The Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certificate is the way to verify the expertise required to implement, manage, and monitor Microsoft Azure and its environment.

About Certification

The Microsoft AZ-104 exam is the only prerequisite for earning the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification. As it’s clear from the name, this is an associate-level designation, and earning it is not an easy feat. Apart from a strong understanding and expertise in the implementation and management of Azure services, candidates are also required to have a couple of months of hands-on experience in administering them. In addition, an Azure Administrator who longs for such a certification should be able to perform tasks related to the organization's overall cloud infrastructure and thus, will play a significant role in the team. Finally, opting for this validation will require the candidates to have an understanding of Azure identities, storage systems, compute resources, virtual networks, and more.

About AZ-104 Test

The AZ-104 is not intended for individuals with no technical background. On the contrary, the AZ-104 certification exam targets Azure Administrators with a minimum of 6 months of hands-on experience in working with Azure services, their workloads, governance, and security. To get through this evaluation, the determined applicants should have expertise in working with PowerShell, Azure CLI, Azure Portal, and Azure Resource Manager. To add more, the AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam costs USD 165 to register, and the registration is done through Pearson VUE. The candidates have the option to choose from the English, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages. Also, in the main test, you will have to solve around 40-60 questions in 130-150 minutes and to pass the exam with flying colors, you need to score at least 700 points out of 1000.

Topics Measured

All in all, the Microsoft AZ-104 evaluation measures the candidates in the following skill areas:

• Managing Azure identities & governance;
• Executing and managing storage;
• Putting into practice Azure compute resources;
• Setting up & managing virtual networks;
• Controlling as well as supporting various Azure services.

When it comes to the first tested topic, it’s divided into three objectives namely, how to manage Azure AD objects, role-based access control (RBAC), and subscriptions & governance. Thus, the entrant should be capable of performing user updates in bulk, setting up Azure AD join, creating administrative units, controlling user & group properties, monitoring guest accounts, and performing a self-service password reset. Furthermore, the entrant should also be capable of developing custom roles, assigning roles to Azure services at different levels, and interpreting access assignments. After that, the candidates need to learn to set up Azure policies, resource locks, deal with the resource tags, manage subscriptions, costs, and resource groups, and lastly, operate with management groups.

Regarding the second domain, it revolves around implementing as well as managing the process of storage. In all, it covers several parts, among which you’ll encounter the way to secure storage appropriately, how to manage storage, and how to deal with varied Azure files alongside Azure Blob Storage. In more detail, the candidates will be asked to successfully set up network access to various accounts for storage, develop & transform storage accounts, create shared access signature or SAS tokens, handle access keys, and set up Azure AD authentication that will be used for a particular storage account. Then, the applicants will need to showcase their proficiency while dealing with exporting & importing from/into Azure job, setting up the Azure Storage Explorer, copying information with the help of AZCopy, putting into operation the Azure Storage replication, and setting up the blob object replication. Apart from all these, the entrants should be capable of making up the Azure file share, Azure File Sync service, Azure Blob Storage, the tiers for storage, and finally, the management of blob lifecycle.

The third tested scope is all about deploying as well as managing Azure compute resources, and it scrutinizes such areas as automating the execution of VMs via the utilization of the templates for the Azure Resource Manager, setting up VMs, and the process of creation & configuration of containers as well as the Azure App Service. In more detail, such a portion will look at how to transform the template for the Azure Resource Manager, how to operate with the virtual hard disk (VHD) template, how to save a specific execution as the template of the Azure Resource Manager, and how to put into practice the extensions of VMs. After that, the entrants will also need to be able to work with Azure Disk Encryption and must be capable of configuring it. What is more, being fluent in the concepts of VM sizes, data disks, VMs redeployment, and configuring high availability, as well as scale sets, is essential. Lastly, under such a category, you’ll familiarize yourself with how to work with Azure Container Instances and Azure Kubernetes Service including its scaling, networks, and clusters.

The fourth topic touches on five tested objectives that detail particular operations like managing virtual networking, accessing the same securely, setting up load balancing, controlling & troubleshooting virtual networks, and uniting an on-premises network together with a virtual network of Azure. In all, this topic examines the concepts of private & public addresses for IP, subnets, Azure DNS, NSG, Azure Firewall, and Azure Bastion. Additionally, the candidate should be familiar with Azure VPN Gateway, Azure ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, Azure Application Gateway, and Azure Network Watcher.

Finally, the last topic details the process of monitoring and supporting Azure resources. In particular, this part sheds light on how to control resources through the usage of the Azure Monitor and also how to put backup & recovery into operation. Therefore, the candidates need to be skilled in configuring Azure Monitor logs and Application Insights. Besides, setting up alerts & actions, analyzing logs, and creating Recovery Services vault are some of the vital skills required to get through this Microsoft exam.

Career Opportunities

Passing the AZ-104 evaluation and earning the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification has its benefits. In particular, this designation opens up new and better job opportunities with great average annual salaries. For example, you can choose to become a Microsoft Azure Administrator and thus, receive the annual pay of around $108k as presented by ZipRecruiter.com.

Certification Path

Earning the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate validation after passing the AZ-104 test is quite an accomplishment. However, if you want to advance your knowledge and career even further, then we recommend going for the Microsoft Certified: Azure for SAP Workloads Specialty as well as Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate designations.