First Sunner ever to achieve Microsoft Certified - Azure Developer Associate: “I started from scratch and studied for exam in 6 months”

Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate is a certification of designing, building, testing, and maintaining cloud applications and services on Microsoft Azure in collaboration with cloud solution architects, DBA cloud and customers to deploy solutions on the Azure cloud platform.

In March this year, Minh and some of his team members positively responded to the learning and taking Azure exam movement by readily setting it as personal OKRs. After nearly 6 months of reviewing, practicing and focusing on balancing it with his current work, Minh obtained this certification in September.

Briefly about D.Q.Minh, this adolescent born in 1997 has been learning and working at Sun * for nearly 2 years.

Despite his young age, Minh has been highly appreciated by the leaders of the EUV3 for his progress right since his early days at the Unit. Quickly showing his ability and accepting the jobs of high difficulty, Minh soon became a key member of the project. Minh's outstanding feature is his high concentration on his work. During his free time, he also supports and works with his colleagues in dealing with other tasks, which explains why Minh always gets trust and love from those around.

"On the first day of the interview, since the beginning I had been quite surprised because this 1997-born adolescent answered most of the questions very coherently and detailedly. After entering the project, I continued to challenge him by assigning difficult tasks to him from the start and he always finished them excellently. At the present, Minh is working as a key member of the project.

Only 1 week earlier, Minh took this exam and lacked a few points to pass so I am extremely happy to know that Minh has passed the certificate. However, I am not too surprised by this result since by keeping track of Minh's learning process which consists of hard work, systematic knowledge system illustrated on charts, substantial amount of time for practice, I found falling unexpected and passing too obvious." - Mr. N.T.Hưng - Minh's Team Leader shared.

When we met Minh for an interview, we were impressed by his simplicity and humbleness in his responses. As soon as he finished the interview with Sun * News, this guy immediately shared his experiences with everyone who is interested in Azure and wants to achieve this certificate in a short time.

Below is D.Q.Minh’s experience on obtaining Azure Certification

"Hi guys,

I'm far from an expert in Azure yet a person starting from scratch, and I still need to learn more about it up to now. Therefore, what I share below is the most basic experience for beginners, as well as those who take Azure for the first time.

The truth is, a certificate is only an affirmation of your knowledge, hence what is important is how you practice and use what you learned in your work.

Since I barely have any experience in Azure, I started to learn about Azure through Azure Fundamentals to understand the basic definitions of cloud computing and Azure, such as what is Cloud computing?, What is CapEx and OpEx?, What is IaaS, PaaS, FaaS, SaaS? as well as those of the services that Azure provides.

After familiarizing with Azure, I started to participate in "Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (AZ-203)" course on pluralsight. The course provides  not only theoretical knowledge, but also a demo for me to practice.

During that time, besides the videos on pluralsight, I also refer to other resources of Microsoft docs and Microsoft learn.

With Azure, I did not encounter much difficulty in finding study materials, because Microsoft provides highly detailed and systematic documents, through Microsoft docs, and Microsoft learn. However, Microsoft docs and Microsoft learn are too extensive to follow them all, so I only referred to the parts mentioned in this Study Guide.

As for the Azure Developer role, practice is important and essential as it increases the developers' experience on using the platform, the ability to handle errors in case errors arise, and deployment. Azure supports many languages ​​such as Python, Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, ... However, the certification exam will only mention questions related to .NET code, so I decided to practice. with .NET Core.

The exam does not require too much ability to write .NET code, but it needs the ability to read and understand .NET code. I have a bit of experience working with .NET when I was at university, so implementing simple logic code in .NET was not challenging. In addition, when I practiced directly with .NET Core, I gradually became familiar with the .NET convention, which creates a lot of advantages for me when taking the test. Since all Azure libraries write for the .NET SDK have to follow convention, I may not need to remember the exact function names or class names of all SDKs to do the exam yet just remember the handling logic for each service that is implemented and integrated.

The hands-on process requires deploying services to Azure, which may incur fees. Many services also charge a monthly usage fee, which leads to a quite high charge for practice, so I switched to using Azure Education accounts. By borrowing the student accounts of my fellow friends at Polytechnic University,  I was able to freely practice because each account has 200 $ credit to use in 1 month.

Exam sittings

First attempt: Fail

I made my first attempt on September 18 and encountered a lot of difficulties with Microsoft's exam format, especially the Drag - Drop question types when they asked the respondents to find the right answers and reorder in a reasonable order.

In addition, the Microsoft questionnaire may also appear tricks to fool the contestant a bit. During the first attempt, I was quite subjective  when forgetting the existence of these tricks and hastily selecting the answers. Finally, I failed with the score 677/1000 (Passing score of Azure is 700)

2nd attempt: Pass

After the previous attempt, Microsoft will reveal the aspects or skills that the candidates need to improve their skills. For me, they were the Security and Logic Apps aspect, which were 2 aspects that I had not really focused on before. Therefore, on my second attempt, I spent most of the time focusing on these 2 aspects. Moreover, I also brought the exam schedule forward instead of the expected schedule at the end of October with hope that I can hang out at ease after the exam.

This time, in addition to covering the 2 previously weak aspects, I am more cautious with tricky questions such as:

+ Appears redundant data as compared to the requirements of the selected solution

+ The information is missing in the question but is hinted in the code

+ Re-verify the order when implementing solutions for each problem.

10 days after the test, I finally got the result of passing with 790/1000. Thanks to a little more luck as this time there seems to be more questions related to implementing code, creating a little advantage for me.

I am quite happy with this result, but after the test I also find out that there is a lot of knowledge that needs to be added later in order to be able to effectively deploy the solutions.

Although the burden of having to obtain a certification for the exam to be worth the effort put in reviewing is over (actually, it is to be worth the money and effort), it is certain that a certificate cannot fully assess the knowledge that we obtain during the process of review and practice, and it cannot replace experience from working directly with the Azure platform. Therefore, my next goal is to continue to review more knowledge about Design for cost optimization and Design Infrastructure. In addition, I will also look for opportunities to work and experience hands-on experiences through Azure platform-based projects at Sun *.

There are many things I want to share with you guys, but the time does not allow. Above are some of my humble experiences to share with those who are interested in or desire achieving Azure certification. For those who want more detailed information, you can leave your email address below, I will contact you directly."

Minh is definitely a representative example of the saying “the young are the talented”. We feel more affectionate towards him because despite all the achievement at work, he always keeps himself calm and humble. Sun* News wish Minh all the best and success on the path that you have chosen.