Category: AZ

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Tips for passing Azure Security Engineer Certification (AZ- 500)

It was almost 2 years of break from the MS certifications before I tried AZ-500 early this week, it was an interesting one. It was the first MS certification I have ever appeared with hands on lab though it was bit of a surprise. I thought of sharing my experience on exam which might be helpful if you are trying get this certification.  

The exam is total 3 and half hours with 3 hours of exam time. I suggest you to go through exam skills outline before you starting the preparation. I started with course in the Linux Academy. I found it is especially good for Azure Active Directory as it covers all the features of AAD that is part of P2. The course covers almost all the subject required for the exam for us to start preparing for the exam. However, don’t stop it there…  we need to deep dive in to each subject with MS documentations. Importantly, you need to do lot of hands-on for each topic described in the exam skills outline.

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Availability Zones for Azure, like in AWS.

Microsoft has now announced its long pending Availability Zones in each region. It is currently on preview and recommended only for non-critical workload as Micorsoft does not provide any SLA now. With this, you can now provision your workload from different data centers in the same regions for resilience as you will have options to select between minimum of 3 AZs in each region with GA. However, it is now available only on East US2 and West Europe for Preview.

AZ Fig01.png

AWS currently operate 44 AZs across 16 Regions and 14 more AZs are already planned (44+14 =58). Microsoft currently operate in 36 regions and 6 more to come. If you assume that Microsoft will bring 3 AZs minimums at each of these regions, Microsoft would have (36+6) *3= 126 which itself is more than double the size of AZs across the globe. I agree, it does not make much sense to just play with the numbers so Microsoft need to bring the services that would help customers to make use availability zones and add value to their workloads hosted in Azure services. AWS currently offers multiple PaaS services for their Multi-AZ deployment model so Microsoft still need do good job on making sure that more services are available for Multiple AZ deployments.

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