Review of 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions Certification preparation course by Scott Duffy

In our earlier post we have described steps about how you can prepare for Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions Certification. But, if you have just started your journey in Azure than it will be a good idea to start with the Azure developer certification which is 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions .
If you are an absolute beginner you can start with free Azure account.  It will help give a good understanding of Azure. But, be careful while using the resources because as we get free hand access to resources, we tend to spin up lot of instances and forget them running. This may end up with a huge bill. Best practice is that you setup a billing alert to avoid any shocks at month end.
To further hone your skills you can either go for Azure classroom training or go for online courses. The classroom training will cost you from USD 800 to USD 2000. While the online courses can cost you from USD 10 to USD 300, depending on which course you choose.
As mentioned in the last post since my experience with online courses was good as it give you good foundation, so I prefer to go the online way.
When I started my search for a suitable course I zeroed in on 70-532 or renamed AZ-203 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions Certification  course by Scott Duffy on Udemy.
Scott himself is a certified architect and got a rich industry experience. Going through the course content I found that it covered almost all exam topics. Also Scott keeps on updating the content as the syllabus changes. And if you buy from Udemy you get free life time access to the course so I went with this one.
As of Dec-18 the course contents 10 hours of video and a practice test. Also, you get lifetime free access to the course on Udemy.
It’s a good idea to follow all the labs with the instructor and once you get confidence redo the labs independently. Don’t forget to complete the practice quizzes to check your knowledge.
You can also supplement your preparation with practice Tests for 70-532 Developing MS Azure Solutions  .

Review of 70-534 70-535 Architecting Microsoft Azure SolutionsCertification course on Udemy by Scott Duffy

As I mentioned in my earlier post that I had a good experience with Udemy’s online course while preparing for AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam.
So for preparation of Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions Certification also I wanted to buy an online course.
When I started my search for a suitable course I zeroed in on  Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions Certification  course by Scott Duffy on Udemy.
Scott himself is a certified architect and got a rich industry experience. Going through the course content I found that it covered almost all exam topics. Also Scott keeps on updating the content as the syllabus changes. And if you buy from Udemy you get free life time access to the course so I went with this one.
Now coming to the course.
After buying the course as I went through it I found the content to be good but the content delivery of Scott is not as good as Ryan of acloudguru whose AWS course I have completed.
Scott mixes many Developer course topics with this course which can be good if you are from development background but not essential for the exam.  For the exam you need the basic understanding of coding so that you can read and understand the code.
Course has many quizzes after the modules which are helpful in testing what you have learnt. It covers hands on exercises which you can follow in your own MS Azure free trial account.
It has mock exam at the end of sections but when I gave them I found that no matter how many times you give the mock exam it reflects the same score that you got when you appeared for the mock exam first time. I informed Scott about this on the forum page and he said he will get it sorted. Hope it’s fixed now.
Overall this course covers most of the exam topics and if you are a beginner in Azure it will give you a good base.  Also as of Apr-18 this is the only course on Udemy which covers most topic and get you exam ready.
If you already have background in AWS then I recommend that you also go through the course Microsoft Azure for AWS Experts by Microsoft(Update: This is now a paid course).  Few of the Azure terminologies are confusing and if you relate them to AWS it will help you understand them quickly. You can also refer to our post where we have compared the services of AWS vs Azure .
Read the post Azure exam pattern to know more about  what’s asked in exam. You can supplement your preparation with sample exam questions by Scott.
Scott also got a good course on 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions .
Do share your queries or opinion with us.

Comparing AWS, Azure and Redhat exams

In last couple of years I’ve given certification exams of multiple cloud providers. While AWS and Azure exams are more theoretical and based on multiple choice questions. Redhat Openstack is practical lab exam. In this article I’ll be discussing the pros and cons of the different exam patterns.
AWS
Passed AWS CSA – Associate and Professional
Pros:-

• You can refer to any question any time you want during the exam.
• Exam tests you on a wide range of topic.
• Even if you have made mistakes in the beginning you can recover by reviewing the questions later.
• No datasheet type questions like “How much RAM does C3.Xlarge offers?”
• You get 1 Year free tier which is great to learn about AWS.

Cons:-

• Exams are expensive in comparison to Microsoft Azure (at least in India)
• In many question it just tests your reading speed.
• No version, so you don’t know if you should answer as per recent announcement or old method available.

Azure
Passed Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions.
Pros:-

• Azure exams are not very expensive in comparison to AWS or Red Hat.
• Exam tests you on a wide range of topic.
• Even if you have made mistakes in the beginning you can recover by solving correctly other answers in later sections.

Cons:-

• No version, so you don’t know if you should answer as per recent announcement or old method available.
• It’s a race against time.
• The most insane thing I found in the exam is that with each case study you get 5 to 6 questions. But, for about 2 to 3 questions in that case study you can’t refer back to case study. I don’t understand why Microsoft expects you to remember the whole 2 page case study.
• 30 days free tier is too less to know about azure.

Update:- Azure is now(Oct-17) offering 12 months free trial.
Redhat Openstack
Passed  RHCSA in Redhat Openstack
Pros:-

• The difficulty level of the exam is medium.
• You generally get questions on tasks which you will be doing in real life.
• You get only 15-20 questions (tasks) and even if someone knows those questions beforehand he will have to do the tasks practically to pass the exam. So even if anyone has dumps, they are useless.
• It has versioning so you know you have to answer as per Redhat Openstack version 6 or 8.
• Can play with Redhat Openstack by installing it in your desktop or laptop. Good Learning!

Cons:-

• Exams are expensive in comparison to Microsoft Azure.
• If you have made a mistake at the beginning or in the middle of exam chances are you will mess up the whole exam or waste lot of time correcting it.
• If your machine doesn’t work properly you may lose time. But generally examiners take care of this.

In the end, I’d like to say that professional exams should not be like your college entrance exams where they mostly test your reading speeds and cramming abilities. But it’s OK for them as the undergrad and grad have limited practical experience.
Professional exams should be more practical, that makes you sure that if a person has cleared the exam, he definitely know how to do that stuff in real life.
If you want to know how to prepare for these exams refer my post for AWS , Azure and Redhat Openstack .

Azure Crash Course - WebJobs

1. Azure WebJobs is similar to AWS Lambda a serverless technology.

You can run programs or scripts in WebJobs in your Azure App Service web app in three ways:
On demand – You trigger it when you need.
Continuously – It will keep on running in background always.
Schedule – You can schedule it to run on specific date and time.

Following file types are accepted:-

• .cmd, .bat, .exe (using windows cmd)
• .ps1 (using powershell)
• .sh (using bash)
• .php (using php)
• .py (using python)
• .js (using node)
• .jar (using java)

Interestingly Azure WebJobs supports shell scripts which is missing in AWS Lambda.
The WebJobs SDK does not yet support .NET Core.
Typical use case for Azure WebJobs:-

• Image processing or other CPU-intensive work.
• Queue processing.
• RSS aggregation.
• File maintenance, such as aggregating or cleaning up log files.
• Other long-running tasks that you want to run in a background thread, such as sending emails.
• Any tasks that you want to run on a schedule, such as performing a back-up operation every night.

Do Note

• Web apps in Free mode can time out after 20 minutes if there are no requests to the scm (deployment) site and the web app’s portal is not open in Azure. Requests to the actual site will not reset this.
• Code for a continuous job needs to be written to run in an endless loop.
• Continuous jobs run continuously only when the web app is up. Check what’s a Web App .
• Basic and Standard modes offer the Always On feature which, when enabled, prevents web apps from becoming idle.
• You can only debug continuously running WebJobs. Debugging scheduled or on-demand WebJobs is not supported.

This article was written to give you quick snapshot of WebJobs.  You can follow this Azure Doc to check how to quickly deploy apps with WebJobs.
Azure Crash Course series is created to give you quick snapshot of Azure services. You can check other services in this series over here .

Azure Crash Course - Web Apps

Azure is quickly adding services in it’s portfolio.
Three of the Azure services “Web Apps”, “Cloud Services” and “API Apps” provide services which are equivalent to AWS Elastic Benastalk.
In this article we will be discussing about Web Apps.

• Web Apps is a PaaS offering of Azure.
• Web Apps allows developers to quickly build, deploy and manage websites easily.
• It provides you shared or dedicated virtual machines.
• These are managed VMs so you don’t have to worry about hardware or patching.
• Languages supported are ASP.NET, Node.js, Java, PHP, or Python. These are basically the languages which are supported by Azure App Service.
• It supports Scaling up or Scaling out both.
• It supports High Availability.
• You can select application templates from Azure marketplace and deploy using Web Apps.  Some examples of supported templates are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

Web Apps can be deployed in three ways:-

1. Azure CLI
2. Azure ARM Portal
3. Visual Studio

For DevOps you can easily integrate Web Apps with GitHub, Bitbucket, or Visual Studio Team Services.
Web Apps has a great feature of Deployment Slots. So what is Deployment slots?
It allows you to validate the change first in Dev or UAT before pushing it in Production. By deploying a web app to a slot first and swapping it into production ensures that all instances of the slot are warmed up before being swapped into production. This eliminates cold start for your application.
It gives you flexibility to roll back.
You can also configure auto swap. When a deployment slot is configured for Auto Swap into production, every time you push your code update to that slot, App Service will automatically swap the app into production after it has already warmed up in the slot.
Pricing Plans:-
Web Apps supports different pricing plans.

1. Free
2. Shared
3. Basic
4. Standard
5. Premium

Free and Shared Plans don’t have SLAs associated with them.  While the remaining three provide 99.95% SLA.
You can also buy custom domains and SSL certificate through Web Apps.
This article was written to give you quick snapshot of Web Apps.  You can follow this Azure Doc to check how to quickly deploy apps with Web Apps.
This series is created to give you quick snapshot of Azure services. You can check other services in this series over here .

Solved: How to calculate number of available IPs in a Subnet

Many people are confused about how many usable IPs you can get in a subnet and how to calculate it.
So here I am giving you a simple way to calculate it.
Here is the formula.

Maximum Number of IPs = 2**(32 - netmask_length)

Let’s say you have subnet mask  /28 then the maximum number of IPs you can have is

Maximum Number of IPs= 2**(32-28) = 2**(4) = 2*2*2*2 = 16

So you can have max 16 IPs in a  /28 subnet.
First and last IP of subnet is reserved for Network Address and Broadcast Address. So you are left with only 14 IPs in normal networks.
But, generally cloud providers like AWS, Azure etc. reserve 5 IPs instead of 2 IPs in each subnet . Thus, the the usable IPs available for you in AWS or Azure for /28 subnet will be 11.
Similarly, you can calculate the usable IPs in each subnet when working on cloud .

For simplicity we have created an AWS Subnet Calculator which you can use.

Be Sociable. Share It. Happy Learning!

AWS VS AZURE VS OPENSTACK

Most of the services provided by different cloud providers are same as what you do in on-premises setup, they just have a different name in cloud. Below is comparison of major services offered by different cloud providers and what they mean in simple laymen terms. Hope this is helpful to you.

SMALLEST AND LARGEST SUBNET SIZE IN AZURE

What is the smallest and largest subnet in Azure?
The smallest subnet in Azure is /29. So theoretically you have 8 IPs in subnet but Azure reserve 5 IPs so you will only get 3 IPs for yourself.
While the largest subnet in Azure is /8 . 5 IPs are reserved in this also.

Refer this post to know how to calculate the total number of IPs available in a subnet.
You can get more details on this page of Azure site .