The Microsoft Certified: Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification (and exam AZ-220) is now LIVE and out of Beta. This is the first cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) certification from the major cloud providers and a great addition to the Microsoft Azure certification lineup!

The Microsoft Azure IoT Developer certification exam AZ-220 tests and validates your expertise as an Internet of Things (IoT) developer using Microsoft Azure IoT services. This certification is earned by passing just the single AZ-220 exam, and it’s a specialty certification without any prerequisites of earning any other Azure certifications first.

If you are an IoT Developer whose role is to build IoT solutions utilizing Microsoft Azure services, then the Microsoft Certified: Azure IoT Developer Speciality certification is for you!

Certification Target Audience

The Azure IoT Developer (AZ-220) certification is targeted towards all Developers working on building IoT solutions utilizing Microsoft Azure services and technologies. As such, Azure IoT Developers will be developers with a good understanding of the Azure services used to build IoT solutions with both Cloud and Edge integration.

The key job responsibilities of an Azure IoT Developer include the following:

• Coding IoT solutions using at least one Azure-supported language, including C#, Node.js, C, or Python.
• Creating and maintaining the cloud and edge portion of IoT solutions
• Configuring and Maintaining devices using Azure cloud services
• Setting up and configuring physical IoT devices
• Deploy compute / container resources and configure device networking
• Integrating data pipelines and data transformations as they relate to an IoT solution.
• Recognize the Azure IoT service configurations necessary for an IoT solution.

During the day to day duties of an Azure IoT Developer, they will perform the above mentioned activities, including a few related activities necessary to build and maintain a full Azure IoT solution. This will include design and code on physical devices, at the Edge, and into the Cloud.

While this exam focuses on the Azure IoT services and technologies primarily, it will expect you to have an understanding of coding physical devices using the Azure IoT Device SDKs.

Exam Overview Video

Here’s a short overview video detailing the exam objectives, prerequisites, and some study tips to help you in deciding if this is the right exam for you, and to help you on your certification journey:

Exam Objective Domains

The Microsoft Certified: Azure IoT Developer certification (AZ-220) exam covers a number of objective areas that are geared towards building IoT solutions utilizing Microsoft Azure services and functionality. This exam covers these Azure IoT topics from a Developer perspective in hardware agnostic manner.

While you are not expected to know how to develop for any specific IoT hardware platform, the exam does expect you to be familiar with the Azure IoT SDKs that can be used to target various IoT hardware platforms. Beyond the Azure IoT SDKs, the exam focuses primarily on the Azure cloud-side of building IoT solutions utilizing Azure IoT services.

As such, here are the high level exam objective areas covered on this Azure IoT Developer certification exam:

• Implement the IoT solution Infrastructure
  • Create and configure an IoT Hub
  • Build device messaging and communication
  • Configure physical IoT devices
• Provision and manage devices
  • Implement the Device Provisioning Service (DPS)
  • Manage the device lifecycle
  • Manage IoT devices by using IoT Hub
  • Build a solution by using IoT Central
• Implement Edge
  • Set up and deploy an IoT Edge device
  • Develop modules
  • Configure an IoT Edge device
• Process and manage data
  • Configure routing in Azure IoT Hub
  • Configure stream processing
  • Configure an IoT solution for Time Series Insights (TSI)
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize IoT solutions
  • Configure health monitoring
  • Troubleshoot device communication
  • Perform end-to-end solution testing and diagnostics
• Implement Security
  • Implement device authentication in the IoT Hub
  • Implement device security by using DPS
  • Implement Azure Security Center (ASC) for IoT

Notice that the above exam objectives are gears towards Azure IoT services and functionality. This exam includes topics around Azure IoT Hub, DPS, IoT Edge, Azure Security Center for IoT, Azure IoT Central, Time Series Insights, Stream Analytics, IoT Device Messaging, and more.

Also, notice that the exam objectives do not call out any specific hardware devices or platforms. This was a purposeful decision made when developing the exam, since different teams and solutions will be using any of a large number of possible IoT hardware when building an IoT solution. Included in this is the decision to leave out Azure Sphere form the exam; since Azure Sphere is a hardware development platform too. Plus, Azure Sphere is pretty big and would likely warrant its own certification exam to cover it adequately.

Exam Self-Assessment Study Aid

To help those studying for and earning Microsoft Azure certifications, we (Chris Pietschmann and Dan Patrick) have been putting together some easy to use, self-assessments.

Download the AZ-220 Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Exam Self-Assessment Tool

This exam self-assessment is built as Excel spreadsheets, and is made available as Free and Open Source via the Build5Nines/exam-assessments GitHub project. This tool will help you ensure you fully study each of the exam objectives on the AZ-220 Azure IoT Developer certification exam. It also offers you an estimated percentage level of overall confidence on each exam objective area and the overall exam too!

Wrap Up

If you are an IoT Developer building solutions utilizing Azure IoT services, or even just a developer with an interest in getting more into Internet of Things development, then the Microsoft Certified: Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification is for you.

If you’re just getting started on your journey to learning about building Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, then I recommend these additional articles that I’ve written on topics included in this certification exam:

• Introduction to Azure IoT
• IoT Security Architecture: Trust Zones and Boundaries
• Introduction to Azure IoT Edge and Edge Modules
• Lambda Architecture for IoT and Big Data Systems

The above are just a few highlights of articles you can read about Azure IoT. The Internet of Things category within Build5Nines.com contains much more IoT related content that will help as you study for this exam

Happy studying!