Well passed my Azure Solutions Architect Expert exam, so managed to nail two Expert certifications in a single month.
But holy damn it was a tough exam. Just completely exhausting. Every question was long and arduous and it felt like they threw a curveball in every question to make your life difficult. Like instead of "You're migrating 10 on premise SQL Databases to Azure, which solution should you reccomend that minimizes cost and eases administration effort", to which you would answer "Azure SQL Database with Elastic Pools"... they would instead ask something like "You're migrating 10 on premise SQL Databases to Azure, the solution must support 8GB of memory for OLTP and the logs must be directed to a solution that minimizes costs while maintaing instant read access, which solutions should you reccomend". So it was never simple. And I get it, the exam is for Solutions Architect, so it makes sense. But I didn't feel like any of the study material I went through actually prepared me for the complexity of questions I had, so it was a bit of a surprise.
Also, my case study at the end is going to give me nightmares for atleast a decade. A company that uses AD DS with multiple domains, multiple forests, with multiple offices, in multiple global regions.. they needed to migrate some workloads to Azure, each had different requirements, some needed to use Azure AD auth and some needed to stay on premise, some needed failover, some needed global access, some needed access only from some offices while keeping it offline from a diff office. All the offices were linked via ExpressRoute Global Reach and that kind of thing. And the questions were like "How many Azure AD tenants and how many Conditional Access Policies are required to satisfy the technical requirements?", "Which type of Azure AD DS authentication integration would best suit Office A for accessing Tenant B from AD Hybrid devices" bruh. I wanted to jump out of a window.
