In May 2019 Microsoft retired the two exams (AZ-100 & AZ-101) needed to achieve the Azure Administrator certification in favor of one condensed exam, AZ-103. At the time it seemed exciting that I only needed to pass one exam in order to be certified, but this also meant that there weren’t many options for study materials. Below are a few points as a high level Azure AZ-103 Exam Review.
Key Idea
My background is in physical infrastructure (primarily server) and what I have found is that moving to an Azure role required me to learn more about networking & storage management. You see, as an Azure administrator you can drop your knowledge of the physical but the trade off is that you will be expected to replace that with a mid-level understanding of the major offerings in Azure. I think the key idea to keep in mind is that Azure is an enterprise virtual environment where the physical counterpart would have separate people in charge of servers, networking, storage, SQL, etc.
Preparation
The official practice tests from Mindhub offer a great overview of the style of questions to expect on the exam, but I MUST recommend to at least set up a free Azure account to get in there and do some practicing (more on that later). Microsoft has great (free) learning labs that can help you get familiar with Azure as well. Also, keep your eyes open for offerings from Microsoft on their Certify with Confidence offerings as they will sometimes have a promotion of 3 exam vouchers & official practice tests (current offering is a Microsoft MCP Voucher with 1 retake).
Exam Overview
As for the actual test you are provided about 220 minutes to complete 40 – 60 questions which comprise of multiple choice, case study, one-shot answers, and live Azure labs. The case study is my favorite kind of questions as you are given a business scenario and questions to answer about it. The one-shot answers are the worst as you only have one chance to answer them correctly and cannot go back to review or change your answer. The live Azure labs are the hardest to complete just due to the time it takes for the portal to load & complete tasks. Therefore it is important to get in there during your study time and get comfortable with the portal (and PowerShell too). If you have any questions / feedback, please contact us here at DC.