Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure – is a quite popular exam. It proves you know how to design, test, and maintain Azure solutions. It is also one of the possible prerequisites for Certified Azure DevOps Engineer Expert. In this post, I’m explaining how you can prepare for the AZ-203 exam for free.
To prepare to Azure exam you need two things:
- Azure subscription
- Study materials
Azure subscription
You can read a lot of materials but without exploring everything in practice your knowledge will be very weak.
You can create a free Azure subscription here – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/. It gives you 200USD to explore any Azure service for 30 days and you can use many popular services for free for 12 months. To create this subscription you need to provide a credit card. Microsoft will not charge you any money – but you need to provide it.
If you don’t like to provide the credit card you can use Azure Sandbox – How to learn Azure with a free Sandbox subscription?. It has some limitations, but it is perfect for learning.
You can also ask if your company is a Microsoft Partner and if they can assign you an MPN subscription – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/mpn-benefits/.
On twitter (and my other social media) I’m sharing interesting (in my opinion ;)) stuff about Cloud, DevOps, Software Development and Technical Leadership.
Study materials
There are quite a lot of materials you can use to prepare for AZ-203. Here are my two, free recommendations.
The first one is Microsoft Learn. It provides learning paths dedicated to some exams – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/.
Before you will check the courses related to AZ-203, I would recommend going through Azure fundamentals path which is dedicated to AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. Probably for some of you, it sounds like something to basic, but I would really recommend completing this path to make sure you have a solid background. I don’t think it is worth to take the AZ-900 exam, but I’m sure it is worth to prepare for it.
Once you will finish Azure fundamentals path you are ready for AZ-203 – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-developer. As this exam is more complicated there is more than just one path.
Go through all of them – especially exercises!
Now it is time to continue your journey with Pluralsight, and as I promised we will use Azure courses for free!
On Pluralsight you will find quite a lot of knowledge you have already gained on Microsoft Learn. I think it is good to go through both. Every course is unique in some way and is explaining the same topic in a different way, focusing on different details.
Pluralsight, together with Microsoft, is sharing for free 200+ courses and learning paths – https://www.pluralsight.com/partners/microsoft/azure.
Check this page – https://help.pluralsight.com/help/microsoft-azure-courses – to learn how you can access Azure courses for free.
Once you will create a free account navigate to Microsoft Azure Developers channel where you have more than 137h of learning (I would recommend increasing the speed to 1.3x for most the courses 😉 ).
Or just check the Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (AZ-203) path: https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/certificate/developing-solutions-for-microsoft-azure-az-203
With SkillIQ you can validate your knowledge (but it is not similar to real exam).
Aaaaand that’s all 🙂
Of course, do not forget about official Azure documentation. It is always worth to at least quickly “scan” what is there.
HAPPY LEARNING!
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