Jung Chan

Professional shit kicker and Cloud Engineer. Other stuff I do - skate, climb, write, music - but unfortunately not at the level where I get paid for it (yet!)

7 minute read

In short:

  • Only Ravikiran Srinivasulu’s AZ-104 Practice Tests are really worth your time. Everything else just does not go into the right level of detail to actually pass the exam. Bonus points for high quality text based, and video based (though I didn’t watch them) explanations.
  • The exam has a bunch of weird behaviors that can cause you to lose points:
    • While the majority of questions give you the option to “review for later”, the “repeated scenario” questions1do not allow you to review. Answer these carefully
    • The exam is in 2 parts: a main part, which will likely take you 75-90% of your 120 minutes to complete, and a “case” based series of 5 questions, which will take you roughly 5-10minutes to complete. Critically, you must lock in your answers to part 1 before you can start part 2. Plan your time accordingly.
  • I found the exam pretty difficult, and I ended up learning a lot about the fundamentals of networking, in addition to Azure features and constructs.

Preramble

After a long period of putting off certifications in favor of higher order priorities2, company pressure finally pushed my off my butt to obtain the Azure Admin Associate (AZ-104) exam.

After 2 weeks of procrastination and 2 weeks of actual studying, I passed my exam on Sep 30th, 2024. While I wouldn’t say my preparation was perfect (and nor was my score ha), I did learn a lot about Azure, networking, and studying.

Part of the the reason I decided to write this article was I didn’t like any of the reviews I could find on Kagi, so I decided it would be worth writing my own.

My background

I’ve worked with AWS for 2-3 years, mostly doing SysAdmin and Infrastructure work for small teams. Over this time, I’ve dabbled with Azure administration enough to do basic administration on the platform, IAM and the like.

In my hubris, I thought this meant that studying for the AZ-104 would be easy. Haha.

Studying process and resources used

I feel like every time I study for something, I end up going through the same cycle of over-engineering a study plan3, spending 2 weeks having fun playing around with this new study process, quickly realizing I am not making progress fast enough, and then I end up bashing my head into exam questions over and over until I pass the exam. This time was not different.

Courses:

For me video based courses are a complete waste of time. Even on 2x speed, the amount of time between information I really care about4 just isn’t enough to keep me focused and interested.

Text based courses are a little better - they can be read through faster and can be easily referenced - but because courses are usually structured to only cover every detail once, they still fail to trigger spaced repetition, which means any thing I did somehow manage to retain usually get forgotten by the time I start doing exam questions later.

Obviously, because this time I had a newly over-engineered study plan to try out, I decided to give it one more shot.

Courses Used:

  • Microsoft Learn Course
    • While very useful for the purpose of feeling like you’re learning something, it was very much mostly a waste of time. The content doesn’t go into the level of nuance that’s required for passing the exam, and provides a lot of superfluous information that distracts from the important information. A careful reading of this would not prepare you for the exam.
    • About a week into reviewing the content just starting to do practice questions, I realized all the detail that I was learning from the course wasn’t showing up in the exam, and I abandoned the approach.

Practice Questions

Slamming through practice questions are honestly the only thing that really work for me. Do questions, research concepts when you don’t know the answer, get stuff wrong, research why you got it wrong, make a note, repeat. If there’s a contradiction, keep researching and reading until you arrive at an acceptable understanding.

A deeply unpleasant process, but it works - it forces you to direct your attention to what you get wrong, your research and learning process is high directed and focused, and by repeating questions you get the spaced repetition needed to actually remember the concepts.

Resources Used

Over my study experience, I went through the following resources:

  • Scott Duffy’s AZ-104 Practice exam
    • I initially started off with this course, and slowly worked through the question packs. While I won’t say the concepts are wrong, or they’re not helpful, but they don’t prepare you for the level of difficulty of the actual exam.
    • The low quality is reflected by the reviews.
    • I would say this is likely the worst course, because it lulls you into a false sense of security on your level of preparedness
  • Ravikiran Srinivasulu’s AZ-104 Practice Tests
    • This is the only course that’s worth your time.
    • The questions are really hard, super detail oriented, and honestly feel like he’s taking the piss on you. He’s really not - while the exam doesn’t go into quite the level of anal detail around precisely how Azure works, it’s like 90% there.
    • Don’t get too discouraged by the score you get - as long as you’re reviewing your mistakes, you are making progress. I was getting a good solid 40% on both exams. ![[Pasted image 20241115102213.png]]
    • He also very closely emulates the question structure of the exam - more on that later.
    • Unfortunately he has decided to chunk his exam into 3 hour 84 question slogs, which you need to complete before you can review your answers. It’s a small price to pay for what you get though.
  • Microsoft’s Practice Exam
    • Similar, way too easy, while having even worse explanations than Scott Duffy.
    • Only consists of multiple choice - completely unlike the real exam.
    • The only benefit is it allows you to check your answers and review the explanation immediately after every question.
    • I’d recommend using it as an indicator for if you should postpone the exam. If you’re scoring terribly on the practice exam, (less than 60%), you are not passing.

      Exam Structure

Exam questions come in roughly a few types:

  • Multiple choice - won’t waste your time here
  • Multiple select - choose N (2-3) out of M (4-5)
  • Multiple multiple choice - from 2-3 drop down lists, select between 2-4 options
  • Drag and drop ordering - take a list of 5-8 items, select a subset of them, and order them
  • Repeated scenario - given same scenario, is a specific statement true or false?
  • Case study - here’s a bunch of information about a company, their current architecture, their target architecture, and their problem statement and requirements. Please select the most correct statement about what they should do from multiple choice.

If your practice questions don’t look like this - I would worry if you’re actually ready for the exam!

The exam itself has a lot of weird quirks. The “repeated scenario” question does not let you review answers. The worst is the forced split in the exam - before you go into the case study section, the exam will force you to choose to “lock-in” your answers for the previous section5. I ended up giving myself way too much time for the final section (18min), as I finished the questions in 10min, with reviews.

I would suggest leaving yourself roughly 10 minutes to work on the last section. It can safely be completed under 5 minutes, but I don’t think you want to subject yourself to the spiritual danger of dashing through 5 questions that rely on careful review of multiple pages of context.

Closing words

While I definitely got a little lucky passing it first time - I stand by the study method. I only ended up having the time to review 70% of Ravikiran’s content in the 2 weeks - not to mention a repeat review which would have helped me a lot. Another week and it probably would have been a much more secure pass.

  1. i.e. the question type where you are given the same scenario repeatedly, and answer different facts about the situation. ↩

  2. Also see: Procrastination ↩

  3. This time I wrote a quick GPT bot that took study material, converted it into a anki cards, and tried studying it that way. While it was a fun mini project, I very quickly realized the bot wasn’t really capable of differentiating between exam relevant facts, and I wasn’t getting better at passing the exam. ↩

  4. Nor is it really clear what information is relevant either! ↩

  5. i.e. no more reviewing ↩

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