The expert-level certificates of the Microsoft certification program are among the choices of many IT professionals. And Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert is one of the paths that are taken by the potential candidates. This certificate proves your knowledge of the design of Cloud and hybrid solutions, such as storage, monitoring, security, compute, and network. It also demonstrates that you know how to partner with various specialists, including developers and administrators, in order to implement solutions on Azure.
To be eligible for the certification path, the interested individuals are required to have a good understanding of networking, security, business continuity, virtualization, identity, disaster recovery, governance, data platforms, and other operations. You should also have knowledge of how decisions in each area affect an overall solution. This means that your experience in Azure administration and Azure development as well as your skills in using the DevOps processes is vital. Besides the level of expertise, it is required to hold the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certificate and pass the corresponding exams.
Exam Details
Microsoft AZ-303 and Microsoft AZ-304 are the qualification tests of this expert-level certification. Both of them are 100 minutes long and contain about 60 questions each. All the items are presented in various formats, so you can face with active screen, multiple choice, case studies, and more. To obtain the certificate, you need to get the passing score, which is 700 points. If you want to be sure of the outcome, you have to prepare for the topics that are included in the exams.
Thus, the Microsoft AZ-303 exam includes the following areas:
- Monitor and Implement an Azure Infrastructure – This domain covers the details of storage accounts, virtual networking, Azure AD, hybrid identities, VMs for Linux and Windows, as well as Cloud infrastructure monitoring. It is important to perform the implementation and management tasks;
- Implement Security and Management Solutions – The next section is about the management of Azure governance solutions and security for apps. It is also important to know about workloads in Azure, network security, and load balancing;
- Implement Solutions for Apps – To deal with the questions from this area, you need to be able to implement the container-based applications and an application infrastructure;
- Manage and Implement Data Platforms – The last topic evaluates your skills in implementing Azure SQL as well as NoSQL databases.
As for the Microsoft AZ-304 test, it contains the following parts:
- Design Monitoring – This domain contains the information about the solutions for logging and monitoring and design required for cost optimization;
- Design Identity and Security – If talking about the next area, it is all about the design of governance, authentication, security for apps, and authorization;
- Design Data Storage – To answer the questions presented in this objective, an individual should know about data integration, storage accounts, and solutions for databases;
- Design Business Continuity – This topic covers the details of the design for high availability and solutions for recovery and backup;
- Design Infrastructure – The last section measures your skills in designing application architecture, migrations, a network solution, and a compute solution.
Further Career Path
The certification path is changing with the technology in use today, which is why Microsoft offers the updated versions of the current qualification tests or even provides the interested individuals with completely new options. If you are still deciding whether to go for the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certificate or not, you need to know that the recertification process is one of the important stages of the verification of your skills. This means that you may need to take a new exam to maintain the status of your certification. The vendor offers the Microsoft AZ-305 test as the latest option, so keep track on changes to understand what you should do. Thus, you will be able not only to prove your current level of expertise, but also improve it and gain new skills. This means higher pay and more career options await you.
