The AZ-204 Microsoft Azure Developer Associate certification exam is tailored for people overseeing various development stages. This includes tasks such as gathering requirements, designing, developing, deploying, securing, maintaining, optimizing, and monitoring applications and services.
Candidates for this certification are expected to be skilled in using Azure SDKs, managing data storage solutions, establishing data connections, and integrating APIs. They should also demonstrate expertise in authenticating and authorizing applications, deploying compute and container resources, and troubleshooting applications within the Azure environment.
Additionally, candidates will collaborate with cloud solution architects, database administrators, DevOps teams, infrastructure managers, and other stakeholders to deliver comprehensive solutions. This involves responsibilities such as developing Azure Functions, managing web applications, and implementing solutions with Azure storage.
The ideal candidate possesses at least two years of programming experience, has proficiency with Azure SDKs, and is familiar with tools like Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and similar resources.
The content of the exam will test your ability to perform the following:
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Develop Azure compute solutions
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Develop for Azure storage
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Implement Azure security
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Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions
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Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services
For more information about the AZ-204 exam, you can check out this official exam study guide. This study guide will provide you with comprehensive review materials to help you pass the exam with flying colors.
Study Materials
For the Microsoft Azure Developer Associate exam, we suggest that you check out these study materials first before you take the actual exam. These resources will help you understand complex concepts and services that will be useful on your exam day.
1. Microsoft Learn – This website offers various learning paths for Microsoft certifications. For the AZ-204 certification exam, you should focus on the following modules:
2. Azure Documentation – These documents provide an overview, tutorials, examples, and how-to guides that will enhance your knowledge of various Azure services.
3. Azure Blog – To stay updated on new technologies and offerings from Microsoft Azure, you can subscribe to their newsletter.
4. Azure FAQs – You can find the FAQs section in the Azure documentation. This section is a compiled list of commonly asked questions, use cases, and comparisons of various Azure services.
5. Azure free account – The Azure portal offers a 12-month trial for hands-on experience, along with free credits available to spend during the first 30 days.
6. Tutorials Dojo’s Azure Cheat Sheets – With our cheat sheets, you can easily grasp the information in Azure documentation. They are presented in bullet point format to emphasize key concepts.
7. Tutorials Dojo’s AZ-204 Microsoft Azure Developer Associate Practice Exams – Our practice exams are widely considered the best in the market. Each question in our practice tests is accompanied by detailed explanations at the end of each set. This helps you understand the important concepts necessary for passing your Microsoft Azure certification exam on your first attempt.
Azure Services to Focus On
Your primary source of information for studying the AZ-204 certification exam is the Azure documentation. To understand the various scenarios covered in the exam, you should have a thorough understanding of the following services:
- Azure App Service – Understand how to deploy web applications and APIs on the Azure platform. Know how to scale applications and set up continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
- Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) – Know how to create, configure, and manage VMs, including scale sets and VM configurations for different workloads.
- Azure Functions – Understand how to create serverless applications, manage triggers, and implement Azure Functions for event-driven scenarios.
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – Learn how to manage and deploy containers in a managed Kubernetes environment, including setting up clusters and scaling applications.
- Azure Storage – Focus on Azure Blob Storage and Azure Queue Storage. Learn how to create, configure, and manage storage accounts.
- Azure Cosmos DB – Understand how to implement and manage Azure Cosmos DB, including partitioning, consistency models, and creating databases and containers.
- Azure Service Bus – Know how to work with Azure Service Bus queues and topics to enable communication between different applications and services.
- Azure Event Grid – Learn how to implement Event Grid for event-driven architectures and how to integrate it with other services.
- Azure Logic Apps – Focus on designing automated workflows and integrations between services, including connecting with APIs and systems.
- Azure Key Vault – Learn how to securely store and manage secrets, keys, and certificates within your Azure environment.
- Azure Monitor – Understand how to monitor and diagnose applications, infrastructure, and network using Azure Monitor and its components, such as Application Insights.
- Azure API Management – Know how to manage, publish, and secure APIs, especially when creating or managing an API gateway in your applications.
We suggest that you check out Tutorials Dojo’s Microsoft Azure Cheat Sheets, which provide bullet-point summaries of the most important concepts on different Azure services.
Validate Your Knowledge
If you’re feeling confident because you’ve followed the recommended materials above, it’s time to test your knowledge of various Azure concepts and services. For high-quality practice exams, you can use the Tutorials Dojo AZ-204 Microsoft Azure Developer Associate Practice Exams.
These practice tests cover the relevant topics that you can expect from the real exam. It also contains different types of questions such as single choice, multiple response, hotspot, yes/no, drag and drop, and case studies. Every question on these practice exams has a detailed explanation and adequate reference links that help you understand why the correct answer is the most suitable solution. After you’ve taken the exams, it will highlight the areas that you need to improve on. Together with our cheat sheets, we’re confident that you’ll be able to pass the exam and have a deeper understanding of how Azure works.
Sample Practice Test Questions:
Question 1
You manage an Azure App Service that serves users across multiple regions. The application uses Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic intelligently and has Application Insights enabled for monitoring. Additionally, Azure Front Door is configured to enhance global load balancing and content delivery.
Your team must generate monthly reports on uptime trends and analyze historical performance data to ensure high availability.
Which solutions will achieve this goal? (Select TWO.)
Note: Each correct selection is worth one point.
- Azure Front Door Health Probes
- Azure Monitor logs
- Application Insights Availability Tests
- Azure Traffic Manager Endpoint Monitoring
- Azure Monitor metrics
Correct Answers: 2,5
Azure Monitor Logs is a robust service designed to help you collect and analyze telemetry data from your Azure resources. It provides deep insights into your applications, infrastructure, and network by gathering log data from various sources, including Azure App Services, virtual machines, and more. With the power of Kusto Query Language (KQL), you can perform complex queries to analyze system performance, troubleshoot issues, and detect abnormal patterns. This functionality is especially useful for monitoring long-term trends, such as generating monthly uptime reports and diagnosing performance issues over time. By centralizing log data, Azure Monitor Logs helps ensure operational efficiency and the availability of your applications.
The service integrates with other Azure monitoring solutions like Application Insights and Azure Security Center, offering a comprehensive view of your environment’s health. This integration allows you to correlate log data with application performance metrics, security insights, and network traffic, providing a 360-degree perspective on your app’s health. Azure Monitor Logs also supports custom dashboards, alerting mechanisms, and automated actions based on log data, which makes it a powerful tool for both real-time monitoring and historical analysis. Whether you’re monitoring uptime, error rates, or system resource usage, this service provides actionable insights to maintain optimal performance.
Azure Monitor Metrics complements Azure Monitor Logs by offering real-time, high-frequency performance data for your Azure resources. It tracks important metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, request rates, and response times, providing instant visibility into the performance of your application. Azure Monitor Metrics is essential for detecting performance degradation or availability issues before they affect end users. It allows you to create custom dashboards, configure alerts, and track metrics over time, which is valuable for generating monthly reports on system availability and trends. By leveraging both logs and metrics, you can ensure a proactive approach to maintaining application health and availability.
Hence, the correct answers are:
–Â Azure Monitor logs.
–Â Azure Monitor metrics.
The option that says: Azure Front Door Health Probes is incorrect because it is primarily used for real-time health monitoring of the application’s endpoints. They ensure that only healthy instances serve traffic, but they typically focus on detecting issues with individual endpoints or regions at a specific moment. While they help with immediate health status and routing decisions, they simply don’t provide the historical analysis or long-term uptime trends required for generating monthly reports or analyzing performance over time.Â
The option that says: Application Insights Availability Tests is incorrect because it is primarily used to simulate user traffic from various locations to measure the availability of your application in real time. While they can provide insights into availability and alert you to downtime, they only test specific endpoints at set intervals and do not provide the deep historical analysis or detailed trend reporting over extended periods.
The option that says: Azure Traffic Manager Endpoint Monitoring is incorrect because it is only useful for monitoring the health of the endpoints being routed to, and it helps ensure that only healthy endpoints are receiving traffic. However, it focuses on real-time health checks and routing decisions rather than storing and analyzing historical data over time. It ensures that traffic is distributed to healthy regions or endpoints but does not collect the historical performance data needed to track uptime trends or generate monthly reports.
References:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/logs/data-platform-logs
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/data-platform-metrics
Check out this Azure Monitor Cheat Sheet:
Question 2
You are tasked to design a healthcare application to store patient records using CosmosDB for data storage. The application needs to handle batches of relational data such as patient information, medical history, and appointment schedules. The system must support complex queries for retrieving patient data based on multiple attributes and scale dynamically to accommodate growing data.
- PostgreSQL API
- Gremlin API
- SQL API
- Cassandra API
Correct Answer: 3
The SQL API in Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides flexible and scalable data storage with SQL-like querying capabilities. It allows applications to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data while offering the ability to perform complex queries on data using a familiar SQL syntax. This API supports rich query features like filtering, sorting, joining, and aggregating data, which makes it ideal for use cases where detailed and complex queries are necessary. Additionally, it supports dynamic scaling by automatically partitioning data, ensuring high performance even as data grows.
The SQL API allows for multi-region distribution of data, providing low-latency access to data across the globe, which is crucial for applications requiring high availability and reliability. It also allows developers to design their data model using flexible schema management, making it easier to evolve the data structure as the application’s requirements change. The combination of elastic scalability, low-latency access, and rich query support makes the SQL API an excellent choice for applications like healthcare systems that need to store and query large volumes of structured data.
One of the key features of the SQL API in Azure Cosmos DB is its ability to scale horizontally through partitioning. This enables the database to distribute data automatically across multiple nodes, ensuring that it can handle large amounts of data and high request rates. By partitioning data, Cosmos DB ensures elastic scalability as the application grows; it automatically scales the throughput and storage to match the workload demands, making it ideal for use cases like healthcare applications, where data volume can grow significantly over time. The automatic index management further enhances query performance without requiring manual configuration.
Hence, the correct answer is: SQL API.
PostgreSQL API is incorrect because it is primarily designed for relational data models and provides SQL-based querying for structured data. While it supports complex queries, it is typically used for applications that need traditional relational database features like joins, foreign keys, and strict schemas. However, PostgreSQL is not as well-suited for dynamic scalability and globally distributed workloads, which are essential in scenarios where the healthcare application must handle large amounts of data across multiple regions.
Gremlin API is incorrect because it is designed for a graph-based data model. It is ideal for use cases such as social networks, recommendation engines, or fraud detection, where relationships between entities need to be explicitly modeled and queried in a graph structure. However, it is unsuitable for relational data like patient records, medical histories, or appointment schedules, which are better represented in tabular or document models. Gremlin is not optimized for complex queries involving multiple attributes in a relational format.Â
Cassandra API is incorrect because it is designed for workloads that need high availability and scalability, particularly for write-heavy applications with minimal consistency requirements. Cassandra excels in environments where data is distributed across many nodes with high write throughput but does not prioritize strong consistency, complex querying, or relational data models. It is typically used for applications that handle massive data writes in real time.
References:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/choose-api
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/introduction
Check out this Azure Cosmos DB Cheat Sheet:
For more Azure practice exam questions with detailed explanations, check out the Tutorials Dojo Portal:
Final Remarks
To excel in the AZ-204 exam, a solid foundation in theoretical knowledge alone won’t suffice. While it’s essential to understand key Azure concepts, hands-on practice is crucial for reinforcing that understanding. Spend time exploring the Microsoft Azure Portal and engage in real-world simulations to grasp how services are applied in practical scenarios. By combining practical experience with theoretical learning, you’ll significantly boost your confidence and capability to navigate the exam’s complex questions.
Here are some important tips for exam success:
- Time management is key: Allocate your time wisely, ensuring you review your responses, especially for case studies and yes/no questions, before proceeding.
- Maintain focus and composure: Stay calm and centered during the exam to think clearly under pressure.
- Prioritize rest: Being well-rested is essential for peak performance. Make sure you are both mentally and physically prepared on the day of your exam.
- Be flexible with your preparation: If you feel unready, don’t hesitate to reschedule the exam, allowing yourself additional time to study and gain confidence.
By balancing preparation, rest, and practice, you’ll set yourself up for success in the AZ-204 exam. Good luck, and we wish you all the best.
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Written by: Nestor Mayagma Jr.
