Microsoft has recently disrupted their learning paths and retired a number of exams. I am happy to have passed AZ-102 - Microsoft Azure Admin Certification Transition last year, while it was in beta.
A number of exams have been retired recently or are set to retire.
https://buildazure.com/2018/12/21/microsoft-exams-scheduled-to-retire-in-early-2019/
Microsoft is leveraging edX for its Microsoft Professional and Capstone tracks. Pick a topic and go.
Microsoft Virtual Academy is going away and being replaced with Microsoft Learn. What's great about learn is that it provides a no-cost sandbox in Azure for learning, directly in the labs! Microsoft is pursuing developer adoption, and developers have concerns with their credit cards and cloud services. A former colleague of mine rang up a large bill in Amazon after leaving on some Hadoop clusters he was using for training. This fear of costs and the pay-as-you-go model will continue to limit the cloud experience for entry-level developers.
Speaking of cost containment, it is 2019 and we still can't pause HDInsight clusters.... I think that this feature alone would "Spark" increased growth of Hadoop on Azure. Azure Databricks and its job-based cluster model seems to have the right approach, and the friction of spinning up and pausing clusters is much less than in HDInsight.
With Databricks being the fastest growing company in North America, I see adoption of Cloudera (+ the former Hortonworks) and HDInsight in the cloud continuing to increase. The vast zoo of services between Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) being combined and deprecated will make for an interesting gene pool.
And all will sit on Azure Data Lake Gen2 Blob Storage? Microsoft marketing needs a better name than hierarchial namespace for their game-changing big-data filesystem....
When Apache and Microsoft worlds collide - there are some amazing code reviews coming out of those JIRA tickets where companies such as Microsoft enter the open-source arena.
Microsoft Azure HDInsight Big Data Analyst
