I’ve recently taken the Azure 303 Exam and would like to share my experience, hoping it migth well someone. I am going to start with the organizational stuff, then some actuall tips regarding the important things relevant to the exam, and share the resources I’ve used. Firstly, I believe the actuall time for the exam was 90 minutes, plus 30 minutes for the check-in and reading the instructions. The exam began with a Use case related series of questions. After answering the last question in the series, you cannot go back and have to move forward. I should also point out, that the timing is quite generous, when I was done, I had about 20 minutes time left. Getting to the actuall tips:
- Azure AD is very, very important. You need to know the difference between Pass Through Auth, Password Hash and ADFS and when to use them. You also need to know the P1, P2 and free licensing tiers.
- know the built-in roles in Azure and when to use them (Contributor, Owner, Reader …) and IAM (Access Control), Service Principals
- In networking, know when to use VPN Gateway, Express Route, Network peering (IP overlaping, and hub and spoke model …).
- Know all tiers of App Services and logging and monitoring mechanisms.
- Know Storage Account tiers (hot, cold, archive) and redundancy options (LRS, ZRS, GRS, RA_GRS). Premium SSD is only supported with LRS.
- You need to know the difference between event hub and event grid.
- Have a rough knowledge of different VM Series (B for moderate burstable workloads, F for Compute Optimzed) …
- Scaleset vs AZ
- Key Vault
- Know the difference between Azure SQL Server, SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server on VM. Some features of Legacy SQL Systems are only supported on SQL Server on VMs. Also know the Powershell Scripts for spinning up the SQL Servers.
- know Powershell scripts for vms, SQL, Key Vault, Storage, Vnet … They write a patial script and ask to fill in the blank with the given options.
- Know the difference between Hyper-v and VMWare limitations when migrating vms. (Regarding the OS Disk (2GB for both) the data disk 4 and 32 for Hyper-v and VMWare respectively )
- Know DTU price modeling of Azure SQL (not supported in Azure Managed SQL) and how to calculate it.
- Know when to use, Azure Front Door (suitable for Latency and internet facing apps), Application Gateway and Load Balancers and Traffic Manager.
- Know when to apply NSG and Application Security Group.
- Azure Cosmos DB Apis and when to use them (Mongo, CQL …)
I also took the official practice tests, which were pretty helpful (from PearsonVue on measureup.com). There were some tests on udemy which are unfortunately removed. Microsoft provides some free hands on training which I definitely recommend, however, I see this mainly as an introduction to the services, as the questions are much more detailed than what you learn in the labs. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-solutions-architect/
Also, you can choose a bundled product for your exam: it includes one practice test (one/two month access, Az 303 test + 1 retake). Wish you success in your exam!
Some useful links:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/migrate-support-matrix-vmware-migration
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/migrate-support-matrix-hyper-v-migration
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/introduction