Whenever CompTIA beta exams become available, I tend to ignore them as they do not interest me, however I had taken the bait for the Cloud+ instance. What got me hooked? I am gonna be honest, the cost to attempt the beta exam was only $50.00 compared to a whopping $329.00 (not accounting for academic discounts) for the commercial exam.

Besides, a lot of things in my field are moving towards virtualization so learning about the Cloud and it’s technologies are definitely a huge benefit to myself. I mentioned in a previous post that I am looking to gain a VMware Professional certificate and despite CompTIA being vendor neutral, it does show you what you need to know in general.

I registered for the exam on June 17th. CompTIA fortunately had already started offering the remote proctoring of exams in that timeframe. I scheduled the appointment for today, October 6th knowing that I will need to have a better grasp on the fundamentals.

With work being all encompassing and an on-call rotation once every month, I naturally procrastinated with zero care in the world. I ended up using and devoting the entire weekend towards reading and practice exams. See below for eBooks I used for self-study.

Note: This list below contains affiliate links to products and I may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.

Resources:

Before I give my thoughts on the Beta exam, I would like to share my experience regarding Pearson Vue’s remote proctoring.

I will spare you a wall of text and guide you with a direct link on what to expect over at https://home.pearsonvue.com/Test-takers/OnVUE-online-proctoring.aspx.

NOTE: You can check in thirty minutes prior to your actual appointment time.

The check-in process was relatively smooth and I had absolutely no hiccups toward exam content delivery. My only gripe was that I could not use any external device such as a monitor and USB keyboard. I do see why they would refuse the other peripherals. In any case, they did allow the USB mouse so that was nice! All in all, Pearson OnVUE works and works well.

Now onto my thoughts on the Cloud+ beta exam. As this was my first ever beta exam with CompTIA, I did not know what to expect. After going through the typical user agreements and beginning the exam, I was choke slammed with the maximum amount of questions!

110 to be exact! I saw on some Reddit and other forum threads that some people had 90 or so, so I guess I was one of the lucky ones! Oh well! This was just me looking at the top right hand corner. When I looked at the bottom left, BOOM! Simulation! I was not expecting any SIMs to be in this exam but I digress, the objectives did mention “Given a scenario…” heh.

The SIMs were definitely head scratchers and I think they could use a little more explanation but I was able to make sense of it after a while. Luckily test takers are given ample time to think about it! Am I right? Haha!

I was hit with two SIMs right off the bat but I am thankful that they were first up to the plate. Like a pitcher, I struck them out. Did I get any good stats from that? I won’t know until May 2021 when the actual exam is released.

After the two SIMs, it became a typical CompTIA exam with multiple choice questions. Just 108 of them! I did see some repetition but not a whole lot. After plugging away at the questions and submitting the answers to end the exam. I have got to say that the stigma with CompTIA exams has got to go and would rate this exam as mid-level (2.5 out of 5.0 stars) in difficulty.

For me? I would say this is a great stepping stone into the cloud arena with useful information all around.

Hopefully my contribution to CompTIA in finalizing this exam was meaningful. If not, here is to hoping I walk away with a PASS next year! ?

Image by Bethany Drouin from Pixabay