How I Passed 2 Azure Certifications in 2 Days (AZ-500 Security Engineer & AZ-700 Network Engineer)
Pro Tip 0: Always remember to brag about your achievements on LinkedIn once you pass the exam and obtain the certifications XD
Jokes aside, obtaining cloud certifications is probably one of the most effective ways for an engineer’s to promote themselves nowadays (Self-branding is so important for modern software engineers to expand your network and it also accelerates your career development!)
In my previous article How I Passed AZ-500 Azure Security Engineer Associate Certificate in under 8hrs of Preparation, I shared the resources I used to pass the AZ-500 exam for Azure Security Engineer Associate over a weekend. Feel free to have a read there if you are interested :)
Today I’m going to share the resouces I used for the preparation of AZ-700 exam for Azure Network Engineer Associate. I’ve been dealing with lots of customer questions regarding networking and that’s why I decided to study for this exam. (Another pro tip: Having a very good understanding of on-premises networking and cloud networking is also a key to your success as a Cloud Engineer or Solution Architect.)
Resources I used to prepare for AZ-700
1. A Cloud Guru (ACG): AZ-700 Microsoft Azure Network Engineer Associate
- Link: https://www.pluralsight.com/cloud-guru/courses/az-700-microsoft-azure-network-engineer-associate
- Time: a lot — I watched all of the educational modules and did a few of the hands-on activities (I didn’t do all of them as I already have some related work experience — but you don’t, highly recommend that you go through all the hands-on too). I didn’t time myself for the whole preparation process, but it took me around one month to prepare for this exam. It just happened (i.e. impulsive exam booking at the last minute XD) that I decided to take AZ-500 exam for Microsoft Security Engineer Associate on the weekend before AZ-700 lol
- EC’s Note: I’ve watched lots of cloud certification courses from ACG and I have to say — I often find the knowledge covered by the ACG course is just NOT ENOUGH for you to pass the exam. However, this one is DIFFERENT! The modules delivered by Matthew Ulasien is one of the best ones I’ve ever watched!!! It is organised in such a way that it fits the exam purpose, but at the same time I found it useful in my day-to-day work too, which is quite rare (I work as a Azure Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft Australia).
- The course is also co-delivered by another instructor — Chase Dovey (probably 35% of the modules were delivered by Chase). No offense to Chase, he’s a good instructor too, but for my personal learning preference (disclaimer here XD), Mattew is wayyyyyyyy better. I wish the whole course was delivered solely Matthew as I believe I’ll benefit a lot more — not only in passing the exam, but also in my day-to-day work as an Azure Solution Architect.
2. Exam Topic — Microsoft AZ-500 Exam
- Link: https://www.examtopics.com/exams/microsoft/az-700/view/
- Time: around 3hrs (I went through 10 pages of the exam questions)
- EC’s Note: As always, Exam Topic is one of the most useful resources for me to prepare for any cloud certifcations, including AZ-700. Please remember to read the discussion as sometime the displayed answer might not be the right one. I usually use Exam Topic (they have many cloud certification exam questions) as the last step of my cloud certification preparation to validate my knowledge. Sometimes I also see very similar questions in the real exam, so that’s also a bonus of using this website!
Reflection for the exam taken on 3 July 2023
- I only got 1 case study in my AZ-700 exam and it contained 8 questions. And my reflection for this exam is that the case study is WAY too complicated!!! The complexity and the length of the exam scenario — the company’s current state, their networking diagram, heaps of different tables on different VMs, different VNets, different NSGs, different Resource Groups etc, plus… the company’s desired future state and the whole 3 paragraphs of their technical requirements to achieve their desired future state — what the heck Microsoft!!! Are you doing this to just torture people who sign up for this exam!!!??? I really couldn’t see any points of designing such a lengthy and complicated exam questions for learners — this is 1000 times harder than the real-life customer scenarios I encounter at work (Another disclaimer here — Although I work at Microsoft, my opinion is my own and it doesn’t represent Microsoft in any way lol)
- I literally spent more than 10mins toggling between these case study info tabs and the question tabs and eventually I couldn’t even attempt 2 out of the 8 questions because I CLOUDN’T LOCATE ANY RELEVANT INFO for me to answer these 2 questions at all. So I just randomly picked answers for these 2 questions and finished the exam lol. Luckily I still passed the exam even though I completely missed the points of those 2 questions. If I failed the exam because of this, I sware that I’m going to use the internal Microsoft resources to trace down who wrote this case study question!!! (Just joking — there’s no way for me to do anything like that XDDD)
- Lastly, I was actually expecting my score to be much higher than 788/1000! As mentioned previously, I’ve been working a lot in networking related solution designs and feel like my networking knowledge has grown exponentially for the past 6 months. However, it turned out that I still have much to learn in this domain :)
Conclusion
There you have it — this is the part 2 of how I obtained two Azure certifications in two days.
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