Networking Associate, which I don't recommend you take if you are not looking to be an Azure specialist), and AZ-305. Although allegedly most of the nitty-gritty networking content got stripped from AZ-104, so maybe you'll only be asked once.)

AWS (as of July '24) just announced questions like this; they haven't had them up until now.

"Will X work?" "Will Y work?" "Will Z work?"

You'll be presented with a problem, and then it will end with "Will [insert solution here] meet the requirements?" There's a warning that once you answer, you cannot review the question later or change your answer. (I can't remember if that's a separate screen or just a note on the question screen.) This is because the next couple questions are going to be the same scenario, but with a different solution; they don't want you to use the later suggestions as a way to jog your memory on an earlier one. Once you hit "Next", it's too late to change your mind.

MS Learn Access

As of early 2024, you can access the documentation parts of MS Learn on all Microsoft exams, except the -900 exams. That's right, it's "open book". You can access the complete documentation; it's all there. (You cannot access the literal study curriculums, also hosted on MS Learn.)

Now, you'd think this would make the exams a lot easier; it does not. For starters, the only search function you are allowed to use is the one built in to MS Learn. Let's be real; in your actual job, everyone's first instinct is to use Google for this. As a result, apparently MS pays very little attention to the search engine in MS Learn, and it's pretty awful.

Just try a basic query like "Azure App Service Plan Tiers"; Google will send you right to the correct article; (as does Bing, for that matter.) MS Learn? Unless you drill down the filters on the left in your search results, the correct article might as well not exist... until you actually tell the search engine you want only articles on the Azure App Service, it has no clue and just gives a bunch of random articles with the right keywords; it's pretty pathetic.

As a result, you need to actively practice navigating MS Learn, both using the basic structure of the site, and learning the quirks of the search function.

Also, (and this has gotten better over the last few months), the actual implementation has been very buggy, with it routinely tossing candidates out of the exam, leaving them needing to re-join.

Bathroom Breaks for At-Home Exams

If you take your Azure exam at home, you are allowed to go to the bathroom! (AWS only lets you do so at test centers.) That's right, they trust you to not somehow download everything you forgot directly into your brain in the few minutes you are out of view of the camera. You send the proctor a message, and when they acknowledge your request, you go and take your break.

Now, there are two things you need to know about this policy. The first is that the clock doesn't stop during your break. The second is that you cannot review any questions you already saw after your return. This is reasonable, because you know cheaters would just go check a dumpsite on their "bathroom break" to look up answers.

(I honestly don't know if the same restriction applies for in-center exams; I haven't taken one from Microsoft.)

Your Picture

Okay, this is super minor, but the picture you'll see on every score report for every Microsoft exam you take will be the ID selfie you took before your very first Microsoft exam. So if you will ever be showing off your score report, make sure that first picture is a nice one?

And now, for the MAIN EVENT of this part of the article...

****** READ THIS SECTION OR YOU ARE DOOMED! (NOT KIDDING!) *****

*****--> CASE STUDIES <--*****

This one trips up a ton of MS Exam takers. They aren't present on the -900 exams, but they feature in all the others. If the first time you've seen one is the exam itself, they are going to be a big surprise, and may cause you to run out your exam clock without meaning to.

Question Structure (HOW TO NOT SPEND 20 MINUTES ON A FIVE MINUTE SECTION)

You'll be presented with pages of background information for a particular scenario. You'll then be asked several questions based on it. Here's the trick (okay, one of several tricks)... you won't be tested on 80+% of it! That's right, most of the details they give you are completely irrelevant to the questions you'll be asked! (I suspect these have a large question bank, and different test-takers will be asked about different things.)

If you start taking notes and planning out the total Azure solution, it's going to burn a lot of test time, most of which will be wasted. Instead, skim the pages so you get a basic outline of the scenario, and, importantly, what information is on which page. You don't need to memorize anything specific, because you'll have access to the whole scenario throughout the section.

As soon as you are done skimming, hit the button to reveal the first question. Then go back and find the detail you need to answer. Repeat for the remaining questions. You are going to feel really foolish diagramming a complete Azure architecture on the useless little virtual notepad in the testing software, and then realize that you only used a tiny bit of it to answer questions.

Timing (HOW TO NOT END UP WITH 30 SECONDS TO ANSWER A FIVE MINUTE SECTION)

Case studies do not have their own bank of time; they share the time with the rest of the test. Why is this important?

Case Studies will be present at the beginning of the exam, or the end of the exam, or both; it's completely random! And while the very beginning of the test tells you the total number of questions, it's not super-clear in the interface during the exam that the number of questions left in the section is not necessarily the same as the number of questions left in the test.

A lot of exam-takers have taken their time reviewing the main body of the test, thinking they are done, then hit "Next", and get hit with surprise case study, and two minutes left to complete the whole thing. Whoops!

And if you aren't practiced with the questions (because you didn't read this article), and it's at the beginning, you could blow a huge amount of test time on a case study, and you haven't even started the main body of the exam yet! (And might have another case study to complete at the end!) Whoops!

PRACTICE THEM!!!!

You see how I've been repeating "Take TutorialsDojo!" "the Tutorials Dojo exam isn't optional!" etc. all throughout this article? It's because they are the only practice exam provider I'm aware of that has bothered to write a simulator for this style of question. Now, they don't incorporate the randomness, or the poor clarity on if you have one at the end or not, but at least you can practice the style of question itself.

Now, the actual questions asked aren't particularly difficult! You aren't going to have to slog through multiple pages of specifications for one tiny little detail that reveals the correct answer. It's more along the lines of you figuring out that it matters which Availability Zone each of the servers in this question is in, you'll flip to the table that shows which is where, and the answer will be obvious. But if you've accidentally not realized that the case study even existed, and you have 30 seconds to find that table? That's a little more challenging!

Exam Results and Scoring

At the conclusion of your test, Microsoft delivers your score report immediately for all the exams I go over in this article. (MS Exams with labs take a little time to score.)

It's important to note that while your score report is on the screen, the webcam is still running if you are taking an exam at home. It's very tempting to grab your phone and take a picture of that report. Don't. I got scolded at by a proctor; I didn't get my exam invalidated, but I don't think you want to risk such a thing happening. (If you think that it makes no sense, since there's no possible test security violation you could commit when you are staring at the exact score report you are going to be provided later, you'd be right. But neither MS nor Pearson asked my opinion on the matter.)

If you pass, great! Your exact score doesn't matter too much; a pass is a pass, and the actual numerical score will not be reported anywhere but your score report.

If you did not pass, don't get too discouraged, your numerical score should give you a decent idea of how close you were, and therefore roughly how much further effort you need to put into study. There is a 24 hour waiting period before your next attempt. Then you must wait 14 days. Further attempts must also wait 14 days, up to a maximum of five total attempts in a year.

I see a lot of questions online asking things like: "I scored a 690. Does that mean I was X questions from passing?" The answer to that question is two-fold:

First, it's impossible to answer; a score of 690 is not "you answered 69% of questions correctly", and likewise a passing score is not a set percentage of correct answers. Each exam has unscored questions in it that do not count in your final results (though you are not informed which questions those are.) In addition, your score is adjusted based on the difficulty of the particular questions you were asked in your copy of the exam.

Second, it doesn't really matter. It is not as if you are going to be asked the same questions on a subsequent attempt, or not do the very best you can the next time you take it.

Again, use your score as a rough guide to how close you came, not some absolute number of questions you passed/failed by.

Renewals

Unlike the other two major cloud vendors, who make you re-take their exams after 2-3 years in order to keep certifications current, Microsoft Associate and Expert credentials expire after one year (fundamentals never expire), however, you do not need to take a complete exam in order to renew. Instead, starting six months in, you can take a brief non-proctored quiz on MS Learn. They provide a suggested curriculum that will encompass the topics on the quiz, and you are not denied access to the Internet during the quiz process.

You can take your first two attempts, one after the other. If you still don't pass, you can attempt once every 24 hours until you do. Just don't put it off until the last minute! Your credentials expire exactly one year after you earned them, down to the second.

If you let a credential expire, you must take the full exam in order to reinstate it.

When you pass the quiz, it's extended to a full year past the "anniversary" date, so if you took your exam February 1st, 2025 (expiring February 1st, 2026), renewed on August 1st, 2025, your renewal will be in effect until February 1st, 2027.

Conclusion

This wraps up my thoughts on attaining Azure Architect Expert as an experienced IT pro. If you feel that this article helped you on your journey, I'd love to hear it, and feel free to leave a comment below. (And, of course, check out the other articles in this series, because I want to feed The Algorithm those sweet, sweet, views!)

Good Luck!