My AZ-305 Beta Exam Testing Experience

I took for the AZ-305 beta exam Thursday, December 16, 2021. Here is my breakdown:

This is an expert-level exam!

I took the AZ-700 Azure Network Engineer Associate which was the hardest associate exam that I ever took and AZ-305 required way more thinking and Azure background knowledge than AZ-700.

I had 61 questions with 3 case studies at the end. That was why time management was a must! I reviewed each section after answering all of my questions. That helped because I had only 13 minutes left after this exam.

Proposed study to get to AZ-305

• AZ-900 – DP-900 – SC-900 – AZ-104 – AZ-500 – AZ-700 – AZ-305

You will need the basics (AZ-900), DP-900 for the Big Data solutions and pipelines, SC-900 for Microsoft Security basics, AZ-104 which is mandatory for this Azure Architect Expert sequence, AZ-500 for Azure security especially Azure Identity Protection, Privilege Identity Management, conditional access policy and application security. Finally, you would need AZ-700 for Azure networking, app security, data security and container security.

Know the following:

• Azure AD, hybrid cloud and Azure AD Domain Services
• Blueprints vs. Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
• 4 load balancers (Hence why I say that you need AZ-700!)
  • Azure Load Balancer
  • App gateway
  • Front door
  • Traffic Manager
• Logic App vs. Azure Functions
• vCore vs. DTU
• Azure Identity Protection vs. Privilege Identity Management

The Resources I Used To Sit For This AZ-305 Beta Exam

The current AZ-305 Whizlabs, Udemy and TestPrepTraining resources helped BUT:

I leaned on my AZ-700 cert knowledge. I noticed that Azure networking and the load balancers were prominently featured on my AZ-305 beta exam. If you just took AZ-104 only as Microsoft recommended in its roadmap then you would had failed miserably!

I recommend TestPrepTraining AZ-700 because it has short modules. Whizlabs only has full AZ-700 tests. Whizlabs does have Azure Traffic Routing class and AZ-304 which other test takers are saying has an 80% overlap with AZ-305 (I did not use AZ-304 for my studies).

I attended this week’s SC-300 Microsoft Certification Week for Partners livestreams. That 4-day livestream helped me learn about entitlement management and external identities that are within Azure AD. These showed up on my AZ-305 exam.

Final notes

I would admit that during certain parts of this beta exam, I thought I failed because there were some things that were on my exam that weren’t covered by the prep material. I thought that I did well once I calmed down and clicked the review button.

But like I said with AZ-700 when everyone else was complaining that they failed, Microsoft can fail everybody!