Yayy!! I got my AZ-900 and AI-900 certificates. Now I can say I know Azure and you must beleive me :P

Despite my keen interest in VLSI and electronics in general, I ended up doing database engineerign for most part of my life. I've dealt with on-premise installations and lived inside terminals for 8 years.

Cloud services isn't my day to day thing. But it was exciting and scary, to sit for certifications within Azure: AZ-900 (Microsoft Azure Fundamentals) and then AI-900 (Azure AI Fundamentals)

I really thought Microsoft Learn website is in Greek or Latin. I have a new tab open for each word, and I ran out of tabs. Some of the words look same same but different.

But I'm excellent at Jigsaw puzzles. I solve them with patience, and even dream about the pieces. Like that girl in Queen's Gambit.
Applied the same thing here, trying to find pieces as well as the final artwork that is to be puzzled together.

So yeah, somewhere between “what is a resource group?” and “wait, this is not machine learning, this is AI services*”, things started making sense.

AZ-900 felt like learning a new city map. You don’t need to know how every building is constructed, but you should know which road goes where. Subscriptions, resource groups, regions, availability zones — at first it all felt like buzzword soup.

Slowly, I realised it’s mostly about responsibility. Who manages what, what is Microsoft’s headache and what is yours. Once that clicked, the rest kind of fell into place. Storage, compute, networking — same old concepts, just wearing Azure clothes.

Then came AI-900, which was… interesting. I went in thinking it would be hardcore algorithms and maths, and instead I met Cognitive Services smiling politely at me. Vision, Speech, Language, Decision — all these ready-made blocks that you can just plug in. As someone who comes from a very build-it-yourself background, this was both comforting and mildly offensive.

But again, puzzle pieces. The goal here isn’t to train models from scratch, but to know when to use AI, which service fits, and what problem it actually solves. Once I stopped overthinking it, the exam felt more about understanding use-cases than definitions.

I won’t pretend I’m suddenly an Azure wizard. I’m still more comfortable staring at a blinking cursor on a terminal. But these certifications gave me vocabulary. They gave structure to the chaos. Now when someone says “cloud-native”, “serverless”, or “AI-powered”, my brain doesn’t immediately shut down.

And honestly, the biggest win? Confidence. The kind that says, okay, this is new, this is scary, but I’ve done harder migrations at 3 AM on on-prem servers. I can learn this too.

So yes — I know Azure now. You must believe me :P