AI-200 (Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate) succeeds AZ-204, retired July 31, 2026. Its four areas weigh 20–25 / 25–30 / 20–25 / 20–25: containers, data services, messaging and serverless, security and monitoring. Nothing in the objectives covers model deployment, prompts, or agents; the closest it gets to AI is vector search on Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL pgvector, and Managed Redis. Official specs: $165 in the US, $83 in Taiwan, 120 minutes, pass at 700, 13 languages including Traditional Chinese, one-year validity, and no practice assessment yet.
AI-300 (Machine Learning Operations Engineer Associate) succeeds DP-100, retired June 1, 2026. The five areas weigh 15–20 / 25–30 / 20–25 / 10–15 / 10–15: the first two are classic MLOps on Azure Machine Learning at 40–50% combined, and the last three are GenAIOps on Microsoft Foundry at 40–55%. The objectives name MLflow, Bicep, Azure CLI, and GitHub Actions. Official specs: $165 in the US, $83 in Taiwan, 120 minutes, pass at 700, one-year validity, English only.
AI-901 replaces AI-900, retired June 30, 2026. The certification is still called Azure AI Fundamentals, but the objectives are now two areas: concepts at 40–45% and implementing with Microsoft Foundry at 55–60%. Python is an explicit requirement, and the objectives include building a lightweight chat client with the Foundry SDK and creating a single agent. Official specs: $99 in the US, $50 in Taiwan, 45 minutes, pass at 700, 13 languages including Traditional Chinese, and fundamentals certifications never expire.
The cloud deep dive post (order 14) of the Sandbox Series. Azure Container Apps Sandboxes architecture, snapshot and state management, lifecycle policy, security boundaries, and trade-offs with other providers, plus Azure ecosystem integration advantages.
App Service manages web runtimes, TLS, deployment, and scaling, while capacity, cost, and isolation live in the shared App Service Plan rather than one app.
Across Microsoft's four AI/agent certifications there are two hard prerequisites: AI-500 requires AI-103, and AB-100 requires any one associate on its list. The rest is positioning. Three forks decide it: whether you write Python (AI-103/AI-500 vs AB-620), whether you build or judge (AB-100 vs the rest), and whether you can actually start today — AI-500's four official learning paths currently 404, AB-620 has no practice test, AB-100 has a free one. For readers who prefer Chinese there is a fourth fork: AI-103, AB-620, and AB-100 offer Traditional Chinese, and only AI-500 is English only. All four cost $165 in the US ($83 in Taiwan), expire after one year, and renew free but only inside a six-month window.
AB-100 is the architect tier of Microsoft's agent line, weighted 25-30 / 25-30 / 40-45 with deployment and governance heaviest. Its outline runs on verbs like design, recommend, and propose — it tests judgment, not configuration. Three things to know first: it has a prerequisite — besides passing AB-100 you must hold one of the associate certifications on the official list (AI-103, AB-620, and AI-300 are all on it); it has a free practice assessment, the only one of Microsoft's three agent credentials that does; and one blurb on the exam page describes a compliance exam instead, so prepare from the study guide. Official specs: $165 in the US, 13 languages including Traditional Chinese, pass at 700, one-year validity.
AB-620 is the low-code branch of Microsoft's agent certification line — it tests agent flows, adaptive cards, computer use, MCP tools, A2A, and Fabric data agents in Copilot Studio, not Python. The three skill areas weigh 30-35 / 40-45 / 20-25, with integration the heaviest. Official specs: $165, 120 minutes, pass at 700, one-year validity, and 13 languages including Traditional Chinese. It is generally available, but the practice assessment is not out yet.
AI-103 replaces AI-102, retired June 30, 2026, and the objectives were rewritten around Microsoft Foundry — prompt flow, Azure AI Studio, Azure OpenAI Service, and Azure AI Agent Service appear nowhere in them. The five skill areas weigh 25-30 / 30-35 / 10-15 / 10-15 / 10-15, with generative AI and agents the largest. Official specs: $165, 120 minutes, pass at 700, offered in Traditional Chinese, may include interactive components — and it is valid for only one year, though renewal is a free, open-book, unproctored online assessment.
AI-500 is a rare thing among the major clouds — an expert-level certification dedicated to multi-agent systems, weighted 15-20 / 30-35 / 20-25 / 20-25, naming Agent Framework, LangGraph, Hugging Face Transformers, MCP servers on Azure Functions / Logic Apps / API Management, A2A, Key Vault, and the AI Red Teaming Agent. Two constraints come first: it requires AI-103 before you can take it, and neither the official learning paths nor a practice assessment is live yet. Microsoft removed the beta label from its pages at the end of September 2026.
Most prep guides start at chapter one. This one works backwards: derive the exam date from each vendor's retake rules (AWS makes you wait 14 calendar days, Google escalates 14 → 60 → 365 days, Microsoft allows a retake after 24 hours, and Taiwan's iPAS has no retake at all — you wait six months for the next session), then order your study by domain weight rather than domain number, and take a free official practice set before studying anything. Includes weightings for seven certifications and a five-week AIF-C01 example.
Every AI certification an engineer can register for in 2026, listed one by one: AWS AIP-C01 / MLA-C02 / AIF-C01, Google PMLE, Microsoft AI-103 and AI-500, all twelve NVIDIA exams, Databricks, Snowflake, Oracle's Agentic AI track, IBM watsonx, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub GH-300, Anthropic's four Claude exams, Taiwan's iPAS AI Application Planner, plus the governance and audit line (IAPP AIGP, ISACA AAISM / AAIA, CertNexus CAIP) — prices, validity, and registration gates all checked against vendor pages. Two things that hit your wallet: Google's PMLE exam guide has renamed Vertex AI to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform throughout, making pre-mid-2026 study material worthless, and the iPAS intermediate certificate is valid 5 years, not permanently.
Deploying OpenClaw to the cloud comes down to four decisions: where the Gateway binds, where state lives, who can reach it, and how you recover. Which platform you pick is the least important of them.