Azure exam 70-532
OK, it was an interesting roller-coaster. It was a while since I took any
Microsoft exams but I felt that I do not have enough exposure to the Azure
architecture on a daily basis, so I decided that taking an exam might be the
second best thing to the real field experience: the learning forced on you by
the circumstances.
This was quite a brutal exam, probably the worst I ever had with the
Microsoft, and here are the feelings:
The very good:
- It feels that while studying I did try every single button on the Azure
Portal and tried to build, run, scale, monitor and program against almost all
component, except selected third-party marketplace offerings (I have no
immediate plans for them), AD sync (I did not have local AD to play with) and
some preview features, like Cognitive Services or AI (I have special plans for
those :) ;
The Good:
- The exam has touched all aspects of the current Azure platform;
- With the history of the latest updates (March, October and December)
it kind of shows the Microsoft's feelings towards one or another technology;
The Ugly:
- It was overly detailed, reminding (unpleasantly) the late 90-s VB exams,
which tested memorizing of exact sequence of method parameters (kind of
excusable for pre-Intellisense and pre-Google era);
The Bad:
- Some exam techniques seem questionable, like asking to memorize whole six
screens of the test case before answering some questions from which you cannot
return back and consult the requirements. What do you test? The memory?
- It contained bugs and glitches, which can't be new, because the affected
questions test some old Azure offering. Does it mean that nobody really tests
the testing question thoroughly?
But nevertheless...