Having recently been working on a project to deploy Azure Stack Hub, I thought it a good opportunity to study for the Microsoft cert for Azure Stack Hub, the AZ-600: Azure Stack Hub Operator Associate.
The Azure Stack Hub certification was released back in 2018 as a 70-537: Configuring and Operating a Hybrid Cloud with Azure Stack. Since then, Microsoft’s Azure Stack portfolio has grown and rebranded, and the current certification (at time of writing) is the AZ-600:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-stack-hub-operator/
First port of call for me was to gain access to a test instance of Azure Stack Hub so I could test the platform and the various functions required for the exam syllabus. The good news is that Microsoft provide a ‘development kit’ version of Azure Stack Hub that you can install on a VM for testing purposes (as a fully blown instance of ASH is a minimum of 4 physical nodes). The bad news is that even the trial version requires a VM/host of at least 16 vCPU and 192 GB RAM:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/asdk/asdk-deploy-considerations?view=azs-2108
So if you want to deploy to Azure it will start costing a lot very quickly For this reason, I’ve been using an Azure labs provider to spin up a test instance of ASH. In my case, I was able to get a login to this XtremeLabs course to prepare for the exam.
In addition to this, I’ve found the following video series to be very helpful on YouTube:
In addition to Thomas Maurer’s excellent study guide:
I normally use Udemy and LinkedIn learning for my video learning, but unfortunately I couldn’t find much material on either platform (aside from mock exam questions).
Finally, regarding exam questions I’ve always used Whizlabs as it’s cheap and has good quality questions:
https://www.whizlabs.com/az-600/
Recently however, my company have kindly been offering access to the official Microsoft mock exam questions (through Measure-up).
Difficult Sections of the Syllabus
These are the areas that I found particularly difficult:-
- Managing updates for Azure Stack Hub, as there are three different update types, each with different processes. Make sure you learn them all as I found they came up a lot in exam questions:
- Azure Stack Hub System updates (and OEM updates)
- Tenant updates
- Resource Provider Updates
- Connecting to Privileged Endpoints and using Azure Stack PowerShell
- Multi-tenant deployments
- Adding tenants
- Removing tenants
- Multi-tenant configurations
- Subscriptions and billing
- Azure Stack Hub in disconnected mode (a common installation scenario)
- App Service/Event hub Worker tiers – Some questions ask you to correctly size App Service and Event hub workers, so it’s worth brushing up on how to capacity plannings:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/operator/event-hubs-rp-capacity-planning?view=azs-2108
I also find that when sitting mock exam after mock exam when you’re getting ready to sit the real thing, it’s a good exercise to screengrab the answers to difficult questions (and their explanations) and store in a folder for review the night/morning before your exam.
Microsoft Learn Collection
I’ve created a custom Microsoft Learn collection of the sections I found difficult here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/users/archiechristopher-7596/collections/kqz4bmxy3ww3mz
It’s also worth pointing you in the direction of the official Microsoft Learn collection for AZ-600:
https://aka.ms/AZ-600StudentMaterials
Final gotchas and the Exam itself
I’m pleased to say that I passed the exam on June 1st. Regarding the questions themselves, as is commonly the case MeasureUp is a good indicator of the type of questions but not a full list of the questions you’re going to get yourselves. There were also lots of case studies and questions you couldn’t go back to, more so than normal exams. In my exam in particular there were also a lot of questions on correct Azure Stack sizing (App service and event hub workers) so going through that the night before really paid off.
After I started getting 80-90% in the mock exams from MeasureUp, I also decided to try a few other free exam providers and found a good free collection for AZ-600 on the website itexams.com:
https://www.itexams.com/exam/AZ-600
However, I found some of these questions to be outdated (for example using the 2019/2020 version of Azure Stack Hub) meaning that the answers were incorrect or no longer relevant.