AZ-900 vs AWS Certification: Path Planner (Sri Lanka)

The planner holds two different kinds of fact and keeps them apart, because they carry different weight.

The exam facts are the vendors' own.Each AWS certification page prints an exam overview block: Cloud Practitioner is “Foundational, 90 minutes, 65 questions, 100 USD” and Solutions Architect Associate is “Associate, 130 minutes, 65 questions, 150 USD”. The pass mark comes from each certification's own exam guide PDF, which reports results as a scaled score of 100 to 1,000with a stated minimum: 700 for the foundational exams, 720 for the associate exams, 750 for professional and for Security Specialty. Microsoft works the other way round. Its exam pages print no fee at all, only “price based on the country or region in which the exam is proctored”, and no question count, because one policy page covers every exam: fundamentals run 45 minutes with 65 minutes of seat time, associate and expert role-based exams run 100 to 120 minutes, and “most Microsoft Certification exams typically contain between 40 and 60 questions”. Microsoft's pass mark is 700 out of 1,000 on every exam it sells. Where a vendor publishes no figure, this tool shows none.

The sequence is this site's mappingof a job goal onto those vendor ladders, and it is labelled as such on every row. Your experience level does not change which exams exist, only which ones are marked to book now. A student starts on the foundational paper because both vendors write it for people who can describe the cloud rather than operate it. Someone already in an IT job skips it, since neither vendor requires it, and plans the associate and the professional or expert paper together. Where a vendor names the next step itself, the reason line quotes the vendor: AWS's Data Engineer page points data professionals at Security Specialty.

The rupee figures. Each exam is converted once: card cost = round(fee in USD x mid rate x (1 + card margin)). The mid rate is the latest stored USD rate from the same daily series behind the LKR exchange rate tool, and the margin is what your bank adds over it on a dollar transaction, commonly 2% to 4% in Sri Lanka. The plan total is the sum of those per-exam figures, so it can sit a rupee or two away from converting the whole dollar total in one multiply. The planner computes that second figure too and reports the difference, which is its own check on the arithmetic.

Voucher prices are read live from this site's store and are not assumed to be cheaper.For AWS they are far cheaper at today's rate. For Microsoft fundamentals they are not: USD 44 on a card lands below the fundamentals voucher, so the planner keeps that rung on Microsoft's own checkout and says why. The cheapest-route total takes the lower of the two prices for each exam, not the lower of the two totals. The dataset covers 10 AWS and 14 Azure exams across 6 goals, and every row links to the vendor page it came from.

This is the part most certification guides have not caught up with. Microsoft's own retirement schedule lists all four of these as gone within the last year, so a path that ends at any of them is a path to nothing:

Two more renames catch people out at booking. The AI-900 exam was retired on 30 June 2026 and replaced by AI-901 for the same Azure AI Fundamentals certification, so book AI-901. On the AWS side, SysOps Administrator Associate became CloudOps Engineer Associate and the old version closed on 29 September 2025, so search for SOA-C03.

• AWS Certification: exam pricing and policies before testing
• AWS Certification FAQs: validity, recertification and retakes
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam page
• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate exam page (SOA-C03)
• Microsoft Learn: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) certification page
• Microsoft Learn: exam duration and exam experience
• Microsoft Learn: renew your Microsoft certification
• Microsoft Learn: credential retirement schedule
• Pearson VUE: Microsoft exam vouchers and price list

Every exam fact above was read from these pages on 2026-10-11. Both vendors reshuffle certifications several times a year, and 2026 alone retired four Azure role-based certifications, so this page is re-checked quarterly and after any retirement announcement. Next review by 2027-01-11. Spot a figure that has moved? Tell me and it is fixed the same day.