AWS Solution Architect Professional Certificate vs Microsoft Azure Solution Architect Expert Certificate

Which of the certificates is more demanding? Let’s find out.

Amazon cloud and Azure cloud belong to extended cloud providers. Based on the latest statistics, Amazon is first in the ranking in terms of usage, and the Microsoft cloud provider is in second place. At the beginning of 2023, I decided to test my knowledge and signed up for the Microsoft Solution Architect expert exam and compared the complexity with the AWS Solution Architect professional certificate. According to many people, these certificates are very similar in complexity. Come see what I think about it.

Azure Skills measured:

Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions (25–30%)
Design data storage solutions (25–30%)
Design business continuity solutions (10–15%)
Design infrastructure solutions (25–30%)

AWS Skills measured:

Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity( 26%)
Design for New Solutions (29%)
Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions (25%)
Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization (20%)

Number of questions:

Azure — 40- 60 question
AWS — 65 question

Passing score:

Azure — At least 700
AWS — At least 750

Time for an exam:

Azure: 150 minutes
AWS: 180 minutes

As you can see, in general, the tests for certificates are not diametrically different. Yes, there are minor differences, but nothing extra. What is, however, a diametrical difference is the complexity of the question and the length of the question text. Let’s show it on an example.

AWS Exam question

Your startup wants to implement an order fulfillment process for selling a personalized gadget that needs an average of 3–4 days to produce with some orders taking up to 6 months you expect 10 orders per day on your first day. 1000 orders per day after 6 months and 10,000 orders after 12 months. Orders coming in are checked for consistency men dispatched to your manufacturing plant for production quality control packaging shipment and payment processing If the product does not meet the quality standards at any stage of the process employees may force the process to repeat a step Customers are notified via email about order status and any critical issues with their orders such as payment failure. Your base architecture includes AWS Elastic Beanstalk for your website with an RDS MySQL instance for customer data and orders. How can you implement the order fulfillment process while making sure that the emails are delivered reliably? A. Add a business process management application to your Elastic Beanstalk app servers and re-use the ROS database for tracking order status use one of the Elastic Beanstalk instances to send emails to customers. B. Use SWF with an Auto Scaling group of activity workers and a decider instance in another Auto Scaling group with min/max=1 Use the decider instance to send emails to customers. C. Use SWF with an Auto Scaling group of activity workers and a decider instance in another Auto Scaling group with min/max=1 use SES to send emails to customers. D. Use an SQS queue to manage all process tasks Use an Auto Scaling group of EC2 Instances that poll the tasks and execute them. Use SES to send emails to customers.

Azure Exam Question

You have an Azure subscription. The subscription has a blob container that contains multiple blobs. Ten users in the finance department of your company plan to access the blobs during the month of April. You need to recommend a solution to enable access to the blobs during the month of April only. Which security solution should you include in the recommendation? A. shared access signatures (SAS) B. Conditional Access policies C. certificates D. access keys

As you can see, the question that was asked on the AWS Soltion Architect expert exam is extensive, it contains minor tricks, and if you lose your train of thought, you have to go back to the beginning of the question. In the Azure Solution Architect expert exam, the questions are straightforward. It does not contain any insidious tricks and is not that comprehensive. After successfully passing the AWS Solution Architect expert exam, I was completely tired, incredibly exhausted, and it took me almost 2 hours to solve all the questions. After 1 hour of writing the test on azure solution architect expert, I happily continued with my work. However, I must point out that the end result was almost the same. I scored 915 and 920 points in both tests.

Why do I prefer the Azure test?

It’s not about the difficulty of the exam or anything like that, I enjoyed the case study the most on the Azure exam. The case study situation is used to answer the series of multiple-choice questions designed to test the ability of the exam taker to critically analyze a situation and apply practical Azure knowledge to reach a solution.

Example of case study:

Introductory Info Case Study - This is a case study. Case studies are not timed separately. You can use as much exam time as you would like to complete each case. However, there may be additional case studies and sections on this exam. You must manage your time to ensure that you are able to complete all questions included on this exam in the time provided. To answer the questions included in a case study, you will need to reference information that is provided in the case study. Case studies might contain exhibits and other resources that provide more information about the scenario that is described in the case study. Each question is independent of the other questions in this case study. At the end of this case study, a review screen will appear. This screen allows you to review your answers and to make changes before you move to the next section of the exam. After you begin a new section, you cannot return to this section.

To start the case study - To display the first question in this case study, click the Next button. Use the buttons in the left pane to explore the content of the case study before you answer the questions. Clicking these buttons displays information such as business requirements, existing environment, and problem statements. If the case study has an All Information tab, note that the information displayed is identical to the information displayed on the subsequent tabs. When you are ready to answer a question, click the Question button to return to the question.

Overview - Contoso, Ltd. is a research company that has a main office in Montreal.

Existing Environment -

Technical Environment - The on-premises network contains a single Active Directory domain named contoso.com. Contoso has a single Azure subscription.

Business Partnerships - Contoso has a business partnership with Fabrikam, Inc. Fabrikam users access some Contoso applications over the internet by using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) guest accounts.

Requirements -

Planned Changes - Contoso plans to deploy two applications named App1 and App2 to Azure.

App1 - App1 will be a Python web app hosted in Azure App Service that requires a Linux runtime. Users from Contoso and Fabrikam will access App1. App1 will access several services that require third-party credentials and access strings. The credentials and access strings are stored in Azure Key Vault. App1 will have six instances: three in the East US Azure region and three in the West Europe Azure region. App1 has the following data requirements: Each instance will write data to a data store in the same availability zone as the instance. Data written by any App1 instance must be visible to all App1 instances. App1 will only be accessible from the internet. App1 has the following connection requirements: Connections to App1 must pass through a web application firewall (WAF). Connections to App1 must be active-active load balanced between instances. All connections to App1 from North America must be directed to the East US region. All other connections must be directed to the West Europe region. Every hour, you will run a maintenance task by invoking a PowerShell script that copies files from all the App1 instances. The PowerShell script will run from a central location.

App2 - App2 will be a .NET app hosted in App Service that requires a Windows runtime. App2 has the following file storage requirements: Save files to an Azure Storage account. Replicate files to an on-premises location. Ensure that on-premises clients can read the files over the LAN by using the SMB protocol. You need to monitor App2 to analyze how long it takes to perform different transactions within the application. The solution must not require changes to the application code. Application Development Requirements Application developers will constantly develop new versions of App1 and App2. The development process must meet the following requirements: A staging instance of a new application version must be deployed to the application host before the new version is used in production. After testing the new version, the staging version of the application will replace the production version.

The switch to the new application version from staging to production must occur without any downtime of the application.

Identity Requirements - Contoso identifies the following requirements for managing Fabrikam access to resources: Every month, an account manager at Fabrikam must review which Fabrikam users have access permissions to App1. Accounts that no longer need permissions must be removed as guests. The solution must minimize development effort.

Security Requirement - All secrets used by Azure services must be stored in Azure Key Vault. Services that require credentials must have the credentials tied to the service instance. The credentials must NOT be shared between services.

In each case study, you must find the section you are asked about in the question. For example, they ask about Identity Requirements. So you have to find the Identity Requirements section in the question and think of a solution that will suit the question. I really enjoyed the cast case study. It’s a shame that not all questions are like that.

Summary During the preparation for both certificates, I learned a lot of things. Both certificates are demanding, you have to know a lot of information, but in the end I say that AWS Solution Architect Professional Exam is more difficult than Microsoft Solution Architect expert.

What do you think about the mentioned certificates? Let me know and don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any other questions.