How do I keep my Azure skills honed?

gettinold

Hi,

There are lots of good paying Azure Cloud jobs these days but I can't seem to find a way to keep my skills honed that suits me. 

I don't want to sign up for a free Azure account with my credit card and then forget to turn a server off. I don't want to keep changing email addresses every year to keep a free account.

I work in a series of provisioned servers that is hosted by another team and with leadership who oversell our Azure environment as this great thing but my Azure skills are very rusty. I am constantly required to sell our environment and I am going to vomit if I need to keep memorizing white papers for meetings. 

Is there any other way to keep my Azure skills honed when the other team won't give me access to the portal? My company will pay for any training but I am not big on emulation. I like the real deal.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

UnixGuy

I think you answered your own question, short of practicising on an Azure instance or doing a training course/cert that get you to practice on an Azure instance, how else can you keep your skills sharp?

gettinold

Concur, thanks.

chrisone

Check measureup.com, they have labs for certain exams at $35-$40. They allow you to attempt each lab twice and there are tons of challenges. For instance AZ-104 has 60+ challenges you can attempt each one twice and contains over 34hrs of hands on practice. 
AZ-500 has 20 challenges and 12 hrs of hands on practice. 

See the labs they have, at $35-$40 its a great opportunity to get hands on access to a live Azure portal.

Measure Up Labs

JDMurray

gettinold said:

I don't want to sign up for a free Azure account with my credit card and then forget to turn a server off.

I thought that only AWS has the "problem" of runaway charges on free accounts, and that Google and Azure have a hard-stop on spending to prevent surprise billing on free accounts. Am I wrong on this assumption?
 

gettinold said:

I don't want to keep changing email addresses every year to keep a free account.

That's pretty much the "poor man's" way of doing it. All those free email accounts you create are specifically for running free Cloud accounts and are typically all associated with the same credit card. You will no longer use an email and its associated Cloud account once the free trial is up, so there is nothing to maintain. Just make another email and Cloud account and keep practicing.