Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate
I've been working through the AZ-203 course materials recently. This course covers the following areas of Microsoft Azure offering.
- Develop Azure Infrastructure as a Service compute solutions
- Develop Azure Platform as a Service compute solutions
- Develop for Azure storage
- Implement Azure security
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize solutions
- Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services
The course materials are around 60 hours worth of information. Longer which actually practising the information shown. This course replaces the Microsoft 70-532 course materials.
Given how new the course is training for it has been extrodaniarily hard. The exam course guide isn't released till the end of 2019. Quite a few of the training companies wern't offering official course materials either. So I learn't the information from Pluralsight. In addition, LinkedIn Learning didn't provide an AZ-203 course although they do now.
As you would imagine this made training for this course really difficult. In addition, I encountered issues with the Microsoft learning portal. The learning portal doesn't allow work email addresses. Even with non-work emails, I encountered a lot of troubles. The phone number system expects American for example. Infinite loops where the page refreshes without end. The page flat out errors and stops you dead in your tracks. All in all not a great experience and made things infinitely more difficult.
I highly recommend you take the exam at an exam centre. It was really easy for something that is quite stressful anyway. One of my colleagues did the exam online, the anti-virus on his machine kicked in to scan the drive and the exam was cancelled. Not something you want or need to add to the experience!
The above all sounds really negative and believe me it was at the time! But the course material is really useful in covering some amazing areas of Microsoft Azure platform which you might not know about. I can't recommend the course highly enough but I would leave it a little while for Microsoft and their training partners to work these kinks out.
But ultimately I became a Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate off the back of it so I'm not complaining :-)
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About Me
As a Tech Lead for Sagittarius marketing who I have been with for the last twelve years. I oversee a team of seven working pods, including numerous developers and contractors in multiple global locations. This involves supporting the developers with coding issues, meetings and phone calls with their clients and going out of pitches with potential new clients.
I have extensive experience building and supporting Sitecore websites from Sitecore 6+ including Helix pattern, I scored 100% in the Sitecore 7 certification exam. Experience managing and maintaining SQL Server, integration with numerous third parties such as Salesforce, AppDynamics, New Relic, Dynamics CRM and many payment gateways.
The first Sitecore website I developed was Skiweekends which was architected and developed by me. It won the Sitecore Experience Award the main award during the Sitecore Experience awards ceremony and the Sitecore Best Travel & Tourism award. I also was lucky enough to perform the first Sitecore 8 upgrade within the United Kingdom for Liberon.
Personally I have had the honour of being recognised in several award ceremonies. Including the BIMA 100 awards in 2019 in the Tech Trailblazers category and previously in the Dev's and Makers category. I’ve been highly commended twice in the Wirehive 100 Techie of the Year awards. Due to my involvement in many aspects of Sagittarius work, many of the awards for their clients I've also been involved in.
About the author
Richard Brisley
I'm a multi-award winning Sitecore developer. Currently working for Sagittarius Marketing as a solutions architect to understand customer needs and produce multi-national high-performance websites.