Background

So up until now I’ve concentrated most of my Public Cloud certification time on Amazon Web Services (AWS), as that’s what I’ve been living and breathing for the last few years. Whilst AWS is my area of specialism, I have origins in Microsoft and hold many certifications for all of the on-premise / private cloud portfolio. I’ve also been working closely with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Azure recently, working out how we take principles around shared responsibility, DevSecOps, cost accountability, self-service and connectivity patterns into other Cloud ecosystems.

Whilst I would really like to bolster my GCP knowledge, the reality is that most of the use cases I currently see seem to be heavily focused on either AWS or Azure rather than GCP; In addition, the trend with Azure seems to be one of combining 365 collaboration tools, Azure Active Directory and Azure for PaaS and IaaS gaps. With those trends in mind I think common sense prevails here and so over the next few weeks I’m going to start spending my evenings and weekends focusing on the Azure route, where it seems like the obvious starting place would be to prepare for the Azure AZ-104 exam and then work up through the various certification paths. Alongside the Public Cloud provider study and certification, I also want to revisit Hashicorp Terraform and Vault again, as most of the last year or two has been heavily focused on CloudFormation, which has certainly improved but isn’t Cloud agnostic like the Hashicorp tools. Also, the idempotency that Terraform brings is a real key feature that CloudFormation lacks! AWS really needs to sort out drift detection and remediation, but maybe I’ll do a post specifically on the landscape of both product in 2021 as both have evolved a fair amount in the last couple of years.

Certification Plan

So, my plan is to complete the other AWS Pro exam which will compliment my existing certs, I’ll then move onto the Terraform Assoicate to solidify my existing TF knowledge, and then finally over to the Azure 104 Administrator Associate. Well, that is the plan at least.

My Approach

My aim here is to take the same approach with Azure as I’ve done with AWS, which means hosting a set of services such as a functioning web app or project along with the domain, email, pipelines, authentication and any supporting infrastructure and services. This allows me to conduct lots of real-life labs and operational scenarios, rather than just digesting course material which for my kinetic learning style doesn’t work very well and I will need to be comfortable demonstrating my hands-on experience to teams and customers I work with.