I'm happy to share that I passed AZ-305 today, which brings my total to seven Microsoft certifications. You can verify it here: AZ-305 Microsoft Learn credential.
I didn't start from scratch. I already had quite a bit of hands-on Azure experience, and part of this journey was about turning that experience into recognized certifications.
Looking back at the path I followed, my certification order was: AZ-900, AZ-204, AI-900, AI-102, AZ-104, AZ-400, AZ-305
Now that I've completed them all, I would recommend a slightly different order for most people: AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-204, AZ-400, AI-900, AI-102
My main reason is that AZ-104 gives you a strong practical Azure foundation, and AZ-305 builds very naturally on top of that. There is a lot of overlap between the two, especially around identity, networking, governance, storage, and infrastructure design. In my opinion, AZ-305 is best done soon after AZ-104 while those concepts are still fresh.
AZ-204 and AZ-400 also become easier to approach once you already understand the Azure platform well. For AI-900 and AI-102, I personally think it helps to leave them a bit later unless AI is your main focus, because then you can connect the concepts more easily to real Azure services and architecture decisions. But I wanted to get these certificates earlier 😄
So in summary: Start with AZ-900, move to AZ-104, then AZ-305, and build out from there depending on whether your focus is development, DevOps, or AI. For me, this journey has been a great way to structure my learning, validate what I already knew, and strengthen my hands-on work with Azure, Kubernetes, DevOps, and cloud architecture.
