I Passed Four Azure Certifications in Two Months
Between March and May I passed the AZ-104 (Azure Administrator), AZ-400 (DevOps Engineer Expert), AZ-305 (Solutions Architect Expert), and the Terraform Associate. Four exams in about eight weeks.
This wasn’t a flex. Ok maybe a little. But mostly strategic.
Why the Blitz
I’d been stacking infrastructure certs for years — CCNA, VCP-DCV, VMCE, VMCA — but they were all on-prem or vendor-specific. My day job at Veeam is increasingly cloud-focused, the MSCS at CU Boulder was teaching me cloud-native concepts, and I’d been building projects on Azure for months. The knowledge was already there. I just needed the credentials to prove it.
I also knew from experience that cert momentum is real. Once you’re in exam-prep mode, your brain is wired for it. Taking one exam a month is harder than taking four in two months because you lose the rhythm every time you stop.
The Order Mattered
I started with the AZ-104. This is the foundation — identity, networking, compute, storage, monitoring, all at the administrator level. If you can’t pass the 104, nothing else matters. It also overlaps significantly with my day job, so a lot of this was confirming what I already knew.
AZ-400 was second. DevOps Engineer Expert builds on the 104 with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and release management. The Terraform work I’d been doing for personal projects (UpDog Monitor, Platform-Starter-Kit) made the IaC sections straightforward. The Azure DevOps specific content was the only part that required real study.
AZ-305 third. Solutions Architect Expert is the design exam — given a set of requirements, design the right Azure architecture. This is where years of VCSP support paid off. I’ve seen hundreds of different infrastructure architectures, watched them succeed and fail, and developed opinions about what works. The exam is really testing whether you can think in trade-offs, and support engineers think in trade-offs every day.
Terraform Associate last. Honestly this was the easiest of the four. I’d been writing Terraform daily for months. The exam tests whether you understand state, providers, modules, and the workflow. If you’ve written real Terraform, you’ll pass.
What I’d Tell Someone Doing the Same Thing
Don’t study topics. Build things, then take the exam. I learned more about Azure networking by deploying an AKS cluster with custom VNets than I did from any study guide. The exams test practical knowledge, and the best way to get practical knowledge is practice.
Microsoft Learn is good and free. I supplemented with John Savill’s YouTube videos for the architect exam, which are excellent for building the mental model of how Azure services connect.
And schedule the exam before you feel ready. I scheduled all four within the first two weeks. Borderline irresponsible? Maybe. But having the dates on the calendar meant I couldn’t procrastinate.