Thursday 15 December 2016

Microsoft Azure certification (70-532 and 70-533)

Last month I managed to sneak in my 70-532 and 70-533 exams before the new content came in.  For those of you who are keen to have a crack, I would highly recommend the Pluralsight courses by Tim Warner which were absolutely great, and I could just watch  on the train on the way to/from work.  I'm not sure whether he's going to update them with the new content, but I would assume he will, as he seems to do quite well at keeping up to date despite the rapidly updating Azure environment.  I would also advise purchasing the practice tests to get a feel for the exam structure, and ensure you have the right level of knowledge (though the practice tests certainly don't cover 100% of the content, and some of it is a bit out of date).

Early next year I'm looking forward to having a go at the 70-534 exam and achieving my end goal of becoming a certified Microsoft Azure Architect!  With the release of Sitecore 8.2 update 1 and the ability to run Sitecore as an Azure web app, I'm really looking forward to using the existing ARM templates and writing some of my own to hook into the power (and cost saving) of Azure.  Between ARM templates, staging slots, auto-scaling, and the ease of the portal and powershell, there are just so many reasons to use Azure web apps! Many of our clients already host their Sitecore instances on Azure, and this will hopefully be a great reason for everyone to upgrade and migrate to the PaaS offering.  The latest release of Sitecore+Azure has been blogged to death, but stay tuned for some of my fresh tales from the cloud.

All the best until next year!