It’s exam renewal time!
This year I had two to renew - AZ-104 and AZ-400.
Now I wrote about renewing AZ-104 last year here. So I had a rough idea on what to expect.
But AZ-400 renewal was a new for me, and I didn’t really know what to expect.
On the subject of renewal notifications…I didn’t get one for AZ-104, but did for AZ-400. So be aware that you shouldn’t rely only on Microsoft to notify you that you need to renew your exam.
Renewal format
Not much changed from last time. The renewal exam is still open book that you can complete at home, at work, on the bus?!
Want to search the internet for answers, you can - no one will stop you. This really is a good thing. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t confirm something by looking it up or reading about it if they weren’t sure in real life. The main exams have also now changed to allow you access to the MS Learn site during the exam.
The biggest change, was that this time around there were only 25 questions in each renewal exam (compared to 45 last time).
AZ-104 Azure Administrator
This time around, the modules in learn were much the same as last year. Which meant that there were only 2/3 new modules for me to look through. The main one was related to the change from Azure AD to MS Entra. After working through the new modules I briefly looked through the ones I’d already completed.
The actual exam was reasonably tough. I needed to spend a lot more time on the modules that I’d already completed as that was where most of the questions came from. Something to take note of next time.
AZ-400 DevOps Engineer
1st time renewal for this exam, so there were about 8 modules in learn for me to work through. A couple of modules on GitHub Actions were the most interesting as well as a module on SRE. I spent most of my time playing around with the GitHub Actions and will probably take a closer look at that afterwards.
The 25 questions pretty much covered these new things as well as a few other things and was honestly not too bad. I scored higher on this renewal than I did on the AZ-104.
Another year of exam renewals completed.