Friday, August 4, 2017

70-534 Azure Certification Study Guide + Tips

Hi there!

I just passed my Azure cert 70-534 and wanted to share my study guide.  Please click here to see my guide. It is a 35 page long PDF. I basically took the outlined points from the official Azure exam outline and added in notes between them.  Most of the notes are copy pastes of relevant information from the Azure documentation.  The notes from the Azure documentation and outline from the Azure exam are current as of August 2017 -- so take note that if you are reading this a year out that some of the exam has probably changed. 

 Please also utilize the Measure Up 70-534 practice exam along with studying + doing things on Azure.

Notes after taking exam, I think that you should…
  • Know the difference between page and block blobs.
  • Know when to use A series, D series, DS series, G series, GS series VMs and approximate size/RAM
  • Know ARM templates very well and the pieces in it
  • Know a lot of Azure AD stuff
  • Know security stuff for DBs, VMs, other Azure resources etc.
  • Know on-premises & communicating with Azure
  • Know Traffic manager and CDNs very well
  • Know Federated Stuff
  • Know Azure Batch.
  • Know what Chef or Data Lakes or all these other technologies do at a basic level.

General Exam Observations
  • I had about 2 hours and 45 mins (I think, it was definitely between 2.5-3 hours) for the exam, 50-60 questions total
  • I had 4 cases + the rest were multiple choice (31 multiple choice)
  • There are a lot of stupid multi-part questions, usually if it's a 3 part answer each part is scored individually.
  • There are a good amount of "order the steps to do such task" with 3-5 steps in it, no idea how this is scored.
  • Small amount of Azure CLI / Portal / Powershell / C# specific questions, I think about 5 total.
  • I had about 1.5 hour to spare at the end, after obsessively slowly double checking everything. Might be unfair though, was a med student so I take exams extremely, extremely quickly. I did not feel any time rush at all.