I'm here with Orin Thomas from Microsoft.
Thanks Orin for joining me.
And Orin is one of the people behind the new certs
of AZ-800 and AZ-801, as it's called.
So thanks Orin for joining me.
No worries Lars, good to talk to you again.
Yeah I know. Orin is actually not too far from me,
but because we can't leave home restrictions, et cetera,
we have to do it via Zoom.
Otherwise we'd do it in person. So maybe next time.
But first of all, I want to know
what are these two new certs?
Or it's one cert, two exams. I should be specific here.
So 800 and 801, what are they?
Well, what they are is that they are a certification
that is dealing very much for people who are
implementing hybrid technologies.
So what they're designed around is for people that,
for example, are responsible for managing
very traditional Microsoft on-premises types of networks,
but who are starting to reach up to the cloud
and are starting to integrate
those existing on premises network
with the appropriate cloud services, such as Azure Arc,
Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and so on.
All right.
On from that, why do we need two exams?
Because everything so far has sort of been, you know,
everything's been dwindled down, essentially,
or, you know, boiled down to one exam.
Except for the architecture one.
Well, if you even think about the MS100 and the MS101 exam
for M365, that's two exams, one cert as well.
And if you got back into Microsoft's history,
like my first certification was the MCSE on Windows NT4,
and that was a six exam certification.
And then even with our most recent
Windows Server certification, that was three exams.
So the reason that we have two,
and two is fairly pared down,
is that there are a vast variety of technologies
that someone who is an on premises
Windows Server Administrator,
or Windows Server Hybrid Administrator, actually deals with.
And in the first exam, we start off with what we call
the core ones, which are identity,
storage, management, networking, and compute.
What we're looking at there is your meat and potatoes roles.
All of the things that you would absolutely need to know.
And especially when we're covering things
like storage and networking, things that you need to know
before you start moving into more complicated topics.
In the second exam, we're looking at security,
high availability, backup and recovery,
troubleshooting, monitoring, and then migrating
on-premises workloads into Azure.
So the idea there, with the second exam,
is that these are the topics that you would hit
once you had those foundational or those core topics done.
Now in the past, with the Windows Server 2016 exams,
there was a whole identity exam.
And then there was a whole
sort of storage and networking exam.
And then there was also compute and things there.
And then in previous versions,
you then went on and you did a whole lot of other things.
So a lot of things have sort of been pared out.
And at the moment, the approach with these exams
is that this was about as tight as it could be made
and still give appropriate levels of coverage
to what most people do.
Because role-based certifications are about the tasks
that people do on a daily basis.
So some of the things that are not in the exam, for example,
is too much on IIS administration,
and too much on, say, ADFS administration,
and too much on setting up a remote,
I mean, there's a little bit of remote desktop in there,
but again, it's not some of the,
the previous Windows Server exams were certainly
much more broadly covering all of the things
the operating system does.
Because one of the things that people forget is that
just as Azure is almost an operating system
with many, many, many, many different surfaces, so is Linux.
And the Linux certifications
generally have two exams as well.
If you're looking at, say, a Red Hat certification,
you'll look into that operating system certification,
you're looking at multiple exams as well.
There was also the way that we interwove hybrid in.
So instead of telling a separate hybrid story,
when we were treating the hybrid technologies
as sort of a separate set of topics,
we've really, in this exam,
approached hybrid from the functional domain perspective.
So when we're talking about identity,
we're talking about on-premises identity
and how that moves into hybrid identity.
We're talking about storage, on premises storage,
moving into hybrid storage,
networking into hybrid networking,
disaster recovery, high availability,
all of this sort of what you might've started off with
and then where you're growing into.
Yeah, right.
So I mean, that all makes sense.
And it sounds like it's quite a large topic.
So why did you choose to do it now?
Is this because the cert was ready,
or is there a specific history
behind why this is a good timing for it, right now?
There are many, many people who got into the industry,
especially on the Windows or the Microsoft ecosystem side,
with certification.
And to them, certification has been a real north star.
It's always been interesting
to sort of contrast IT pros versus developers,
where developers have been less enamored with certification
compared to IT pros who take a very much,
a very certification-focused approach to their careers.
Very true. Very true.
So one of the big spines for a lot of people,
and again, IT pros tend to skew a bit older than developers,
many IT pros have already picked up Windows Server
certifications, and have almost used that
as a roadmap about what they needed to know.
And so, in terms of why now?
With this focus on role-based certifications,
what we don't want to do with a certification,
and what was certainly done 20 or 30 years ago,
is 20 or 30 years ago, certifications would be released,
and they would talk about things that were brand new,
that you would never have used.
Whereas with a role-based certification,
it's really about attesting to stuff that you might be doing
or that you is within reach of you doing right now.
So with the hybrid story, Azure's hybrid technologies
have now reached a level of maturity where people are
actually implementing them in the real world.
Where we've seen people start to use Azure Arc,
start to connect their event logs
into Azure Security Center.
And we also had the bonus
of the approximately three year release cadence
of Windows Server, with Windows Server 2022 being released.
And we sat there and we thought,
"You know what? Windows Server 2022,
"one of the things we want to get across
"is how good this is in hybrid situations."
We've got these great hybrid technologies.
This would be a good time to come back
to certification on Windows Server,
because we've got a good story here.
Whereas if we'd done it prior to now,
it still might've been a bit too biased
into the Windows Server,
and there wasn't enough of a hybrid story.
But now we feel we've got a really good story.
And a realistic story for what people are doing.
So that people who, and everybody's at a different stage
in their hybrid journey.
Some people they might have Office 365 or Microsoft 365,
so Exchange is not on prem.
So they've already got hybrid identity,
but that might be it.
And there's others that are fully in the cloud.
And this is trying to deal with
sort of where you are on that continuum,
so that you understand where you can go on that continuum.
No, so that makes sense. You said people
are on different parts of their journey within hybrid.
And I totally agree with that,
because I've done a few presentations on multi-cloud
and the hybrid and how that relates to each other
and yada yada yada, and it's just, people are everywhere.
So who is your target audience
for these two exams and this one cert?
Out of the bat, it's obviously people
that work with Windows Server on a daily basis
and are starting to use, or already use,
Microsoft cloud technologies,
or at least interested in starting to use
the Microsoft cloud technologies.
There are several million people,
we know just from looking at LinkedIn data,
who are already claiming Windows Server as a job role.
We know that the number of jobs in the US,
before what we've got going on,
last time Windows Server jobs were advertised,
there was about a hundred thousand roles
just in the United States alone, that required
Windows Server.
So there is a substantive audience
because there's a lot of organizations
that have adopted Active Directory and Windows Server
as their sort of, and then, you know,
Windows client operating system,
and are running in that ecosystem.
They've got heterogeneous workloads,
and they're appropriate for where they are.
But what we're looking at,
is we're looking at that market that's always been there
for Windows Server Administrators.
In the NT4 days, more than a million people
certified on Windows NT4 in just a couple of years.
And obviously it changes over time,
but there's certainly an audience out there.
We're also looking at people who are...
And IT pro is very much almost like a trade in some ways.
But people who are coming through and they want to go
and manage medium-sized corporate networks.
A lot of those corporate networks
still have Windows Server as their backbone.
Absolutely. Yeah.
So when a certification is published,
it's not just the Microsoft resources that are available,
but as a certification is clearly important
to a lot of people, a lot of third parties come on board
and then create their own training to support that.
So again, back in the earlier days,
if a certification was released for a particular product,
you would get a bunch of different third parties
creating content to support and to teach those people,
or people who are interested in it,
how that technology worked.
And that third party ecosystem is very important
because a lot of people learn in a lot of different ways.
And there's a lot of third party providers
that cater to different learning styles
that might not be catered to by someone
who just wants to go and read a docs.microsoft.com article.
Yeah, totally.
We're going to create a course on this certification,
without a doubt.
When, I don't know. Sort of out of my hands.
But right now, I'm assuming you can
take the exam right now in beta. I think that's right?
But where do I go to study for it?
What is the best path to actually
get some knowledge on this area?
Okay, so actually, you can't take the exam in beta.
And the beta won't actually be available until December.
Okay. So what I'll do,
there will be a link on the bottom of the screen
to a blog post that I wrote
that actually then links out to two study guides.
And what those study guides have
is that they have a list of the exam objectives,
and they have a list of relevant docs.microsoft.com articles
and MS Learn modules.
So that's one place where you could start.
One of the important things about those study guides
is that, that's if you want to go to
the primary source material.
Now what you get, obviously, and one of the things
that places like ACG are very good at,
is distilling all of that information
from the primary source material
into an easily digestible video based format
that someone can consume in a way that suits them
based on the way that ACG, or Pluralsight,
presents the information.
And that was always, as a former author for Pluralsight,
and still a current textbook author,
what the value proposition of us
creating that sort of tertiary material has been,
is that we are doing the hard work,
figuring out which needles
in the particular documentation haystack
are relevant or likely to be tested in an exam.
So one of the reasons we wanted to get,
when we announced the certification,
put up some study guides as well,
was to not only prime the pump
for students who were thinking of taking the beta
in a couple of months time,
because studying for a certification, as you know,
can take several months.
So if you've got the material there,
but also priming the pump for content creators,
or third party ancillary content creators,
to start creating their own stuff
so that they're not standing there
going, "Wow, this exam gets released next week.
"We've got to start creating content."
But that by the time the exams are released,
in beta in December, and then sometime,
probably in the new year, when the exams go live,
by the time the exams go live,
the hope is that there will be
a whole lot of third party content
that people who want to take the exam can consume
to help them prepare.
Yup, yup. No, that makes sense.
Thanks very much, Orin.
I'm looking forward to see what happens with it.
This is not exactly my ballpark,
as you said, developers, that's me.
But it is interesting because there's been very little
sort of official Microsoft stuff around, especially Arc,
and some of the more hybrid technologies.
So thanks for putting this together.
You and the team, of course.
And well, yeah, looking forward to see where it goes.
Fantastic. Great to talk to you, Lars.