Certifications – Adrian Ng's Notes

Cisco Rev up to Recert

Cisco really came in to save the day here with certifications expiring in August. Normally you have to pay for a subscription to Cisco U to get access to Continuing Education credits to recertify Cisco certifications. End of June they announced this program that’s good thru August 31 where it’s free to get up to 56 credits by completing three courses.

I only needed 32 credits to recertify my CCNA so I completed the Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics course… plus the Network Automation course which covered Python, APIs, Ansible, DevOps, Git. I actually learned a lot and it helped me improve my understanding of infrastructure automation. Took about 8 days of 4-8 hour sessions.

This gives me much more time to prepare for my CCNP instead of the rapidly approaching expiration date of Aug 23, 2023 for my CCNA. Now my CCNA is good until 2026 and I really should start my CCNP after I get a couple of AWS and Azure SA certs this season.

Certified Meraki Networking Associate (CMNA)

Got this a couple of weeks ago. This is one of the best entry level certifications to get in the networking industry. It’s relatively easy and builds lots of confidence and is available for free.

It used to be a participation certification, meaning you just have to attend a one day workshop and they give you the cert. Now they’ve added a certification test to it which makes it slightly harder but it’s really not that difficult if you’ve been paying attention during the workshop. And it’s unproctored so do with that information as you will.

Upon passing the certification test, they will send you a Meraki Polo T shirt, as well as some demo gear. In the past I got a MX64 firewall, MS120-8P switch, and MR33 access point. Now I believe it’s going to be a MX67W firewall/access point two-in-one.

Not sure if they’ll keep doing this but we will see in 3 years’ time.

Cisco 700-755 Small Business Technical Overview

Just passed this exam last week. It’s a 45-55 question exam that covers the Cisco offerings targeted at SMB. A lot of Meraki in there as well as entry level Cisco offerings. It’s not a difficult exam but it does take a day or two of preparation and refresher/studying to be ready for it.

Having said that, it’s an unproctered exam so take whatever meaning out of that. You need 790 to pass. I scored 860.

To prep, there are videos on Cisco SalesConnect that talk at you. https://salesconnect.cisco.com/#/

I prefer the in person training that Ingram Micro held in previous years for a similar exam. You sit in a classroom for a day and write the test at the end of that day. It’s not available this year.

Passing this exam was huge for the business though. We already had 3x CCNAs and the Sales cert, we were just missing this technical cert to be a Cisco Premier partner which allows us to deal reg, internal use, as well as receive rebates for Cisco deals. So needless to say I didn’t get any pushback when I expensed the US$90 + HST which was close to C$130 after forex and credit card 2% markup.

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ900

Passed on my first try 800/1000. Passing score: 700.

The Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification Exam is aimed at non-technical folks, including management leaders, financial auditors, sales reps, etc. Some IT folks opt to skip this as it is not a pre-requisite for later technical exams. I took it as a Director for Cloud Center of Excellence suggested I do.

This is a relatively straightforward exam. It seems daunting at first but once you learn the Microsoft lingo, it’s easy as pie. I refer to it as a word association exam. A lot of questions just test your knowledge of the Microsoft lingo.

The takeaway I got from having taken the course and gone through some practice exams, is that Microsoft really wants us to move away from servers and VMs, and towards serverless computing. So if there’s a question asking which is best? And your options are on prem server, hosted server, cloud VM, container, or Azure Functions (serverless computing), pick Azure Functions even though we all know the correct answer is it depends. (There are other questions which will test your individual knowledge of the definitions of servers, cloud VM, container, Azure Functions, etc. but the general recommendation is to run serverless to save cost while maintaining uptime performance given the absence of details/customer requirements.)

To pass this exam, I took a 2 day course AZ900 Azure Fundamentals, along with practice exam from examtopics.com. Links where possible are below.

However I actually recommend the 6 part self study over any instructor led course: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-fundamentals/

https://www.examtopics.com/exams/microsoft/az-900/view/

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Passed on my first try: 834/1000. Passing score is 700.

AWS’s CCP certification exam is slightly more challenging than Microsoft’s Azure Fundamentals Certification, even though both are considered entry level certifications targeted at… everyone (not just IT folks). It is aimed at sales reps, management leaders, finance auditors, etc. Some IT folks actually skip this cert as it’s not a pre-requisite for later, more technical certs but I still recommend it to get an idea of the look & feel and “culture” of the AWS certification questions and process. See what I mean below.

My biggest takeaway having passed the test now, is that you need to read carefully both the questions and each of the multiple choice answers in AWS’s exam as there could be a modifier or condition that renders the default answer incorrect:

An easy example would be including a negative operator like “Which of the following is not correct?” If you read too quickly or didn’t pay attention to the not, you might have picked the default correct association that comes to mind. AWS is tricky in the way they word the answers as well as the questions, so the multiple choice answers may at first seem like 1 correct answer with 3 incorrect answers, which in this case you’re actually looking for the one incorrect answer… anyways I know we’re all good with this one since… school exams.
A more complex example would be “What two resources or tools could a company use to predict their cloud spend, if they’re considering moving to cloud?” If you stopped paying attention after “predict cloud spend”, you would’ve picked an answer like Cost and Usage Report or Cost Explorer, which does in fact predict cloud spend, however it is based on previous usage. The condition specified that they’re considering moving to cloud, means there’s no previous usage to base predictions off of, so the correct answers would be the pricing calculator and an AWS sales rep. Tricky right?

In terms of studying I watched a 4 hour Youtube video by FreeCodeCamp.org and purchased a practice exam on tutorialsdojo. Links below.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams 2021