Oh boy, what a week! It's been a hasty preparation as this exam retires tomorrow. I had to put in extra effort to get this done, and I am absolutely happy about my achievement. The funny thing - I was taking part in beta testing of this and other transition exams, but never had time to take it for real... Until the note from MS landed in my mailbox, saying that AZ-102 is about to retire soon. So, roughly, I managed to jump onto the departing train, and I'm not doing this again... ever ;)
Earning the Azure Administrator Associate certification validates the skills and knowledge to manage cloud services that span storage, security, networking, and compute cloud capabilities. Candidates have a deep understanding of each service across the full IT lifecycle and take requests for infrastructure services, applications, and environments. It's the right way toward AZ-400 (Azure DevOps Engineer Expert).
Returning to the transition exams - they're more attractive by all means. First, you don't need to take the path from the very beginning, besides, those of us who possess older certifications like 70-533/535 etc. are experienced enough for the upgrade.
Here is a curious table that summarizes transition certifications:
|
Candidates who have passed these 70-xxx series exams |
Can take these Transition Exams |
To earn these role-based Microsoft Certifications |
|
70-533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (retired December 31, 2018) |
AZ-102: Microsoft Azure Administrator Certification Transition (retires June 30, 2019) |
|
|
70-535: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions(retired December 31, 2018) |
AZ-302: Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Certification Transition (retires June 30, 2019) |
|
|
70-339: Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016(retires July 31, 2019) |
MS-302: Microsoft 365 Teamwork Administrator Certification Transition (retires September 30, 2019) |
|
|
70-345: Designing and Deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 |
MS-202: Microsoft 365 Messaging Administrator Certification Transition (retires September 30, 2019) |
For those who are interested in developing Azure or Azure DevOps skills, bringing the expertise to the next level, Microsoft has come up with a new role-based certification approach. The idea of the new certifications is that they should map to job roles and that you should be able to see a route from Foundation to Associate, then on to Expert. Microsoft took this opportunity to revamp the way that the questions are asked, focusing more on familiarisation than memorization. For Azure exams, this means that to be proficient enough to pass the exam, you’ll need to know how to do tasks via the Azure Portal, Azure CLI and PowerShell. Here is a nice infographic by Iain Fielding that explains certification paths in more detail:
Kudos to Microsoft for the effort, as the roles are clearer now, especially concerning Azure Cloud and DevOps parts.
Cheers.
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