Tasty Nuggets for the AZ-500 Exam
- joe parr
- Jul 18, 2022
- 3 min read
So, after recently studying, sitting and eventually passing my AZ-500 Azure Security Technologies exam, I thought it would be fair for me to share my thoughts and study advice for said exam.
Before I begin…
GET YOURSELF AN AZURE SUBSCRIPTION
It massively helps when running through labs, testing things out, exploring features and running through “try yourself” sections of learning.
Yes, you could potentially have to pay, but for the exposure to the Azure technologies, it’s well worth it. When I say you have to pay, it will be little to nothing.
How so? Well, you can deploy a resource, check out the features, have a poke around and then delete it. The cost will be negligible. That said, if you work for an IT company, you may have access to an MSDN account, with that, you get £115 worth of free credit per month, so go wild!
Right, into the nitty gritty and to start…
Study Material
As a starting point, the Microsoft Learn path for the AZ-500 is great. It covers a lot of content, each section of the exam and has some handy little knowledge checks at the end of each section. It is a bit of a read and may not be the right sort of study for some people but does cover the spectrum of requirements.
Sign in with your Microsoft account and start tracking your progress, gain XP and LEVEL UP.
As I am such a kind person, the link to the learn page is here, make sure you scroll to the bottom though.
Obviously, you can pay for access to sites like PluralSight and CBT Nuggets, the most cost effective (Free) method to study is on Youtube, by the name John Savill.
He is the GOAT in the Azure field. His study videos are incredibly thorough. He couples whiteboarding with demonstrations within the Azure portal and exams of which. The best part about it, they are Ad free and some of these videos are 2 to 3 hours long. Honestly, I cannot speak highly enough of this guy and he is British too!
Not sure on a subject, I’m sure if you search his channel, you will find a video. He even has a AZ-500 study cram link below
Even during the writing of this blog, I realized he has a AZ-500 playlist! Link for the playlist is below aswell!
Now…
The Exam Itself
I would like to touch on a few points here and before I start, I'm not going to give you any answers or questions.
To start the exam, I had no labs, interesting, as there have been contrasting reports across Google that they have reintroduced them, but we digress and move on.
It was a mixture of some of a few of the “NO GOING BACK” case studies, 40 odd questions and then those weird questions where you have the same question for 3 or 4 questions but cant go back.
I don’t know about you, but I hate the questions where you have to drag and drop how to do something in the correct order and, if you’re like me, no one knows how to do everything in the “Microsoft” order, so you would end up either clicking around, googling or just automating the damn thing anyway.
So now for some of…
Joe’s Exam Top Tips
Pay extra attention and focused studying on Azure Sentinel and Container Registries, especially and more so obviously, permissions required to perform certain tasks. Looping back to sentinel, I’d dedicate a fair bit of time to Runbooks and how they hang together and what you can and can’t leverage.
I’d also do a bit of extra studying around certificates, how to use them within applications and encryption methods
All in all though, make sure you know your managed identities from your service principals, and your Enterprise Admins to your Global Admin, go through the Microsoft Learn program, check out some of John Savills videos and you will be golden.
Yes, this blog isn’t going to tell you how to pass the exam, however, what it should do is provide you useful nuggets to make passing the exam that little bit easier!
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“Cheers”: “THF”
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