This guide is for Microsoft AZ-104 exam prep and is based on my personal experience.
How to obtain a free exam voucher?
Firstly, if you are preparing for any Azure exam, check out my previous POST to obtain a free voucher. Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Fundamentals online session is still available to attend freely till August 2020 as the time of writing. So you can redeem this voucher for your exams.
Secondly, create a free Azure account HERE to play around. You will get £150/ $150 (You will need this for some resources) credit to spend during your hands-on lab.
Course details
Since I have LinkedIn Learning premium access from my organization initially I thought it is good enough to complete the course. But I was still hungry for more contents, so I started googling for more courses and reviews. If you have LinkedIn Learning access, check out Sharon Bennett’s course (AZ-103 or AZ-104) and exam tips.
Eventually I found out Scott Duffy’s course on Udemy which bought my confidence. His course material is excellent. It is very well designed to covers all the topics that you need to know in order to pass AZ-103/ AZ-104 exam. Check out for offers as I purchased it for £11.99.
I did all the hands-on lab’s as Scott mentioned while going through the session. I have gone through the course multiple times to clear up some of the complex sections so I know exactly what is the result of the executed task. So don’t skip any.
And then I have completed the Microsoft learning path including the hands-on labs (its free too). Make sure to read about mentioned tips, warnings and notes as these are key factors to remember.
Also I did purchase practice tests from Whizlabs. Like Udemy, there are offers so you can choose one. There are few test questions for you to try before purchasing. Practice questions are similar to the real exam questions you will expect in your exam. Redo the tests multiple times as much as you are confident. If you don’t understand the answer try to simulate the scenario in Azure portal also do some research. Try not to accept the answer blindly.
Things you should understand
As you know, PowerShell and Azure CLI are another ways of accessing Azure resources. So it’s important to know how to use it wisely. Do not bother remembering all the cmdlets but know the syntax so you can easily predict the commands.
- On this practice question, first line executes the commands to create a resource. When you notice the highlighted, it stores the result to ‘$whizlabspublicip’ array which is the value for a new Public IP. So the cmdlet is related to creating a Public IP address. Also remember Public IP address is available in two SKU’s in Azure, its either Basic or Standard. When you create a new Azure resource in PowerShell it will begin with ‘New-Azure*’.
- On this practice question, for slot 3 the query is to retrieve the details of ‘demovm’ from ‘whizlab-rg’ resource group so Get-AzVM command is used.
- Also Azure CLI uses the short form mostly, so here for slot 3 ‘lb’ instead of ‘loadbalancer’. Note these points so you can easily remember.
- Storage account comparison – remember Storage types, supported services, supported access tiers and replication options.
- Azure Storage redundancy – understand Azure Storage redundancy options.
- Azure Diagnostic tools – read and understand about diagnostic tools. For example, where to use IP Flow verify, where you can use Packet Capture, what are the additional changes you need to do (Storage account to store logs or Azure Log Analytics workspace?) in order to complete the requirement.
- SLA – remember which services provides 99.95% and which ones provides 99.99% SLA.
- Understand the scenarios where you can use Load Balancers and Multi Factor Authentication.
- Custom domain – this one requires an own domain in case if you want to play around, otherwise just read and understand how it works.
- Networking – study more about azure networking concepts especially, default firewall rules, priorities, ports and implementation methods.
- Implementation order – make sure to remember in which order the tasks need to be executed.
- For an example, Adding a custom domain to your Azure CDN endpoint. The steps are,
- Resource Policy – make sure what and how policies are implemented and where you can apply. Also understand how it will effect on existing resources and new resources after the policies are applied.
- Recovery services vault – study all about Azure recovery services vault specially about available options and conditions.
- Lastly, do more labs as much as you can and gets your hands dirty. That way you will understand deeply the facts you read in theory.
Good luck for your exam and happy learning!
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I hope this post helped you with your learning journey. If you got few minutes to spare, take a look on my other blogs as well.
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