When I started preparing for AZ-400, I didn't have a personal site. I quickly realized that just finishing projects in Azure wasn't enough, I wanted to demonstrate them properly.
So I created one from scratch.
I needed clean, secure, public URLs for my demos (especially for blue/green deployments, feature flags, and container apps). Deploying everything to a proper domain made the whole learning experience much more realistic, valuable and fun!
Tech stack I ended up using:
- Azure Container Apps for the backend/demo containers
- Cloudflare for frontend hosting + DNS + SSL
Why having your own website helps a lot for AZ-400 (and for other cloud/devops certs):
- Practiced end-to-end scenarios (custom domains, TLS certificates, routing, managed identities)
- Learned proper security and performance configuration (Cloudflare gave me a ton of new insights)
- It forces you to think about real user experience and production-like setups
- Great for building a portfolio you can actually show in interviews or to your network
- Makes troubleshooting more realistic
In my case, the site is still running the blue (stable) version of my Azure Container Apps demo. It gave me a live environment to test revisions, traffic shifting, and feature flags via Azure App Configuration.
The projects that looked simple on paper became much richer once they were running on a real website.
If you're preparing for AZ-400 (or AZ-204, AZ-400, DP-203, etc.), consider creating a small personal site early. It doesn't have to be fancy, just functional.
Have you built a personal site or portfolio during your cert journey? Worth it or overkill? Curious to hear your experience!
