Experience in taking the AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam

Today, I would like to share my experience of preparing for the AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam. This was my first Azure certification, and I hope that sharing my learning journey will be helpful for those of you who, like me, have limited time, are lazy, and want to save time while achieving the best results.

What is Az-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator?

Lead4Pass az-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate is one of the two corresponding certification exams for Azure career paths for engineers working with their systems. Each exam has two levels: Associate and Expert. Az-104 is designed for Azure administrators and is suitable for individuals responsible for managing Azure systems, including managing resources on Azure, deploying and managing storage systems, networks and virtual machines. It requires a minimum of six months of practical experience in Azure management, along with a deep understanding of core services, security, and Azure administration.

The Az-104 certification belongs to the Associate branch of the Theo Azure Roadmap. You don't need to take Az-900 before taking Az-104, but if you're starting from scratch, it's a good idea to try Az-900 first. In terms of AWS equivalents, Az-104 is equivalent to SysOps. However, it's not as difficult as SysOps since there is no practical exam. I've taken AWS exams before, so I have more experience when I jumped to Azure. But my first impression was that the Azure portal interface was confusing and much laggier than AWS's.

The exam covers a wide range of knowledge, and if you don't have experience using Azure services, it can be a disadvantage (it takes longer to learn). However, since the volume of knowledge is broad, it doesn't focus too much on the core of each service, making it a relatively easy certification for beginners.

Why should you have an Az-104 certification?

Az-104 will help you:

• Get a raise, a promotion, or the boss's approval, as well as impress clients.
• Provide you with a general understanding of Azure and best practices (worst practices) for system design.
• Assign least privilege access to team members, manage usage cost to optimize resource costs.
• Best practices for security, monitoring, and troubleshooting simple to complex systems such as K8s on the cloud.
• Ability to use tools to automate procedures (e.g., CI/CD, Security checkup, health checkup) with ARM templates, Terraform templates.
• Best practices for scheduling system backups and disaster recovery in case of incidents.
• Update the certificate on Facebook, and show off to girls.

Specifically, you'll find it useful in cases such as:

• When the system is running well, but it suddenly goes down for no apparent reason (how to read metrics and troubleshoot).
• Preventing or detecting the perpetrator who wants to deliberately harm production resources and restoring them.
• Being able to offer solutions that are both cost-effective and secure (good, cheap, and tasty) for demanding clients.
• Being able to support and debate with SA's in building systems.

Exam structure: The total time for the exam is 120 minutes, and the number of questions is random between exams, ranging from 40 to 60 questions (when I took it, there were 49 questions, but it could be 53 questions for you, for example). Microsoft's exam structure is as follows:

• Manage Azure identities and governance (15–20%)
• Implement and manage storage (15–20%)
• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources (20–25%)
• Configure and manage virtual networking (20-25%)

You should focus more on core services, such as:

• Active Directory (Tenant, Groups, Role,.. )
• Subscription and Governance (Subscription, resource group, move resources, manage cost, tags, key vault)
• Storage account (tiers, performance, SAS, blob, file share, lifecycle, sync..)
• Virtual Machine (Disk, availability sets, backup-snapshot, access policies, availability zones, ARM, scale sets...)
• Virtual Network (Subnets, ASG, NSG, peering, VPN, loadbalance, application gateway, custom domain..)
• App Service (deployment, service plan, no downtime)
• Azure Containers (Azure Repos, ACI, ACR, AKS, network- storage -scaling in AKS cluster)
• Network Watcher (IP flow verify, connection troubleshoot, connection monitor, next hop, packet capture,..)
• Backup- Disaster Recovery (Backup Policies, RTO- RPO, MARS..)

Note that the AZ-104 exam does