undo.is

Note: I’d originally intended this to be a pretty long piece about studying for the MCAAA, but it never came out the way I wanted it to. Sorry!

I feel pretty lucky in my current position that I get to touch a lot of new technology as we experiment with it and look to the future of our tech. The more I see, the more convinced I am that the future of technology (at the moment, anyway) isn’t in our datacenter; it’s in someone else’s. With that in mind, I started to seriously look into getting certified in a cloud technology with my business’s primary vendor: Microsoft. While it seems like a large portion of the world looks to Amazon for their cloud needs, Azure interested me for a few reasons:

• My current workplace has a heavy investment in the Microsoft stack. If I took this route, not only would I improve myself, but I could also help invest some of that time back into the business.
• A lot of my existing knowledge of Microsoft products seemed to transfer over with little adaptation. They built their platform with the intention of having businesses already using MS products adopt it, and it worked.

Strictly speaking, I started this journey last year; I’d promised myself that I’d make an effort to get a basic cloud certification in 2019 for self-improvement purposes, and passed the AZ900 for my Azure Fundamentals certification in December. With that in hand, though, I was even more interested and made it a point to study even harder in Q1 2020. A lot of time watching online courses and even more time brushing up on my Azure networking skills, I scheduled my AZ103 exam for a weekday in February.

A few hours and one test later, I was officially a Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate.

I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to apply this knowledge in a meaningful way in the coming months. I have my head in the cloud for now, at least; I just have to get the rest of myself there too!