<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"><channel><title>Az103 on Matt Allford</title><link>https://www.mattallford.com/tags/az103/</link><description>Recent content in Az103 on Matt Allford</description><generator>Hugo</generator><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Sun, 29 Dec 2019 04:20:46 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://www.mattallford.com/tags/az103/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>Azure AZ-103 Certification Experience</title><link>https://www.mattallford.com/azure-az-103-certification-experience/</link><pubDate>Sun, 29 Dec 2019 04:20:46 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.mattallford.com/azure-az-103-certification-experience/</guid><description>&lt;h1 id="introduction"&gt;Introduction&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of 2019, I made a decision to aim for a certification in one of the primary public clouds. The decision on which cloud to focus on was relatively simple for me for a couple of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Microsoft certianly seem to be doing awesome things with Azure and it feels like there is a lot of hype around Azure in the circles I travel in, at least more so than GCP or AWS&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;I work for a partner and while not specifically in the team that are delivering public cloud solutions and managed services, we are currently 100% focused on Azure and are a Microsoft triple gold partner. It makes sense for me to skill up in the public cloud that the company I work for is fully invested in&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;rsquo;t want this to become a discussion around whether certifications are &amp;ldquo;worth it&amp;rdquo;, but specically on the second point above, when you work for a partner, almost all vendors still put requirements on partners to have &amp;lsquo;x&amp;rsquo; amount of certified staff at different levels to achieve different partner statuses. The reality is, if you are a technical staff member working for a MSP / VAR, you should absolutely expect your employer will want to you become and remain certified with key partner vendors.&lt;/p&gt;</description></item></channel></rss>