The journey to get all Microsoft Azure Certification in 6 months time

The number of articles that I wrote in the last 2 months was less than usual. This happened because I focus most of my energy to get certified on the cloud - Microsoft Azure.

Last year in September I decided to try to get certified on ALL Microsoft Azure certifications. In total there were around 19 exams that I had to take, covering a lot of different topics from IoT and SAP to Data and Data Scientist. It was not an easy ride, and I would say that the hardest one for me was the Data Scientist certification. Not because it is hard, but because it is not something that I am doing day by day, and learning different algorithms and how to work with them was something different for me.

Refs: https://www.youracclaim.com/users/radu-vunvulea.564add55/badges

One of the most common questions that I received was how long it took to prepare and what kind of resources I used. The training materials that I used were from Udemy plus training content that is available from Microsoft for each certification. For each exam, I spend around 20-30 hours studying and things become easier and easier once the pile of passed exams was bigger and bigger.

When I found time to prepare for the exams? Most of the time was when putting the kids to sleep and during the night when I had to go to them.

Did I fail any exam? Yes. When I took for the first time Data Scientist exam I failed big time. The questions were so different from what I expected that I asked myself if I can pass this exam without having to study for it for a few months.

Let's take a look at some tips and tricks that I used to study for the exams:

Use online video training to build basic knowledge. I used video training from Scott Duffy and Alan Rodrigues, which I bought from Udemy.
When were available I used two different video training for the same exam because different content is covered on each of them
I cover the official documentation and learning path that Microsoft is offering for free only after I watched the video training.
Hands-on experience is important. There are a lot of questions where you will need to know how to configure things in Azure Portal, ARM, or from the command line.
When there are areas that you feel that you don't know well, Google it. There is a bunch of free documentation available.
Before the exam watch one more time the video training content (in fast mode).
Don't expect that after a while the exams to be easier, because the topics are different. There is a small overlap, but not enough to enable you to pass the exam.

Why Udemy?

A great price for the training materials, which quality is pretty good.
Pay one time per training and use it as much as possible for life
The feedback section for each training enables you to get feedback from the others related to the quality of the content and trainer.
You have the ability to require money back from Udemy if the training is not what you expected. I have done this for a few times and works very well.
The total cost of training materials per exam was around $30-$50.
At this moment in time, I own around 68 training packages from Udemy.

What I will do next? A break from certifications. After it, I will aim for the AWS Professional one, but I need a few months to recover (smile)

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(

Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users. This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users. Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see

Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

Search This Blog