Just two months ago in May, Microsoft retired their existing AZ-204 certification and replaced it with the entirely new AI-200: Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate. We're happy to announce that we already have this course online on MDFT Pro!
Access the course here: http://mdftpro.com/course/azure-ai-cloud-developer
I would describe this course as "pleasantly hardcore". It covers how to deploy and manage containerized AI workloads using either Azure App Service, Azure Container Apps or Azure Kubernetes Service. Next, it explores setting up embedding vector search engines in either Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL or Redis, to build a complete Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) setup. The final two days of the course cover Azure Functions, the Azure Service Bus, the Event Grid, and Redis pub/sub and stream services for routing prompts to LLMs and notifying AI containers to upgrade their models or refresh embeddings.
So this basically covers all the architecture work that comes with deploying AI workloads in the cloud. The course assumes you already have fully functional AI agents running in docker containers and covers all engineering work required from that point onward.
I like this course, because it brings very comprehensive Container Apps and Kubernetes training together in one place. I'm also impressed by Microsoft's coverage of vector embedding search techniques in Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL and Redis. Many organizations are experimenting with PostgreSQL or Redis for this, so even if you do not use the Azure cloud for AI, this is still valuable knowledge.
New courses and retirements
We're in the middle of a wave of course retirements and renewals. Microsoft retired the AZ-204 training in May and the certification at the end of July. The new AI-200 training went live in May and the exam will be ready by the end of this month.
So if you were planning on getting the AZ-204 certification, you need to switch today because the old exam will be gone in a week. And I'd wait a couple of weeks for the situation around the new AI-200 exam to stabilize, and then start studying. The months after the summer holiday will be the perfect time to plan this exam.
The retired AZ-204 course
I have mixed feelings about Microsoft retiring the AZ-204 course. The AZ-204 explored how to develop non-AI apps on Azure with Azure App Service, Azure Storage Accounts, Azure Functions and Azure API Management. These are important skills for software developers who are building or managing cloud services that are not AI agents.
Without the AZ-204, there is no course left that cover these important topics.
Fortunately, we have a backup copy of the old AZ-204 course on MDFT Pro. You'll find it in the Microsoft Retired category:
Access the course here: https://mdftpro.com/course/azure-developer