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  • Exam Changes: What Should I Do?

    Exam Changes: What Should I Do?

    By far, the most common question I’m seeing in the courses and FB Group is, “I’ve been planning to take exam 70-5XX in October. But now Microsoft has these new exams. Should I still take the old exam, or should I take the new? What should I do?”

    Of course, the answer is going to be personal to you. You might be excited by the new exams and will happily switch to studying for that. Or you may be perfectly ready to take the existing exams, and don’t see any good reason to switch. So I can’t tell you what to do, just talk about what I would do.

    Why You Want to Take the New Exams

    Here’s some reasons why you might want to consider switching from the legacy exams to the new ones.

    1. If you pass these, you won’t have to take the same topic again for 2 more years. Microsoft has said they will start expiring certifications after 2 years. So expect to have to re-take exams every couple of years to keep your certifications. If you pass AZ-XXX now, you know that you’ll not have to think about it again until January 2021.
    2. The new exams have smaller scope. Instead of having to go into the testing center knowing “everything”, you only have to know half of everything to take the exam. So in this way, it’s a bit easier to study since you can go deeper on fewer topics.
    3. The content is roughly the same. There are very few topics on the new exams that were not on the old exams. 

    Why You Want to Take the Current Exams

    1. Some of the new exams are still in beta. You’ll have to wait until January 2019 to hear if you passed or not. You’ll have to wait until then to know that you are certified. That’s 3 months away!
    2. You’ll have to take two exams instead of one for the same result. This means you’ll have to pay twice, and answer twice the number of questions. So it’s more effort to take the new exams from a studying perspective.
    3. If you pass the current exam, that remains on your transcript forever. Even if Microsoft deprecates the exam itself, the accomplishment of passing remains.
    4. If you pass the current exam, and qualify for an MCSA or MCSE, you also get to keep that certification for 2 years. As I write this, it’s the last quarter of 2018. So you can keep your MCSA and MCSE til the end of 2020, that’s not much different than the new exam.
    5. You can pass the current exam, and then take the “transition” exam, for the same result. The option of taking two tests for the same result is still open to you. You can take the current exam and the transition exam, and become a Certified Expert. 
    6. Your result comes immediately, and your MCSA and MCSE certification as well. No need to wait until the beta period ends.

    The bottom line is that you lose nothing by taking the current exams and then the transition exam. You get the credential today, and get the new Expert one in the future. 

    That’s my recommendation. Taking the existing exams and doing the transition gets you the credential you need today, and the credential of the future when it comes out too. Win-win!

    But yes, it’s entirely personal. If you are happy to avoid the current exams, then the new ones are the way for you.

  • March 2018 Changes to 70-532 Exam

    March 2018 Changes to 70-532 Exam

    I just received notification that Microsoft has updated the 70-532 exam. The changes took effect March 22, 2018, and the official exam web page just changed this week.

    Here is a summary of new/changed items on the exam:

    Virtual Machines:

    • Ansible
    • Accelerated Networking
    • Availability Zones
    • Claim and Unclaim VMs using DevTest Labs

    Storage:

    • Virtual Network Service Endpoints
    • Azure Files Backup
    • Redis Geo-Replication
    • Azure Search Synonyms

    App Services:

    • App Service Isolated
    • Serverless Applications
    • Distribute Mobile App
    • Mobile App Analytics
    • Collect Crash Data
    • Location Aware Applications

    Kubernetes:

    • Create Container Images
    • Azure Container Registry
    • Docker Hub
    • YAML Application
    • Scale Applications
    • Update Applications
    • Container Monitoring in Log Analytics
    • Development Cluster
    • Configuration Values

    Are you interested in being notified when there are new exam changes? Or when I have new free videos on new features of Azure? Sign up to my list and I’ll send you occasional emails on it.

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  • March 2018 Changes to 70-533 Exam

    March 2018 Changes to 70-533 Exam

    I just received notification that Microsoft has updated the 70-533 exam. The changes took effect March 22, 2018, and the official exam web page just changed this week.

    Here is a summary of new/changed items on the exam:

    App Services:

    • All mentions of “web apps” changed to “apps”
    • Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) Workspaces

    Storage:

    • Blob-Level Tiering (Hot, Cool, Archive)
    • Storage Encryption Keys

    Containers:

    • “ACS” changed to “AKS”

    Virtual Networks:

    • Monitor ExpressRoute
    • Accelerated Networking
    • Virtual Network Service Endpoints

    ARM Templates:

    • Configure Lock Policies

    Operations:

    • Implement Serverless Computing, including Azure Functions, Event Grid, and Service Bus
    • IT Service Management Connector (ITSMC)

    Identity:

    • Azure Managed Service Identity
    • Privileged Identity Management
    • Azure AD Identity Management
    • Self-Service Password Reset

    Are you interested in being notified when there are new exam changes? Or when I have new free videos on new features of Azure? Sign up to my list and I’ll send you occasional emails on it.

    [thrive_leads id=’6447′]

  • March 2018 Changes to 70-535 Exam

    March 2018 Changes to 70-535 Exam

    I just received notification that Microsoft has updated the 70-535 exam. The changes took effect March 22, 2018, and the official exam web page just changed this week.

    Here is a summary of new/changed items on the exam:

    Virtual Machines:

    • Azure Batch AI
    • Reserved Instances
    • Design for DevTest Lab
    • Accelerated Networking
    • Azure Backup for Linux
    • Availability Zones

    Serverless:

    • Data Storage for Serverless Computing
    • Azure Event Grid
    • Stream Processing and Bot Messaging

    App Service:

    • Azure App Service Environment (ASE) changed to App Service Isolated

    Compute Intensive:

    • Low Priority Batching and Job Task Counting

    Azure Storage:

    • Azure Data Box
    • Azure Storage Service Encryption

    Relational Database:

    • SQL Data Warehouse Columnar Storage

    NoSQL:

    • Managing Recurring Jobs

    Virtual Networks:

    • Virtual Network Service Endpoints

    Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin

    • Global VNet Peering

    Security:

    • Service Tags

    Media Service:

    • File-Based Encoding or Azure Media Analytics

    Monitoring:

    • TCP Connections

    Operations Automation:

    • Update Management Strategy

    Are you interested in being notified when there are new exam changes? Or when I have new free videos on new features of Azure? Sign up to my list and I’ll send you occasional emails on it.

    [thrive_leads id=’6447′]

  • Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Approach in TOGAF

    Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Approach in TOGAF

    Within the TOGAF specification, you will sometimes read about there being two options for approaching the design of architecture: a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach.

    But what does that mean?

    ​The top-down approach means that you start with the business requirements (the B layer) and fully decide the problems your business needs to solve before thinking about the technology to solve those problems. The “bottom up” approach means you start with the technology that you are looking to add to your organization and work “up” to change the applications and the business.

    An example of this is, let’s say you have a problem with security. You talk to the business leaders, department heads, etc and come up with an extensive target business architecture for it. Then you start looking at vendors and thinking about implementation. That’s top-down.

    The bottom-up approach is, when you have a problem with security, talking to the technical teams and ops teams. What can you do to improve security? They might suggest you restrict all access from outside your company except through the VPN. You then work up to the business layer to say that certain policies need to be followed to get access to the company network from outside. That’s a top up approach. Thinking about solutions first and then changing the business needs to match.

    Hope that helps.

     

  • How Do Software Architects Make Decisions?

    How Do Software Architects Make Decisions?

    A student asked me a question in my Introduction to Software Architecture course, and I decided to write a bit of a longer answer than usual. So I posted it here. 🙂

     

    How and When Architect decide which technologies to go with?

    I would like to know How and When an Architect decides which technology to go with? If he/she is not having in-depth tech knowledge, how to decide if selected technology is capable of catering the need

     

    Well, that is a big question of course. This course went over the role of a software architect at a high level, but a more practical question is how to decide between two or more options when faced with a tough decision.

     

    So let’s look at a scenario with real products, and figure out which we would like to buy.

     

    Scenario: You know you need to buy a piece of software, but how do you choose which piece of software is best?

     

    You have to go and find a marketing solution. You did your research, and the choices are… IBM Marketing Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Yes, four massive companies have named their product the same thing.

     

    So how do you choose which one to go with?

     

    Usually, the way companies do this, is come up with their requirements (part of a RFP). They make a list of features that the product they choose must have, and a list of nice to have features, against which products will be judged against.

     

    In my case, I want a marketing cloud that has the following features, must have:

    • Rock solid security
    • Intelligent folder structure for projects to support all my clients without risk of overlap (multi-tenant)
    • Fine control over which users get access to which clients
    • Proven ability to send high volume of emails
    • Detailed and reliable reporting and tracking features
    • Email automations, funnels
    • Schedule emails
    • Pre-stored templates
    • Customer support by the vendor
    • Cost per user

     

    My nice-to-have features are the following:

    • Can host standalone web pages
    • Support multiple languages for the same email
    • Handle unsubscribes with customizable pages
    • Future roadmap

     

    So you make your lists of features that you’d like to see.

     

    Now for each application, you need to “grade” the application on a score of 1-10 against each of the features.

     

    On a scale of 1-10, how great is the security? Does it integrate with your Active Directory? Can you block IP address ranges? Does is do threat detection and ensure to raise an alert if hackers attempt to get in?

     

    Some applications only do the basics, while others have security features you haven’t even thought of.

     

    You go down the list, and evaluate the software on each feature. If an application doesn’t support something on your must-have list, that’s a big problem. A 0, and possible elimination from contention unless you’re willing to modify your requirements.

     

    Now add up the scores under the must-haves and nice-to-haves.

     

    There will be applications that have a low score compared to the others, and that puts them at the bottom of the list. There will be applications have have a high score compared to others, and that puts them at the top. Easy enough, right?

     

    Now how do you choose between two applications where the scores are similar?

     

    Well if they meet the requirements, and the price is within your budget, it might just come down to picking the one you feel will suit you best. Which one had sales teams that replied to your questions the fastest? Which one has the best reputation for support online? Do you already have this company’s other products in your organization?

     

    There’s no perfect solution. Every architect has experienced the case where you start down the path of choosing one vendor, and then you learn that they don’t support something basic. Or things don’t got as easily as you planned. Such is life sometimes.

     

    But if you start with your requirements, and grading applications based on your requirements, you’ll have “the facts” in front of you on which you can make a decision.

     

  • Four Benefits to Getting Azure Certified

    Four Benefits to Getting Azure Certified

    For the next couple of weeks, I’m visiting my in-laws in South America. As nice as it is to travel, I also find myself with the laptop open at 8 PM, and thought I would write this little post on a common question I sometimes get.

    There are people on both sides of the debate on whether it’s worth it to get certified, in any technical field. On the one hand, it’s provable skills and experience that matters most when applying for jobs, and someone who got their skills from a book but have not actually performed the tasks cannot be viewed as equal to someone who has spent years in the field, gaining their skills through trial and error. There is no equivalent to discovering a strange behavior in a technical system, and tearing it apart to find out the error and fix the bug.

    But even the person who’s spent years in the field might find it challenging to pass a certification test on those skills. Because often in our jobs, we only get to see such a limited view of the way things are done. We could work for years on Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks, and never have touched a Web App.

    So the first benefit to certification is it forces you to be exposed to all features of a system. Microsoft Azure in particular has 100+ cloud services, and it is all but guaranteed that studying for the exam will teach you about areas of Azure that you have not really been exposed to.

    The other challenge with having all of your knowledge from in-field experience is that you are not learning the best practices for working with the system. You might be inadvertently leaving open security holes, or adding unnecessary cost to the solution, simply because you did not know about a security setting or a method for scaling. You can both make your work life easier, as well as improving the overall quality of the system, by being forced to study for certification and read about the “Microsoft Way” for designing solutions. That’s the second benefit to certification.

    Sometimes we do not have the opportunity to work in an area through our normal daily jobs. It’s a chicken and the egg problem. You will not get assigned to projects that work in the cloud because you don’t have any previous knowledge of how cloud systems work. But you can’t get that knowledge, because you do not get assigned to those projects.

    Certification can bridge that gap. It can serve as an important signal to your company that you are trainable on these technologies and already possess a good baseline of knowledge when coming into a project. It signals that you will not be asking “what’s a subnet?” on your first day on the project, and will not be slowing the project down. The third benefit to certification is that it serves as a good substitute to a few months of actual experience, which you can then supplement with actual experience quickly when joining a relevant project.

    Finally, talking about signals, certification is the proof of the claim that you are the type of person who loves to learn new things. Within any enterprise, there are some (thankfully, usually a minor number of) employees who just want to hang on to the applications that they are used to, and resist being exposed to new languages and technologies. You can say in a job interview that you love to learn new things. But you know what actually proves that you love to learn new things? Evidence that you take training courses on your own free time, and get certified. Having Azure, AWS, and other certificates on your resume is the ultimate proof that you’re the type of employee they want on their team. A self-starter. A seeker of knowledge. Not just someone who learns by doing, but supplements that knowledge with the official documentation and other training programs. That’s the fourth benefit.

    So hopefully you can see that, in 2018, certification is still a great way to grow your skills and show your skills. Instead of being a relic of the past, in fact it’s the way of the future. True, you do not see many jobs that state “Azure certification required”, but having that on your resume will get you more interviews than if it was not on your resume. And makes a good talking point during the interview itself when asked “have you ever worked with technology X?”

     

  • Free Azure Guide to Setting Up Linux VMs

    Free Azure Guide to Setting Up Linux VMs

  • Become Azure Certified Through Udemy for Business

    Hundreds of companies provide their employees access to Udemy as part of their employee training benefits. Is yours one?

    If so, you already have access to my Enterprise Architecture and Microsoft Azure courses for free!

    All you need to do is log in to your company’s Udemy portal, and search for TOGAF or Azure using Udemy’s search tool. You’ll be shown a selection of my courses where you can sign up at no cost to you – since your employer already pays to be part of that program.

    But clicking the “sign up” button doesn’t teach you the skill. (We’re not in The Matrix yet. “I know Kung Fu.”)You will need to watch the videos and practice the skills, and this can be done a little at a time. Perhaps the smartest thing you can do is book yourself a meeting in your Office calendar every week where nobody else is able to reserve that time away from you. Whether it’s 30 minutes, or an hour, or more. Book yourself a meeting, and devote that time to taking some training such as my Azure courses that will help you attain the certification that can advance your skills and advance your career.Over 1,000 companies have this as a company benefit, and yours might be one of them. So check with HR on what training platforms you have available.And if you don’t see my courses on the training platform you have (whatever it is), do me a favor and ask that training platform to get in touch with me and get my courses there.Scott

  • Another Engineer Blamed for Poor Process

    Another Engineer Blamed for Poor Process

    Back in March, I wrote about the poor Amazon engineer who accidentally brought down a portion of the Internet by removing a larger than expected number of servers from operation in AWS S3. That made for a bad day.

    Well it seems that something else happened in March, around the same time. Another engineer at a different company failed to do something, which would cause him to have a bad month a few months later.

    We’ve all heard that Equifax got hacked this summer, exposing the most detailed personal information of almost every American (140 million, which is almost every adult who interacts with the financial system in some way). I was personally furious when I heard about it, and some are calling it the most serious hacking incident ever.

    It’s debatable, since Yahoo confirmed yesterday that hackers stole the emails and encrypted password of 3 billion accounts 4 years ago. But certainly, getting email addresses is less valuable than credit details and social security numbers.

    The other thing about Equifax is that these are not user accounts, but people who have no direct relationship with Equifax. These 140 million people are the product, not the customers.

    But we can all agree that Equifax was a huge hack.

    Yesterday, the CEO submitted written testimony to congress that says the following.

    On March 9, Equifax disseminated the U.S. CERT notification internally by email
    requesting that applicable personnel responsible for an Apache Struts installation upgrade their
    software. Consistent with Equifax’s patching policy, the Equifax security department required
    that patching occur within a 48 hour time period. We now know that the vulnerable version of
    Apache Struts within Equifax was not identified or patched in response to the internal March 9
    notification to information technology personnel.

    Further detail was provided during his testimony.

    The human error was that the individual who’s responsible for communicating in the organization to apply the patch, did not.

    So to Equifax, the breach comes down to an individual who’s job it was to patch systems when notified of security vulnerabilities who did not patch it.

    To me, a company that has such precious data (such as a bank or credit reporting agency) should have more robust security processes to ensure a single missed patch doesn’t get overlooked.

    And why was it so easy for the “online dispute website” to get access to the full database of consumers and credit info?