News & Updates

In Profile → Notifications & reminders, failing to turn on browser push always showed the same line: "Failed to enable notifications." Different causes need different responses from you, and none of that was visible. We are sorry.

What is different now. Each cause now produces wording that says what to do:

①Your browser cannot register for push — some browsers (Brave, for example) disable the push mechanism by default. We cannot fix this from our side, so we now suggest trying another browser such as Chrome or Edge.

②The network did not reach us — we ask you to check your connection and retry.

③A problem on our side — there is nothing for you to do, so we ask you to try again later, and note that your browser is already registered.

④Notifications turned on but the settings failed to load — this previously also read "failed to enable", so it looked like a failure when it had actually succeeded. It now shows On and asks you to reload the page.

We also append a short diagnostic code to the message (for example [subscribe/AbortError]). You do not need to interpret it — just quote it if you contact us and we can identify the cause immediately.

Preventing a repeat. We added an automated check that actually produces each class of failure and confirms each one renders differently. Adding wording without verifying it would let everything collapse back into a single message.

Study history, review schedules and earned XP are unaffected.

The 👍/👎 and Report controls on Ask AI answer cards showed "Thanks for your feedback" and "Reported" when pressed — but none of it ever reached us. We are sorry: you took the time to tell us something and it went nowhere. This was the case from the feature's launch on 2026-07-13 until today.

Cause. The buttons and their confirmations shipped before the receiving end existed. Pressing them only changed something inside your own browser; nothing was sent. Because the screen responded, it looked like it had worked.

From today. A 👍/👎 is stored against that specific answer and feeds quality improvements. A report goes into the same queue as reports on questions and comments, and we review it. Open Ask AI history (top right of the panel) and you will see the rated and reported state still there.

If it cannot be sent, we say so. A failed submission now shows "couldn't send" in place, instead of pretending it succeeded. Answers that were never saved to your history — for example one you stopped mid-way — no longer show the buttons at all, with the reason stated.

Ratings and reports are visible only to us, never to other learners. Study history, review schedules and earned XP are unaffected.

In the comment area on each question, editing or deleting your own comment, liking, and reporting did nothing when clicked. We apologise for the inconvenience. This lasted from 2026-07-28 until today.

Cause. When we tidied up the internal fields returned by the comment list, we also removed the identifier that points at an individual comment, so edit, delete, like and report had no address to send to. The screen still rendered and the buttons still appeared, so from your side it simply looked unresponsive. Posting and replying were unaffected.

Also fixed: internal IDs in the comment list. The same comment list was returning the internal ID that identifies the author (a meaningless string assigned automatically when an account is created) and the list of internal IDs of people who had liked a comment, retrievable without signing in. No account information — email address, name, or password — was ever included, and these internal IDs cannot be used to identify a person or act on an account. Even so, there is no reason to expose them, so we no longer return them. The list now carries only the like count, and whether a comment is yours or whether you have already liked it is answered by a separate mechanism that responds only to you while signed in. What you see and do on screen is unchanged.

Preventing a repeat. We added an automated check that actually runs both sides: that the list returns no internal IDs, and that edit, delete and like still appear while signed in. Checking only the first would let a change that strips the IDs and breaks the feature pass as "fine".

Study history, review schedules and earned XP are unaffected.

While working through the four corrections reported in the same-day announcement, we found that an explanation we had already corrected once had reverted to its original wording during later updates. We apologise and have corrected it.

What had reverted (one Google Cloud Professional Security Operations Engineer question). For adding your own detections to Event Threat Detection in Security Command Center, the correct option and the explanation used the name "custom detectors" and described the mechanism as query-based custom detection. The feature is called custom modules, and detection conditions are supplied as JSON template parameters, not queries. The two requirements in the question — traffic to malicious domains, and IAM role grants that violate internal policy — are each covered by a shipped template (Configurable Bad Domain and Unexpected Role Grant). The explanation now says this, in both Japanese and English. The correct option itself is unchanged.

Why it reverted. Several mechanisms load question content, and whichever runs last overwrites the earlier ones. The correction had been placed in one of them, while another — the one that runs later — still carried the old wording, so every reload undid the fix.

What we changed so it cannot recur. We wrote down the order in which those mechanisms run, and added an automated check that compares the content of the last one to run against what is actually published. We also repaired 17 further questions that could have been lost the same way (mostly Google Cloud product renames).

Your answer history, review schedule and earned XP are unaffected.

Ask AI reserves one of your free questions before it starts writing an answer. It was already designed to give that back whenever no answer could be returned — but if the request was interrupted by an unexpected fault, it was not given back. You would see an error and still lose one question for the day.

We restructured this so the reservation is returned in every case where no answer is delivered, and never returned when an answer was delivered successfully. Paid plans have no limit, so they were never affected.

This was rare, and we cannot reconstruct after the fact which requests were affected. We are sorry for the inconvenience — if your remaining count ever looks wrong, please contact us and we will sort it out individually.

While reviewing questions against primary sources, we found errors in four of them. We apologise and have corrected all of them in both Japanese and English.

1. Azure Cosmos DB replication was described as synchronous (one AZ-305 question). The explanation said that with multi-region writes (active-active) every region is writable and data is replicated *synchronously*. In fact a write is committed in the region that accepts it and replicated to the other regions asynchronously — which is precisely why the RPO is near zero rather than exactly zero. The correct answer is unchanged; the reasoning behind it now matches how the service actually works.

2. A boundary-value-analysis explanation contradicted itself (one Applied Information Technology Engineer Examination question). Given a scenario where the six values -1, 0, 1, 99, 100 and 101 all passed, the explanation claimed a risk remained of missing an error in the boundary's equality condition. But the six values include the boundary values 0 and 100, and since those passed, that particular defect is already ruled out — a dropped "or equal to" would have made 0 and 100 fail. The risk that genuinely remains lies elsewhere: all six values are integers, so they cannot distinguish the specified "0 or more and 100 or less" from an implementation reading "greater than -1 and less than 101". If the argument is not restricted to integers, the latter wrongly accepts -0.5 and 100.5. We rewrote the option text and the explanation along these lines.

3. A cost-efficiency claim was one-sided (one AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate question). For serverless inference combined with provisioned concurrency, the explanation simply stated that low latency and cost efficiency are both achieved. In reality the provisioned amount is billed while idle, so that portion does not scale to zero — and the question itself sets out a requirement to scale to zero when idle, so leaving this out removed the basis for the decision. The explanation now states the trade-off plainly.

4. A regional-failure answer named a mechanism that does not survive one (one Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer question). The correct option cited Dataflow automatic zone rebalancing as a way to withstand a full regional outage. Zone placement rides out the loss of a zone within a region; it does nothing when the whole region goes down, and Google states that surviving a regional outage means deploying across multiple regions. It now reads "redeploy/restart the pipeline in a secondary region". The correct option itself is unchanged.

Your answer history, review schedule and earned XP are unaffected.

Until now, Ask AI showed nothing until an answer was fully written, so longer answers meant a longer wait. The mechanism for showing an answer as it is written was already in place, but it pointed at the wrong address and had never actually run.

That setting is fixed, so answers now appear progressively as they are written. The content of the answers and the number of free questions are unchanged.

(Answers themselves were always delivered correctly — only the wait before anything appeared was longer than it should have been.)

On this page and in the announcements section of the home page, formatting in the body text was not being applied. The characters used to mark emphasis appeared literally and paragraph breaks collapsed, so an entry read as one run-on block.

This affected the 12 entries written with formatting (from 2026-07-09 onward). The rest use no formatting, so they are unchanged.

Formatting is now interpreted and rendered: emphasis appears in bold, paragraphs are separated, and tables are laid out as tables. Not a single word of the text itself was changed — only how it is displayed.

We also added a safeguard so this cannot recur: an announcement written with formatting we cannot display now fails before it can be published.

We have eliminated text overflow from all 2,827 textbook diagrams, verified by measuring each of the 30,731 text labels in a real browser.

We originally found 288 overflows across 138 diagrams. Seventeen of them ran past the edge of the image and were genuinely cut off; the worst put 290px of text into a 164px-wide box.

Not a single word of wording was changed. The fixes were only these three: re-wrapping lines, making boxes and images taller, and repositioning an arrow. Japanese text is wrapped following standard kinsoku rules, and we verified mechanically that no character was added or removed.

We also put a safeguard in place so this cannot recur: changing any diagram now requires re-measuring before it can ship.

In AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C02 / SCS-C03), the key-management section and related questions stated that using a KMS key requires an allow in both the key policy and IAM. That is wrong, and we apologise.

The key policy is the root of trust. AWS documentation states: "Unless the key policy explicitly allows it, you cannot use IAM policies to allow access to a KMS key. Without permission from the key policy, IAM policies that allow permissions have no effect." Conversely, a key policy that names the principal directly is sufficient with no IAM policy at all. Both are commonly needed in practice only because the default key policy delegates to the account and thereby enables IAM.

The worst case was the end-of-section quiz, where the accepted answer was "allowed by both the key policy and IAM" and one of the distractors was "key policy alone" — the distractor was the more accurate statement. The question and its options have been rewritten.

The section prose itself was correct all along, describing the key policy as the root of trust and noting the delegation case. Only the compressed forms in front of it — the callout, the summary and the quiz — plus three questions were wrong, which meant the least accurate wording was the first thing a reader saw. All of it now matches the prose, in both languages.

We fixed 23 more diagrams left over from the previous round — ones where the box was simply too short for the text to be re-wrapped into it. We made the box and the image taller, then re-wrapped. No wording was changed at all.

Overflowing labels are now down from 128 to 42 across all 2,827 diagrams (30,692 text labels). The rest need case-by-case judgement, such as Japanese strings with no natural break point, and will follow.

We also corrected an error in the measuring tool itself: it treated each box edge as 1px further in than it really is, judging slightly too strictly. This does not change what you see, but future checks will be more accurate.

We found and fixed several errors that affected the English interface. We apologise for them.

1. English explanations for wrong answers were blank (33 questions). The "why the other options are wrong" text appeared in English as just , or , and. A single sentence covering several options had been split per option, leaving all but the last one empty. The Japanese text was complete throughout, so only English readers were affected. This covered 33 questions in AWS Certified SysOps Administrator (SOA-C02 / SOA-C03), Developer (DVA-C02) and Data Engineer (DEA-C01), all now restored to full sentences.

2. An explanation pointed at the wrong option (3 questions). In CCST Networking and CCNA Cybersecurity, the explanation named an option that was not the correct answer. Because options are shuffled on every attempt, we rewrote these to refer to the option by its content rather than by letter.

3. A law was given another law's English name (3 questions). In Information Security Management, the Act on Optimizing Small and Medium Subcontract Transactions carried the former English name of a different statute. We replaced it with the official English title published by the Japan Fair Trade Commission. The Japanese text is unaffected.

4. Two answers would not actually have worked. In Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner, the accepted answer granted analysts only BigQuery Data Viewer — a role that does not include permission to create jobs, so no query could run at all. It now pairs dataset-scoped Data Viewer with project-scoped Job User, and the explanation distinguishes reading data from running a query. In AZ-120 (SAP on Azure), the answer described Ultra Disk as a tier "including Premium SSD"; Azure's five managed disk types are peers, not nested, and Premium SSD v2 can also be tuned without downtime, so the reasoning now rests on the actual limits.

We also replaced Azure routing terminology that had crept into an AWS SysOps question, and corrected an OSS-DB Gold explanation that described the wrong parameter in English. Your answer history, review schedule and earned XP are unaffected.

Some textbook diagrams had label text that ran past the edge of its box, overlapping the neighbouring box or getting cut off. We apologise for shipping them in that state.

We measured all 2,827 diagrams in a real browser and found 315 of 30,453 text labels overflowing — 17 of them clipped by the image edge and genuinely unreadable. Most sat in a four-card layout where a long English sentence was placed in a 164px-wide box; the worst was 290px of text.

We have fixed 101 of them. The fix only re-wraps the lines and changes no wording at all, verified mechanically both by checking that not a single character was added or removed and by re-measuring afterwards. The rest need the boxes themselves made taller and will follow.

We also added an automated check so this cannot silently happen again — diagrams were the one place with no such check, leaving it to a human to spot at the last moment.

In the IT Strategist material, the section on related legislation was still teaching the pre-revision rule on paying subcontractors by promissory note. We apologise for the error.

On 1 January 2026 Japan's Subcontract Act became the Act on Optimizing Small and Medium Subcontract Transactions, and the Japan Fair Trade Commission states that payment by promissory note is prohibited outright. Our material still explained the old rule — that notes are fine unless hard to discount — and presented it as the key trap, so the practice question had its correct and incorrect answers effectively reversed.

We corrected every place this appeared, across body text, tables, cautions, diagrams, the practice quiz and a related exam question, and added the newly introduced duties (price negotiation, limits on electronically recorded claims and factoring, the ban on passing transfer fees to the supplier) and the new employee-count scope test.

We also improved accuracy in CCNA (the usable VLAN range), AZ-400 (choosing between the Scrum and Agile templates; retiring availability tests), MD-102 (where Microsoft Tunnel for MAM fits), PL-300 (who can certify content), AZ-120 (how RISE with SAP is delivered), DP-100, and Registered Information Security Specialist (CVSS versions, routing authentication, and TLS over UDP).

In one AZ-700 question the correct answer read "Virtual network flow logs (NSG flow logs)", which made the two look like the same thing. NSG flow logs are in fact being retired (no new ones since 30 June 2025; retirement on 30 September 2027) and virtual network flow logs are their successor — the official skills measured were updated in July 2026 to name the successor. The choice now says "the successor to NSG flow logs", and the explanations for the wrong answers now say why each one is wrong. The textbook already described this correctly, so we matched its wording.

We also corrected eight misspellings of product names, all of which use only ASCII characters and had been slipping past our automated checks: WLif for WLC (CCNA), COMMit for COMMIT (Database Specialist), Intue for Intune (MD-102), SharDePoint for SharePoint (AB-900), SOAC for SOAR (Google Cloud Security), CodEDeploy for CodeDeploy (DOP-C02), COMMITT for COMMIT (OSS-DB Silver) and Persistent Disc for Persistent Disk (Google Cloud Developer). To find them we added two tools that look across all material for a word appearing only once in a certification that is one character away from a frequently used product name.

The code samples attached to our explanations were byte-for-byte copies of the Japanese ones, even in the English version. All 579 pairs were identical, and 225 of them (163 questions) still contained Japanese, so English readers saw comments such as "# UEFI環境で現在のブートエントリと順序を確認する". In the Database Specialist material even the table and column names were Japanese, as in CREATE TABLE 社員 (社員ID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, …).

Six certifications were affected: Database Specialist, LinuC 101/102/201 and OSS-DB Silver/Gold. Comments, string literals and identifiers are now in English. Command names, options and real command output are unchanged, so that samples still match what you see on a real machine. The Japanese version is untouched. Every rewritten sample was re-checked with the PostgreSQL parser (SQL) or against a real shell (commands and options) before we published it.

We checked our wording against primary sources and corrected four explanations. For AZ-104 we had described NotActions in a role definition as a deny; it is an exclusion subtracted from Actions, not a deny. A deny assignment is a separate concept that you cannot create yourself—Azure creates it (today through deployment stack deny settings; Azure Blueprints retires on 31 January 2027). For MS-700 we described a call queue only as distributing calls in order, but there are four routing methods, and attendant routing rings everyone at once (the others are serial, round robin and longest idle). For GH-100 we now reflect that GitHub Advanced Security has been sold since April 2025 as two products, Secret Protection and Code Security, available to GitHub Team and not only Enterprise. For AZ-204 we now give the Azure CDN retirement dates (Edgio retired 15 January 2025; Microsoft classic retires 30 September 2027).

We checked our textbook wording against primary sources and corrected four statements that no longer matched reality. For AZ-140 (Azure Virtual Desktop) we had written that FSLogix profile shares assume AD-based authentication and cannot work with cloud-only Microsoft Entra ID. Azure Files now supports Microsoft Entra Kerberos, which authenticates cloud-only users without any domain controller, and it is in fact the recommended choice for Entra ID-joined session hosts, so our guidance had it backwards. The related diagram and two practice questions are updated to match. For MS-700 (Teams) we replaced "connectors" in the channel-settings list with Workflows, since Office 365 connectors were retired on 30 April 2026. For AZ-120 (SAP on Azure) we noted that NSG flow logs can no longer be created after 30 June 2025 and retire on 30 September 2027, and that you should migrate to virtual network flow logs.

Some words mean different things in different certifications. We already open the definition that matches what you are studying, but 12 words still had two competing entries registered for the same certification, so which one opened was undefined. For example, in IT Service Manager (SM), "service level management", "service desk", "configuration management", and "capacity management" now open the more detailed SM-specific definitions, and in Systems Auditor (AU), "IT application controls" opens the audit-oriented definition. Azure Virtual Network Manager had two duplicate entries, now merged into the more detailed one; any understanding levels or vocabulary items you saved against the old entry carry over.

Our textbook, glossary, knowledge map, and diagrams described Google Cloud AutoML as supporting tabular, text, image, and video data. AutoML for text was shut down on 15 June 2025 — you now use Gemini prompting or tuning instead — and speech was never an AutoML modality (use Speech-to-Text custom models). The supported types are tabular, image, and video. We also updated the knowledge map, which still used the old product name "Vertex AI AutoML". This affects anyone studying the Google Cloud certifications such as Professional Machine Learning Engineer and Professional Data Engineer.

Professional Machine Learning Engineer has grown from 101 to 151 questions. The 50 new items follow the official exam guide weights, with the heaviest additions where the exam weights most and our coverage was thinnest: 13 on scaling prototypes into production models, 11 on development environments and collaboration, and 10 on serving and scaling models. This exam is largely about being shown something that is not working and finding the cause, so nearly every new question puts an artifact on screen — measured timings, logs, a config file, SQL, a monitoring dashboard — and asks you to diagnose it. You will separate an input-pipeline bottleneck from a wrong accelerator choice using measured numbers, read a hyperparameter search configuration and explain why the search is doing nothing, read a confusion matrix and identify which fairness criterion is violated, and account for accuracy falling while every input distribution and the model itself stay unchanged. Every new question was independently checked for answer correctness, for whether each configuration option and field name really exists (against primary documentation), for whether the numbers in each artifact still add up against the prompt and the explanation, for Japanese and English equivalence, and for overlap or contradiction with existing items, then scored by our automated exam-realism judge. We also fixed artifacts that stayed in English on the Japanese site: annotations and table headings are now translated, while commands and real tool output remain in English so that they still match what you would see on a real screen.

Tapping a highlighted term in the textbook opens its glossary definition, but when the same word means different things in different certifications, you could get the definition written for another exam. In CCNA, for example, DORA refers to the DHCP exchange (Discover, Offer, Request, Ack), yet the entry that opened described the DORA software-delivery metrics from Azure DevOps. Similar mix-ups affected screen in LinuC, which opened a Power Automate definition, and trigger in the database certifications. Term lookup now prefers the entry belonging to the certification you are reading, so words that legitimately differ by context — such as durability in a database sense versus storage durability — each open the right definition.

Professional Security Operations Engineer has grown from 104 to 154 questions. The 50 new items follow the official exam guide weights (platform operations 14%, data management 14%, threat hunting 19%, detection engineering 22%, incident response 21%, observability 10%). This exam is about the actual work of writing detection rules, normalising logs and running investigation queries, yet our questions had been mostly conceptual, with almost no real rules or logs on screen — in detection engineering, the largest section, not one of the existing 24 questions showed rule code at all. That is the gap these fill. The new questions show a detection rule and ask why it never fires or why it floods, place a log before and after normalisation and ask which field a value belongs in, present the result of an investigation query and ask what to look at next, and show a response procedure and ask why it also cuts off the company own traffic. Every new question was independently checked for answer correctness, for whether each piece of syntax and every field name actually exists, for the internal consistency of the artifact shown, for Japanese/English equivalence, and for overlap with existing items, then scored by our automated exam-realism judge.

Professional Cloud Security Engineer has grown from 100 to 150 questions. The 50 new items follow the official exam guide weights (configuring access 25%, boundary protection 22%, data protection 23%, operations 19%, compliance 11%). Security exams turn on reading a configuration and working out why it is not doing what you intended, so the new questions present real settings and output in a monospaced block — IAM deny policies, organization policy inheritance, firewall evaluation order, VPC Service Controls perimeters and their violation logs, key rotation settings, audit log retention — and ask you to isolate the cause. The scenarios are ones that genuinely stall people: a deny rule is in place yet traffic still flows, a constraint is enforced yet existing resources stay in violation, a key is rotated yet the old version cannot be disabled. We also made the multi-select questions consistent: this certification had a mix of four-option and five-option items, and they are now all five options, which both reads more consistently and lowers the odds of guessing correctly. Every new question was independently checked for answer correctness, for each printed figure against primary documentation, for the internal consistency of the configuration shown, for Japanese/English equivalence, and for overlap with existing items, then scored by our automated exam-realism judge.

Google Cloud renamed Dataplex to Knowledge Catalog in April 2026, folding the previously separate data catalog capabilities into that single product. Our substitution when applying the rename was faulty, leaving a product name that does not exist — "Knowledge Catalog Catalog" — across questions, the textbook and the glossary. Question pde-067 went further: it tested a distinction between governance and metadata discovery as separate products, which was true before the rename but no longer is, and it marked the option saying they are the same product as incorrect. The question has been rebuilt around what is true today, and the related textbook section and glossary entry were corrected too. The glossary auto-link terms were updated as well, so "Knowledge Catalog" in the body text now opens the right definition. Your existing results and progress are unaffected.

The reference figure shown below an explanation is pulled from the textbook section that the question links to. Recently added questions were published without that link in place, so the section had a figure but the explanation did not show it. This affected 200 questions across Professional Cloud Database Engineer, Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Professional Data Engineer and Professional Cloud Network Engineer. All of them are now linked, so the figure is visible from the explanation. The explanation text itself is unchanged, so your existing results and progress are unaffected. We also added a check on the authoring side so that the same omission is caught immediately whenever questions are added in future.

Professional Cloud Network Engineer has grown from 101 to 151 questions. The 50 new items follow the official exam guide weights (design 21%, VPC implementation 20%, network services 16%, hybrid connectivity 16%, operations and monitoring 14%, security 13%). Networking exams turn on reading a configuration and working out what is wrong, so the new questions present real output in a monospaced block — route listings, BGP session state, firewall evaluation order, Cloud Armor policies, Cloud NAT metrics, load balancer settings — and ask you to isolate the cause or judge whether a proposed fix is sound. The scenarios are ones that genuinely stall people in practice: weights were shifted yet some paths keep failing, bandwidth stays halved after a failover, a deny rule was added but traffic still flows. Every new question was independently checked for answer correctness, for each printed figure against primary documentation, for the internal consistency of the artifact itself, for Japanese/English equivalence, and for overlap with existing items, then scored by our automated exam-realism judge.

In 23 AB-900 questions, the wrong answers used terms from outside the exam scope (Azure network security groups, SQL Server transparent data encryption, Azure Key Vault and similar). Unfamiliar terms are easy to eliminate on sight, so these questions could be answered without understanding what was being asked. We replaced them with real Microsoft 365 features from the same area as each question, so the options are as plausible as they are on the real exam. We also replaced two questions that fall outside the official scope (classifying cloud service models, and Intune/OneDrive) with in-scope topics that had little coverage: domain and organization settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and creating an agent. Thirteen quick-check questions in the textbook had the same problem and were revised the same way. The correct answers themselves are unchanged, so your existing results and progress are unaffected.

Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer has grown from 103 to 153 questions. The 50 new items follow the official exam guide weights (bootstrapping 20%, CI/CD pipelines 25%, SRE practices 18%, monitoring and troubleshooting 25%, performance and cost optimization 12%). Because this exam rewards reading an artifact and reasoning about it, the new questions present real material in a monospaced block — Terraform and Argo CD configuration, Cloud Build pipeline definitions, SLO definitions, alerting policies, Profiler output — and ask you to isolate a cause or choose a fix. They also fill in topics that the official guide lists but our bank had never covered, including CI/CD design with tools such as Jenkins, Argo CD, Packer and kpt, CI/CD for machine-learning workloads, and defining error budgets from Cloud Service Mesh telemetry. Every new question was independently checked for answer correctness, for each printed figure against primary documentation, for the internal consistency of the artifact itself, for Japanese/English equivalence, and for overlap with existing items, then scored by our automated exam-realism judge.

We fixed 12 quick-check questions in chapter 1 of the IT Service Manager textbook where selecting an option showed no explanation and the page stopped responding, caused by explanations that had not been stored as plain text. We also fixed the consistency question in chapter 2 ("Storing and accessing data") of the Professional Cloud Developer textbook, which had five options — one Japanese option contained English text and the fifth was blank in the English UI. The correct answers themselves are unchanged, so your existing results and progress are unaffected.

Professional Cloud Database Engineer has grown from 100 to 150 questions. The 50 new items follow the official exam guide weights (design 32%, manage 25%, migrate 23%, deploy 20%), and the bank now sits at 32.0/25.3/22.7/20.0%. The migration items cover pitfalls that genuinely complicate a rollback — reverse replication carries rows but not the position of a sequence generator, and a table without a primary key replicates only INSERTs so deletes and updates go missing silently. The management items focus on where a requirement is actually met or missed, such as backup retention and point-in-time recovery windows differing by edition. Every new question was independently checked for answer correctness, for each printed figure against primary documentation, for Japanese/English equivalence, and for overlap with existing items, then scored by our automated exam-realism judge. Where a new question happened to reuse the same scenario as an existing one, we rewrote the setting while keeping what it teaches.

Professional Cloud Developer and Professional Data Engineer have each grown from 101 to 151 questions. The 50 new questions per certification are allocated across domains in proportion to the official exam guide. As with earlier expansions, they ask you to apply concepts — choosing the best design when constraints conflict, or diagnosing a root cause from symptoms — rather than to identify a product by its name. Every new question was independently checked for answer correctness, scope currency and overlap with existing items, then passed through our automated exam-realism scoring before going live. We plan to expand the remaining Google Cloud certifications the same way. Professional Cloud Architect is the exception: 20–30% of that exam is case studies, a format Instiq does not yet support, so it will be handled together with the work to add that format.

Google Cloud renamed a number of products in April 2026, and our material still used the old names. Questions, textbook and glossary have all been brought to the current names. The main changes: Vertex AI is now Agent Platform (formally Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform), Looker Studio is now Data Studio, Dataplex is now Knowledge Catalog, and Cloud Functions is now Cloud Run functions. Names that did not change were left alone — Dataproc and Cloud Composer keep their names because the official exam guides still use them, and command and API identifiers (gcloud ai, aiplatform.googleapis.com, roles/aiplatform.*) are unchanged, so questions about those are unaffected. We also added a deprecation note to the three questions, one textbook section and one glossary entry that presented Vertex Explainable AI as a current recommendation; it is scheduled for full sunset on 16 March 2027. Glossary entries kept their internal identifiers, so your mastery data and word lists carry over unchanged.

Answer choices are now shuffled each time a question is served. Previously they appeared in the order they were authored, which meant that for many certifications the correct answer was always at the top — you could score full marks by picking the first option without reading it, so practice, mock exams and review were not really testing anything. With this change the order differs every time you attempt a question, including when you press "Retry", so you cannot memorise an answer by its position. The quick checks in each textbook section are shuffled the same way. The letters (a, b, c...) shown against "Why others are wrong" in an explanation now follow the order on screen for that attempt, so they always point at the option they describe. Your existing answer history, review schedule and earned XP are unaffected. We also fixed 12 quick-check questions in chapter 1 of the Database Specialist textbook that reported "incorrect" even for the right answer and showed blank options in the English UI.

We added command examples to 224 questions across LinuC Level 1 (101, 102) and Level 2 (201), showing the point of each question as a command you would actually type. Open "More detail" in an explanation to see them. Option semantics and configuration steps are much quicker to grasp from a real command than from prose. Every snippet was checked on an actual Linux machine: the syntax parses, the command exists, and each option and subcommand it uses appears in that command's own help. That is as far as the check goes — it does not guarantee that the combination of options or the argument values are appropriate, nor that behaviour is identical on your distribution, since the reference machine is a single Ubuntu-family system. Destructive commands were excluded so that anything shown is safe to run as written.

We added code examples to 82 questions in the Database Specialist exam, showing the point of each question as actual SQL. Open "More detail" in an explanation to see them. Topics such as how NULL changes the behaviour of NOT IN versus NOT EXISTS, how to declare a foreign key's referential action, or the lock acquisition order that avoids deadlock are far quicker to grasp from a real statement than from prose. Because this exam is about standard SQL rather than any one product, every snippet is both syntax-checked and screened for constructs that exist only in PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server or MySQL. Questions where SQL would not convey the point — RAID, backup operations and the like — keep the prose-only explanation as before.

OSS-DB Silver and Gold explanations now include real SQL. Until now the explanations were prose only, so topics like the difference between VACUUM and VACUUM FULL, or how to define a trigger, could only be read about. We have added code examples that show the point of the question as an actual command — 52 questions in Silver and 75 in Gold. Open "More detail" in an explanation to see them. Every snippet was checked by PostgreSQL's own parser before being included, so you can copy and try it directly. Note that command-line operations such as pg_dump and configuration-file settings are not SQL and cannot be checked this way; questions whose answer is one of those keep the prose-only explanation.

Question explanations now include a related diagram. Each textbook section already had a diagram, but it was never surfaced while you were answering questions, so almost no explanation showed one. Explanations now follow their link to the textbook section and display its diagram — around 11,600 questions gain one. Note that the diagram depicts the whole section the question belongs to rather than that single question, so treat it as a map of the surrounding material. We also reorganized how explanations open. Previously "See details" expanded everything at once — why the answer is correct, why the others are wrong, key terms, similar terms, pitfalls — which buried the part you most want under the term lists. Now it opens in three steps: the conclusion, then "why this is the answer" (why correct, the diagram, pitfalls), and only if you want more, "more detail" (why the others are wrong, key terms, related sections). Reaching "why correct" still takes a single click, so nothing got slower. The diagrams are wide, so on a phone they shrink to the point where the labels are hard to read — tap one to open it full-screen at full size.

We removed the Chapters 1–3 trial limit: every certification’s study guide is now readable in full without logging in. Sign up free to practice with the question bank, track what you have read, review your mistakes, and highlight passages. We also tidied up retired exams (AI-900, MS-900, SOA-C02, AI-102, DP-100, SCS-C02, MLS-C01) so they point to their successors.

We fixed several problems that are hard to notice from the outside. First, the endpoint that records mock-exam results had no upper limit on the number of questions, so it was possible to record a large amount of XP for questions never actually answered and distort the rankings. We have capped it. If you saw a suspiciously high placement, we apologize. Second, when grading many questions at once in batch or exam mode, some of the XP, correct-answer counts, and badges you earned could go unrecorded because simultaneous updates overwrote one another; they are now recorded reliably. Third, study reminders kept arriving even after withdrawing (suspending) an account — they now stop, and because your notification settings are preserved, everything resumes as before if you come back. We also fixed a case where some data could remain for users with a lot of history when a full account deletion was requested, a window where you could briefly be treated as a free member right after paying, and a case where hitting the follow-up limit in “Ask AI” returned an error while still consuming one of your free daily questions.

In the CCST Networking troubleshooting items — simlets, where you work at a console to find the cause — several questions shared identical wording despite covering different faults. The line “Based on what you found at the PC5 console, what is the most likely cause of this symptom?” was reused across three separate situations (a wrong default gateway, a duplicate IP address, and a wrong subnet mask), and the machine involved was called PC5 in every one, so it read as the same question coming round again. Each question is now worded for its own situation, and the subnet-mask group uses a different machine, PC9, so the two are easy to tell apart. All three faults are ones you meet in practice, so nothing was removed — only reworded.

CCST Networking questions refer to IEEE 802.3, the wired Ethernet standard, yet it appeared nowhere in the certification’s six study-guide chapters and nowhere in the glossary — you were asked about something you had no way to learn here. We have added to section 1.3, “Network types and topologies,” the pairing of IEEE 802.3 for wired LANs with IEEE 802.11 for wireless LANs (WLAN), along with the reading that a standard applies per link rather than per device: the laptop-to-access-point link is 802.11, while the cabled access-point-to-switch link is 802.3. We also made the glossary entry for Ethernet available under CCST Networking, CCNA, and CCNP ENCOR, so the word now links to its explanation wherever it appears in those three certifications’ questions and explanations — 16 CCST Networking questions are now connected to it, and Ethernet also shows up on the knowledge map.

In six Cisco questions, the incorrect options were so obviously off-target that you could reach the right answer by elimination without understanding the material. In one — asking which IEEE standard defines wired Ethernet — Bluetooth sat among the options and could be ruled out at a glance, effectively reducing it to a coin flip. Others asked about investigating a Linux server while every wrong option named a Windows component, or asked you to read a script while the wrong options described things that could not happen, such as formatting the disks daily. We have rewritten those options as plausible mix-ups drawn from the same territory as the correct answer. The CCST Networking item was rebuilt entirely: instead of naming one standard, it now shows a small network layout and asks you to work out that a different standards family applies to the wireless link than to the cabled one. The changes cover one CCST Networking question, two CCNA DevNet questions, and three CCNA Cybersecurity questions. If you have answered any of them before, the options will look different next time.

Between midnight and 9 a.m. Japan time, the site treated “today” as the previous day. During those hours you could not pick the current date when entering the date you earned a certification, the “N days until renewal” badge showed one day too many, and the expiry label on public profiles did not update until 9 a.m. Date handling now follows your device’s local time, and all three places have been corrected. Separately, when you replayed a quiz with “Try again” from the results screen, explanations for questions you answered correctly appeared already expanded if you had opened an explanation during the previous run. A replay is now treated as a fresh session, so those explanations start collapsed again — and you can still open any of them with “Show explanation.”

When navigating with a keyboard or screen reader, tabbing to an answer choice and then pressing an arrow key moved you to a different question instead of between the choices. Because the choices are announced as a “pick one” group, moving between them with the arrow keys is the expected behavior. Now, when the focus is on a choice, ↑ and ↓ move between the choices — on single-answer questions the choice you move to is selected, and on multiple-answer questions the focus moves without changing your selection. While reviewing an already-graded question, the arrows only move the focus and never alter your answer. ← and → still move between questions as before, so clicking a choice with the mouse and pressing → to go to the next question works exactly as it did.

While viewing the “choose a certification” list on the questions or glossary screens, picking a certification from the selector in the header only changed the header label — the list stayed as it was. Since nothing appeared to happen, it looked broken. Now, choosing a certification from the header on a list screen takes you straight into that certification’s questions (or its glossary terms), exactly as clicking a card in the list does. If you are already viewing that certification, the page still stays put without reloading, and behavior on the study guide and home screens is unchanged.

We have added knowledge maps for CCNA, CCST Networking, CCST Cybersecurity, CCNA Cybersecurity (CyberOps), CCNA DevNet, and CCNP ENCOR. A knowledge map shows how the key terms of a certification connect to one another in a single diagram — CCNA, for example, lays out 83 concepts, and selecting one lets you trace the terms that appear alongside it and the terms it builds on. You can open a map from the “Knowledge map →” link on a certification’s study-guide page, or go straight to a per-certification URL such as /knowledge-map/ccna. When you are signed in, your understanding of each term (inferred from your answers, reviews, and vocabulary) is reflected in the colors, so you can spot thin areas right on the diagram. We also renamed four terms that had been displayed as bare enumerations — for instance “spear phishing, vishing, smishing, tailgating” is now “Social engineering techniques (…)” — which makes the diagrams easier to read.

The descriptions on our home page and elsewhere still said “50+ IT certifications” across “AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and GitHub,” which understated what we actually offer — and the “Certifications” figure on the home page was still stuck at 56. We currently cover 93 certifications from 7 vendors, with over 11,000 practice questions. In particular, Japan’s IPA exams (IT Passport, FE, AP, and the advanced exams), LinuC and OSS-DB, and Cisco (CCNA and others) were already fully supported yet appeared nowhere in our copy, so people looking for them had no way to find out. We have corrected the wording throughout. These figures and vendor names are now generated automatically from our certification catalog, so they will stay in step whenever we add a certification. Note that nothing was actually added here — all of these certifications were already available to you; it was only our description that had fallen behind, and we are sorry for the confusion.

We added 100 questions each — 600 in total — to the six Cisco certifications (CCNA, CCNP Enterprise ENCOR, CCST Networking, CCNA Automation, CCNA Cybersecurity, and CCST Cybersecurity). Until now each bank held only about 1.3 to 1.5 times a single real exam, so on a second pass you tended to remember the questions and the practice lost its value. Every bank now holds roughly two to four exams’ worth, so repeated practice keeps its bite. The new questions are distributed across domains according to each exam’s official topic areas and weightings. To bring the feel closer to the real exam, they include not just multiple choice but also typed-command and typed-code questions, matching, ordering, configuration tasks, and questions you solve while operating a device (configuration tasks are omitted for certifications whose real exams do not have you configure a device). We deliberately avoided questions answerable by mere term recall, favoring situational judgment throughout, and chose distractors that reflect mistakes people actually make in the field. All 600 new questions passed our exam-realism quality check and meet each certification’s bar.

We added the last three question formats used on Cisco exams, so every real-exam format is now covered. The first pair is matching and ordering. The real exam uses drag-and-drop, but Instiq does not ask you to pick things up and carry them: dragging is awkward on a phone and unusable with a screen reader. What is being tested is whether you understand the pairings and the sequence, not the act of dragging, so matching is done by choosing on each row and ordering by moving items with up and down buttons. Everything works from the keyboard alone. The second is configuration tasks: you are given a set of requirements and type the configuration that satisfies them. As on a real device, the order you type in does not matter and extra lines are fine. Each requirement is graded separately, and after grading we show you exactly which requirements were not met. The third is questions you solve while operating a device: a console appears beneath a shared scenario, and you run show commands yourself to pull out the information you need and isolate the cause. Choosing which commands to run is part of the question, so the output you need is not all laid out in advance. We added 54 questions across the six Cisco certifications, keeping the same policy as before: configuration tasks go only to certifications whose real exams have you configure a device.

If you use the dark theme, text on the purple buttons has been washed out and hard to read. This affected essentially every white-on-purple button: "Get started" in the header, the language toggle, "Start" and "Try again" in the quiz, the review filters, and the "Accept" button for cookies. The contrast between the text and its background was only 2.72:1 against the 4.5:1 that the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard requires, and it dropped to 1.85:1 while hovering. Rather than change the purple itself, we now switch only the text color that sits on top of it in the dark theme, bringing it to 6.95:1 (10.25:1 on hover). The light theme is unchanged. We also applied the same approach to the red and green buttons used for deletion and notifications (3.35:1 and 2.54:1 in dark), bringing them to 5.65:1 and 7.45:1.

Prompted by feedback from someone using the site, we reviewed the quiz experience and fixed the problems we found. Thank you for reporting them. First, pressing "Practice questions" from your target certifications or a certification card on the home screen took you back to the certification picker instead of that certification's quiz screen; it now goes straight there. Second, the heading on the quiz screen showed "GitHub Foundations" no matter which certification you had chosen. The questions themselves were always from the certification you picked — only the label was wrong — and it now shows the correct name. Third, the domain choices in "By domain" and exam mode appeared as codes such as netfund. This affected every certification except GitHub Foundations, and the proper domain names are now shown. Relatedly, the exam-mode defaults were labeled as a GitHub Foundations preset even for other certifications; they are now presented as generic defaults, and the button reads "Reset to defaults." Fourth, editing the weekly study hours in your study plan could clear the tasks you had already checked off partway through typing; the value is now saved only once you finish entering it. Fifth, the review count on the home screen showed every tracked item rather than the ones actually due today. Sixth, switching to English left the quiz, review, study guide, ranking, and profile screens in Japanese; they now follow the page language.

Until now every question on Instiq was multiple choice. To bring practice closer to the real exam, we added two formats. The first is typed commands: there are no choices, and you type the command yourself for the situation described. Grading follows the same logic as a real device — case differences and extra whitespace are ignored, and unambiguous abbreviations count as correct (for example, sh ip int br is treated the same as show ip interface brief). A device prompt left over from pasting (such as R1#) is stripped automatically. When you get it wrong, we show the correct command alongside what you entered. The second is shared scenarios: several questions follow from a single situation (a topology or show output), and the scenario stays on screen the whole time you work through them, so you can practice reasoning in stages from identifying the cause to choosing the next step. We added 67 questions across six Cisco certifications: 19 for CCNA (200-301), 16 for CCNP Enterprise ENCOR (350-401), 12 for CCNA Automation (200-901), 9 for CCST Networking (100-150), 8 for CCNA Cybersecurity (200-201), and 3 for CCST Cybersecurity (100-160). Typed-command questions were added only where the real exam has candidates enter commands or code. CCNA, ENCOR, and CCST Networking ask for device commands, while CCNA Automation asks for Python and REST API expressions (graded case-sensitively). The two cybersecurity certifications involve no command entry on the real exam, so they received shared-scenario questions only.

Small text such as question counts, dates, and side notes was too light to read comfortably. We revised the text colors so that this auxiliary text now meets the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility threshold (4.5:1 for normal-size text) in both the light and dark themes. The next level up — descriptive text — was adjusted alongside it, so the three-step distinction between body, description, and side note is preserved. Places where the background is tinted, such as the selected item in the textbook contents or search results and the selected quiz mode, were given their own colors. Text sizes and layout are unchanged.

We added share buttons to the quiz results screen. You can post to X, LINE, Threads, and Facebook, or just copy the link, and the buttons are always available regardless of how you scored. When the shared link is pasted into a social post, it expands into a card showing the certification and your score — you do not need to prepare or attach an image yourself. For exam-mode results the card also reflects whether you cleared the pass line, with the ring drawn in green for a pass and red for a fail. Only the certification name, the number correct, and the percentage are shared. No question text, answer choices, or explanations appear on the card or the shared page, and neither your study streak nor your XP is included. Anyone opening the link sees just the result and an invitation to try the same certification.

We rebuilt the results screen for quizzes. Your score is now shown as a ring, with the percentage and the number correct layered in the center. In exam mode the ring is drawn in green when you pass and red when you do not, and a congratulatory line appears only when you pass or score full marks. In the answer review you can now narrow the list to just the questions you missed; the original question numbers are preserved so you still know which ones they were, and the filter is hidden entirely when you got everything right. The quiz screen itself also improved: the progress bar is slightly thicker and, in immediate-scoring mode, is split into green for correct and red for incorrect so you can see how you are doing at a glance. The remaining time and progress now stay pinned just below the header, so they never scroll out of view — no more scrolling back up to check the clock during an exam. The correct/incorrect result animates in subtly on submit, and does not move at all if your device is set to reduce motion.

We fixed a defect where 54 places across the site that specified a soft tinted background were actually rendering with no background at all. It was easy to miss because the text color and border still showed, but the fill was missing from the correct/incorrect banner in quizzes, the highlight on the correct choice, pass/fail badges, mini-quiz feedback in the textbook, and error messages on login and sign-up. The cause was a CSS pattern that combined an opacity modifier with a CSS variable, which silently invalidated the whole declaration. We introduced dedicated color tokens, replaced every occurrence, and verified the intended tint renders in both light and dark themes. An automated check now prevents the pattern from creeping back in.

On desktop you can now work through a quiz without reaching for the mouse. Press 1–4 or A–D to pick a choice, Enter to submit, and Enter again to move to the next question. The left and right arrow keys move between questions (you cannot skip past a question you have not answered). On multiple-answer questions, pressing the same key again clears that choice. Choice letters are now shown as key-shaped badges so it is obvious which key to press, and the shortcut hint appears only on screens that have a keyboard. Shortcuts stay out of the way while you are typing (for example in the report form) and during Japanese text conversion. Screen readers now also announce whether each choice is currently selected.

We have expanded six Cisco certifications: CCST Networking (100-150), CCST Cybersecurity (100-160), CCNA (200-301), CCNA Cybersecurity (200-201), CCNA Automation (200-901), and CCNP Enterprise ENCOR (350-401) — now holding 110, 105, 150, 140, 140, and 150 questions respectively. The new questions were allocated to match each exam's official blueprint weights; for CCNA Automation and CCNA Cybersecurity the resulting distribution matches the official ratios exactly. Multiple-response ratios were also tuned to each exam's target. Most questions present an artifact in monospace — a configuration fragment, show output, API response, Python script, or EEM applet — and ask you to interpret, diagnose, or correct it. For quality assurance we combined machine validation with independent review by a separate model, fetching the official exam topics to confirm scope currency (ENCOR v1.2, effective since March 2026; CCNA Automation v1.1). Every artifact was checked for reproducibility on real equipment, and the printed figures were re-derived to confirm they genuinely support the stated conclusion.

While practicing, you can now go back to the previous question or several questions back. Use "← Prev" in the bottom bar to step back one at a time, or tap "Question 3 / 30" at the top to open a grid of question numbers and jump straight to any of them. In immediate-scoring mode the grid is color-coded by correct, incorrect, and unanswered, so you can pick out just the ones you missed. Questions you revisit are shown in their graded state (answer revealed, with the explanation) and cannot be re-answered — this keeps your study record and XP from being counted twice. The same grid is available in batch-scoring and exam modes; since nothing has been graded yet there, it only shows whether each question is answered or unanswered, which helps when you do a final pass over the ones you skipped. Navigating always brings you back to the top of the question.

Based on feedback from a user, we improved two things about answering questions. First, the "Next" button used to sit below the explanation, so you had to scroll before you could move on. The primary actions — Submit, Next, and Prev/Next — are now pinned to the bottom of the screen and stay within thumb reach regardless of how long the explanation is (on short questions that fit the screen, they still appear inline at the end as before). In addition, the explanation now starts collapsed when you answer correctly, so you can move straight on from questions you already knew; tap "See explanation" to open it (once you do, it stays open for correct answers for the rest of that session). Second, when you moved to the next question the page kept the scroll position from the previous one, sometimes leaving the question text off-screen. Switching questions now always returns you to the top. The same fixes apply to batch-scoring and exam modes, and to the results screen. We also made the correct/incorrect verdict and your score announce automatically to screen readers.

We have expanded nine IPA Advanced certifications from 60 to 110 questions each: Registered Information Security Specialist (SC), Network Specialist (NW), Database Specialist (DB), Embedded Systems Specialist (ES), Project Manager (PM), System Architect (SA), IT Service Manager (SM), Systems Auditor (AU), and IT Strategist (ST). Rather than padding the banks, the new questions were allocated to match each exam's official domain weights — under-covered domains received more, already well-covered ones none. Every question is a judgment-type scenario (choose the best design or countermeasure from requirements and constraints, or diagnose a root cause from symptoms); none are simple definition recall. Distractors are plausible errors from the same field, and choice lengths were tuned so the answer cannot be guessed from length alone. For quality assurance, machine validation (section links, Japanese/English parity, explanation structure) was combined with independent review by a separate model covering answer validity, factual errors, scope currency, and duplication, with all findings addressed. All 450 new questions were confirmed to meet our exam-realism and accuracy standards.

We have added ENCOR (350-401), the shared core exam for CCNP Enterprise and CCIE Enterprise. It covers the core technologies of enterprise networking as practical configure-verify-troubleshoot judgment. Aligned with the official six domains (architecture 15%, virtualization 10%, infrastructure 30%, network assurance 10%, security 20%, automation & AI 15%), it includes a 6-chapter / 27-section textbook, 27 diagrams, 100 questions, and a 77-term glossary. The largest domain, infrastructure, centers on diagnosing root causes from show output — missing allowed VLANs on a trunk, EtherChannel flags, the difference between BPDU guard and root guard states, OSPF stuck in EXSTART due to MTU mismatch, NAT pool exhaustion, and more. With this, our Cisco lineup reaches six certifications: CCST Networking, CCST Cybersecurity, CCNA, CCNA Cybersecurity, CCNA Automation, and CCNP ENCOR.

We have added two Cisco associate certifications: CCNA Cybersecurity (exam 200-201; formerly CyberOps Associate / CBROPS) and CCNA Automation (exam 200-901; formerly DevNet Associate / DEVASC). CCNA Cybersecurity centers on the work of a SOC analyst — interpreting logs, packet captures, alerts, and artifacts through to triage — across the official five domains (security concepts, security monitoring, host-based analysis, network intrusion analysis, security policies & procedures), with a 5-chapter / 27-section textbook, 27 diagrams, and 90 questions. CCNA Automation covers network automation and programmability across the official six domains (software development & design, understanding & using APIs, Cisco platforms & development, application deployment & security, infrastructure & automation, network fundamentals), with a 6-chapter / 26-section textbook, 26 diagrams, and 90 questions, focused on judgment-style questions that read and diagnose real artifacts — JSON/YAML, HTTP responses, Python, Dockerfiles, Ansible, RESTCONF/NETCONF/YANG, and diffs. Both include a glossary. The next step is CCNP.

We added 50 questions each to four professional/specialty AWS certifications — AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02, now 217), AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C03, now 194), AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01, now 181), and AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIP-C01, now 178). That completes the expansion across all twelve major AWS certifications. Befitting the advanced level, the questions center on multi-service design judgment and root-cause diagnosis of operational and security incidents, aligned with the official in-scope services and domain weightings, with staged bilingual explanations and links to the related textbook sections.

We added 50 questions each to three AWS certifications — AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01, now 188), AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate (MLA-C01, now 208), and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02, now 249) — continuing the CLF/SAA/DVA/SOA/AIF expansion. All are exam-style scenario questions (choose the best design or service from data-platform / ML / large-scale architecture requirements and constraints), aligned with the official in-scope services and domain weightings, with staged bilingual explanations and links to the related textbook sections.

We added 50 questions each to three AWS certifications — AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02, now 172), AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03, now 192), and AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01, now 168) — following the earlier CLF-C02 / SAA-C03 expansion. All are exam-style scenario questions (pick the best service or design from the requirements and constraints; diagnose the cause from operational symptoms), aligned with the official in-scope services and domain weightings, with staged bilingual explanations and links to the related textbook sections.

We have added two Cisco entry-level certifications that serve as on-ramps to the Cisco program: CCST Networking (exam 100-150) and CCST Cybersecurity (exam 100-160). CCST Networking covers how networks operate — devices, media, and protocols; CCST Cybersecurity covers cybersecurity fundamentals — identifying threats, applying basic defenses, and incident handling — both from a support technician's perspective. CCST Networking spans the official six domains (standards & concepts, addressing & subnet formats, endpoints & media types, infrastructure, diagnosing problems, security) with a 6-chapter / 24-section textbook, 24 diagrams, and 60 questions; CCST Cybersecurity spans the official five domains (essential security principles, basic network security, endpoint security, vulnerability assessment & risk management, incident handling) with a 5-chapter / 20-section textbook, 20 diagrams, and 55 questions. Both feature entry-level situational, identification-style questions (some multiple-select) and a glossary. The next step is CCNA / CyberOps.

We added 50 questions each to two popular AWS certifications — AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — bringing them to 179 and 223 questions respectively. All are exam-style scenario questions that ask you to pick the best service or design from the requirements and constraints, aligned with the official in-scope services and domain weightings, with staged bilingual explanations and links to the related textbook sections.

We have added CCNA (exam 200-301), Cisco's associate-level certification — Instiq's first Cisco vendor certification. It covers networking fundamentals, routing, switching, IP services, security, and automation, centered on Cisco IOS device configuration, verification, and troubleshooting. Aligned with the official six domains (Network Fundamentals 20% / Network Access 20% / IP Connectivity 25% / IP Services 10% / Security Fundamentals 15% / Automation & Programmability 10%), it includes a 6-chapter / 28-section textbook with diagrams, 100 scenario-based questions (with IOS command output; some multiple-select), and a glossary.

Ask AI (grounded answers from your material with source links and web search) — previously paid-only — is now open to free members: up to 3 times a day, and 100 times total after signing up. You can revisit past questions and answers anytime from “Ask AI history.” Upgrade to the paid plan for unlimited questions.

We have added the IT Strategist Examination (ST), the top tier of Japan's national IT exams. It is the strategy track and highest level of IPA's advanced exams — completing the full set of advanced divisions (technical, architecture, service management, project management, systems audit, and strategy). Covering the multiple-choice morning exam, it includes 60 questions centered on the ST-specific Part-A-II specialty (business strategy management, technology strategy management, business & industry, system strategy, system planning, and corporate activities & law), plus a 6-chapter / 25-section textbook and glossary. (The common Part-A-I builds on the Applied Information course; the descriptive/essay afternoon exam is out of scope.)

Sections beyond the free preview (Chapters 1–3) now show their key points and opening passage without logging in. Sign up free to read the section in full, plus every chapter and all questions. You can check what a section covers before you start.

We corrected textbook content across several certifications to match the latest official information. Highlights: GitHub Advanced Security’s 2025 reorganization (Secret Protection / Code Security are separately purchasable products bundling features, while code scanning / secret scanning remain current feature names), unified naming to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure Blob access tiers (four tiers including Cold), AWS CloudHSM FIPS 140-3, AWS Shield SRT (formerly DRT), and the actual capabilities of Bedrock Prompt Management (approval via external integration). We also fixed some broken term-highlight rendering.

When you select a term in the Knowledge Map, it now shows the corresponding concept in other clouds/vendors (e.g., AWS Lambda ≈ Azure Functions, Blob Storage ≈ Cloud Storage, SageMaker ≈ Vertex AI) in the inspector. Each has a vendor badge, and clicking it jumps straight to that concept on the other vendor’s Knowledge Map — so you can trace "what is this equivalent to on another cloud?" across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

We added "Ask AI", so you can ask a question the moment it comes up while studying. Select text in the textbook and press "Ask AI", or use the floating button at the bottom-right of the screen. Answers are grounded in Instiq's study material (textbook sections) wherever possible, with links to the cited sections. Each answer has 👍/👎 and a report action to help us improve quality. (This feature was initially paid-only; since 2026-07-17 it is also free to try.) Answers can be inaccurate, so always confirm important details with official sources.

The Knowledge Map now lives at a dedicated URL for each certification (/knowledge-map/<cert>), published for all 80 available certifications. Every page shows the interactive map on top and a full "concept index (term + definition)" below it. Bookmark or share the URL to open that certification’s map directly, and the pages are now discoverable from search engines. You can still switch certifications right from the selector in the map.

We reworked the Knowledge Map as a learning tool. (1) It now defaults to a 2D view so labels are always readable, with scroll/pinch zoom and drag to pan. (2) The meaning (definition) of the selected term is shown right there. (3) Your mastery of the certification is visualized as a bar. (4) "Good to learn next" surfaces unlearned terms adjacent to ones you already know, both as a list and as markers on the map. (5) An "Overview" button shows the whole certification's concept connections at a glance, and clicking a term drills into its neighborhood. Even without logging in, the map is colored by how connected each concept is.

We greatly increased the hover tooltips that show a term’s meaning when you point at emphasized keywords in the textbook, across the Applied Information Technology Engineer (AP), Fundamental Information Technology Engineer (FE), IT Passport, and Information Security Management (SG) study materials. We added real concepts that were missing from the glossary—carefully checked to avoid duplicating existing terms—with definitions reviewed for exam-level accuracy, so more terms can be looked up in place while you read.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the Systems Auditor (AU), Japan's top-tier national certification for systems audit. Centered on the AU-specific Part-A-II specialty — audit fundamentals, planning, execution and techniques, IT governance and internal control, control evaluation, and reporting and follow-up — study with a 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams) grounded in the systems audit standards / internal control / COBIT / J-SOX, 60 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive/essay afternoon exam is out of scope.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the IT Service Manager (SM), Japan's top-tier national certification for IT service operations. Centered on the SM-specific Part-A-II specialty — service management fundamentals, design/transition, operation, continuity/availability, security operations, and system operation/facilities — study with an ITIL/JIS Q 20000-based 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams), 60 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive/essay afternoon exam is out of scope.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the System Architect (SA), Japan's top-tier national certification for system design. Centered on the SA-specific Part-A-II specialty — requirements definition, system architecture design, software design methods, non-functional design, cloud/platform, and system integration/migration — study with a 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams), 60 multiple-choice questions on design trade-off judgment, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive/essay afternoon exam is out of scope.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the Project Manager (PM), Japan's top-tier national certification for IT project management. Centered on the PM-specific Part-A-II specialty — integration/scope, schedule/cost (EVM), quality/resource, risk/procurement, stakeholder/communication, and PM standards/agile — study with a 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams), 60 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive/essay afternoon exam is out of scope.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the Embedded Systems Specialist (ES), Japan's top-tier national certification for embedded systems. Centered on the ES-specific Part-A-II specialty — embedded processors, memory, real-time OS, hardware interfaces, embedded software, and IoT/functional safety/low power — study with a 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams), 60 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive/essay afternoon exam is out of scope.

We launched the Knowledge Map (beta) — a graph that maps how a certification's concepts connect. Explore related terms by following the graph, with nodes colored by your understanding (auto-derived from your answers, reviews, and vocabulary, plus manual overrides). Available for 22 major certifications (GitHub / AWS / Azure / Google Cloud / IPA and more). Open it from "My learning" on your dashboard, or from any certification's study-guide page.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the Database Specialist (DB), Japan's top-tier national database certification. Centered on the DB-specific Part-A-II specialty — data models, normalization, SQL/relational algebra, transactions/concurrency control, recovery, performance design, and distributed DB/NoSQL — study with a 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams), 60 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive afternoon exam is out of scope.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the Network Specialist (NW), Japan's top-tier national networking certification. Centered on the NW-specific Part-A-II specialty — TCP/IP, routing/switching, wireless/WAN, SDN/virtualization, QoS/high availability, and network security — study with a 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams), 60 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive afternoon exam is out of scope.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the Registered Information Security Specialist (SC), Japan's national cybersecurity certification. Centered on the SC-specific Part-A-II specialty — cryptography, authentication, PKI, attack techniques, ISMS, security implementation, and networking — study with a 6-chapter, 25-section textbook (with diagrams), 60 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The common Part-A-I builds on the AP course; the descriptive afternoon exam is out of scope.

Added the morning exam (Part A) of the Applied IT Engineer (AP), IPA's national level-3 certification. Study the three areas — technology, management, and strategy — with a 6-chapter, 27-section textbook (with diagrams), 90 judgment-oriented multiple-choice questions, and a glossary. The descriptive afternoon exam is out of scope.

We reviewed the glossary across every certification, splitting entries that had bundled several concepts under one heading into individual terms and tidying them so they can be shared across certifications. The glossary grew by about 180 terms to 2,895 in total, improving the coverage of in-text highlight (term) tooltips and the /glossary page. Surface-form resolution stays automatic, and any term not yet in the glossary simply renders as plain text.

We added the "Information Security Management Examination (SG)," a national level-2 certification from Japan’s IPA (the same level as FE). It targets the knowledge and practical skills needed by people who manage and operate information security in IT-using departments and organizations. Aligned to the latest official syllabus (Ver.4.1), it covers both Exam A (security fundamentals, management, controls, related fields) and Exam B (practical case studies): a textbook (5 chapters / 22 sections), per-section diagrams, 90 questions, and a glossary. It reflects the newest laws and threats.

We added the "Fundamental Information Technology Engineer Examination (FE)," a national level-2 certification from Japan’s IPA and a rite of passage for IT engineers. Aligned to the latest official syllabus (Ver.9.2), it covers both Exam A (technology, management, strategy) and Exam B (algorithms with pseudocode plus information security): a textbook (6 chapters / 29 sections), per-section diagrams, 110 questions, and a 130-term glossary. For Exam B algorithm questions we added a new feature that renders pseudocode in a clear monospaced code block. It reflects the newest scope including generative AI, CNN, and DevOps.

We added the “IT Passport Examination (iPass),” a national entry-level certification from Japan’s IPA. Aimed at every working professional and student who uses IT, it maps 1:1 to the latest official syllabus (Ver.6.5) across all 23 mid-categories in the three fields (Strategy, Management, Technology): a textbook (3 chapters / 23 sections), per-section diagrams, 90 four-choice questions matching the real exam format, and a glossary. It reflects the newest scope, including generative AI. This is the first of the IPA-family exams, with the Fundamental Information Technology Engineer Examination (FE) planned next.

We added “OSS-DB,” the PostgreSQL engineer certification from LPI-Japan. It covers two levels — Silver (general knowledge, operations, development/SQL) and the advanced Gold (performance monitoring, tuning, failure response, and replication) — mapped to the official Ver3.0 syllabus (target PostgreSQL 12–14): textbooks (Silver: 3 chapters / 11 sections; Gold: 4 chapters / 13 sections), per-section diagrams, scenario-based questions (85 for Silver, 86 for Gold), and a PostgreSQL glossary. This adds a new learning path for database engineers.

We added “LinuC Level 2,” the advanced Linux engineer certification from LPI-Japan. Covering advanced server engineering (kernel, storage/LVM, KVM virtualization, containers, DNS/BIND, web servers/Apache/nginx, mail/Postfix/Dovecot, file sharing/Samba/NFS, security/iptables/OpenSSH, and HA/scalability), it maps 1:1 to the official Version 10.0 objectives (subtopics 2.01–2.13): a textbook (201: 6 chapters / 21 sections, 202: 7 chapters / 23 sections), per-section diagrams, and scenario-style questions modeled on the real exam (90 each for 201 and 202). Together with Level 1, this completes a full Linux learning path.

We added “LinuC Level 1,” the Linux engineer certification from LPI-Japan. For each of the two exams (101 and 102) we provide a textbook mapped 1:1 to the official objectives (subtopics 1.01–1.11)—101: 5 chapters / 21 sections, 102: 6 chapters / 18 sections—plus diagrams, a glossary (143 terms total), and scenario-style questions modeled on the real exam (101: 95, 102: 100). This is our first non-cloud, Japan-based vendor certification.

Fixed an issue where the weekly study-report notification rarely arrived—and could be empty when it did—because of its delivery timing (Monday morning by default). The report now summarizes the week that just finished rather than the week that just started, so earned XP and other figures show correctly. The wording also changed from “this week +X XP” to “last week +X XP.”

Direct/bookmarked links to a question’s comment page now open correctly even if you’ve switched certifications. Fixed an occasional one-day mismatch in the days-until-exam count between the study plan and the stats page, and a daylight-saving edge case that shifted the end date in study-plan calendar (.ics) export. We also made small reliability improvements, including preventing ads from showing to paid members during transient network issues.

Fixed the ranking wrongly highlighting other users who share your nickname as “You” (now only your own row is highlighted). Highlight quotes in My Notes now display correctly for sections migrated to the new block-based content. Fixed flashcards ending study prematurely when marking a card learned under a memorize-status filter. Turning browser notifications off now reliably stops delivery across all your devices, including subscriptions left on other devices. Also fixed a failure when saving a vocabulary deck after editing only its description.

We fixed multiple-choice scoring so selecting the same option more than once is no longer wrongly counted as correct. Daily boundaries for stats and streaks are now unified to Japan time (JST), so late-night/early-morning study no longer lands on a different day. Switching language (JA/EN) now preserves URL state such as certification filters and question links. We also fixed reminder emails: the win-back reminder no longer stops permanently after reaching its cap, and now goes to your current email address after a change. In addition, stats no longer drop data for users with very large answer histories (pagination), and security headers were added to all pages.

The notifications, achievements, plan & role, and account-deletion cards on your profile page now have “?” help too. We also raised the character limit for your public profile URL (instiq.net/u?u=…) from 30 to 60 characters.

Each setting on your profile page (avatar, bio, target certifications, links, visibility, per-field visibility, public URL, nickname, display language) now has a “?” icon. Tap or click it to see a short explanation of what that setting does.

On your profile page you can now add up to 5 external links — Credly, LinkedIn, GitHub, X, your own site, and so on — shown on your public profile. Just enter a label and URL to point visitors to your credential pages. You can also show or hide the links via per-field visibility settings.

The “Target certifications” picker on your profile now matches the rest of the app: search by code or name, filter by vendor (AWS, Microsoft, Google, GitHub), and pick a certification to add it right away.

Your study plan — exam date, weekly hours, and task progress — is now saved to your account instead of the browser. Sign in on another device or browser and you’ll see the same plan and progress. Plans previously stored on your device are migrated to your account automatically on your next sign-in (your target certifications are now the basis for study plans).

If you record an expiry date for an obtained certification, we’ll remind you by email or browser notification as it approaches (by default from 30 days before through shortly after). Toggle it and set the delivery time in your notification settings on the profile page.

On your profile page, obtained certifications can now record an acquisition date and an expiry date. Enter the acquisition date and we suggest an expiry based on each certification’s standard validity period (editable; certifications that never expire are labeled as such). Your public profile and dashboard also show the expiry status (“Nd to renew” / “Expired”).

The dashboard now has a “Target certifications” card that shows your textbook progress for each certification you’ve added, with quick links to its study guide and questions. If you haven’t picked a certification to study yet, your first target is used as the default (switch anytime from the header). Add target certifications on your profile page.

On your profile page, the “Target certifications” picker is now grouped by vendor (AWS, Microsoft, Google, GitHub) and sorted by exam code. We also fixed a layout glitch where the “Add” button could overflow the card on narrow screens.

When you answer a question correctly, the XP toast now shows how the amount was composed (base × cert tier × difficulty × streak × review). You can see at a glance why you earned that XP.

We launched a paid plan (¥480/month, tax included) that removes ads. Upgrade from “Plan & permissions” on your profile page; you can cancel anytime and keep access until the end of the current billing period. Payments are by credit card (Stripe).

The textbook (/learn) and questions (/questions) home pages are redesigned as certification catalogs. Search by code or name and filter by vendor (AWS, Microsoft, Google, GitHub) or level (fundamentals to specialty). Each card shows chapter/section or question counts, plus your reading progress when signed in. Pick a card to jump straight to that certification’s study guide or practice questions.

The textbook (/learn) and questions (/questions) home pages now show a certification catalog grouped by vendor, so you can pick and open a certification at a glance. Each certification page also gains an overview — about the cert, the exam domains with approximate weighting, and how to study — to make the exam scope easier to grasp.

We published 11 new Microsoft certifications: SC-100 (Cybersecurity Architect), SC-300 (Identity and Access Administrator), SC-200 (Security Operations Analyst), AZ-140 (Azure Virtual Desktop), DP-420 (Cosmos DB Developer), AZ-120 (SAP on Azure), PL-300 (Power BI Data Analyst), PL-400 (Power Platform Developer), MS-102 (Microsoft 365 Administrator), MS-700 (Teams Administrator), and MD-102 (Endpoint Administrator). Each comes with a 5-chapter textbook, per-section diagrams, a question bank (~100 bilingual items each), and a reference-grade glossary.

Using our AI textbook quality check (currency review), we refreshed mentions of retired or renamed services across about 20 certifications. Examples include AWS CodeCommit/CodeStar/OpsWorks/Elastic Transcoder, Azure Database for MariaDB, NSG flow logs, Azure AD B2C, GCP Deployment Manager and Dataplex (now Knowledge Catalog), and the GitHub Actions Node version—annotating retirements and successors. We also corrected factual errors such as the Well-Architected Framework now having six pillars.

Following AWS and Azure, we greatly expanded glossaries for Google Cloud (14 certs) and GitHub (5 certs). For each cert, beyond services and sub-features, you can now look up cross-cutting concepts—networking, security, reliability, design patterns, and IT fundamentals—with definitions reviewed against the latest facts. Reference-book-level glossaries are now available across the major AWS, Azure, GCP, and GitHub certifications.

Following all AWS certifications, we are now expanding glossaries for Azure certs too. We started by greatly expanding AZ-104 (Azure Administrator)—covering virtual networks, NSGs, storage tiers, AKS/containers, Bicep/ARM, monitoring/backup/Site Recovery, plus foundational networking, security, and reliability concepts you can look up individually. Definitions are reviewed against the latest facts (including tidying up retired services), shipping per certification.

Following SOA-C03 and AIP-C01, we are progressively expanding the glossary for each AWS certification—so you can look up not just services but sub-services, features, and foundational concepts (networking, security, reliability, machine learning, etc.) individually, with definitions reviewed for accuracy and currency (including tidying up retired services). Updates ship per certification, so your cert’s glossary will keep getting richer.

We expanded the AIP-C01 glossary to a reference-book level (~12×). Beyond core generative-AI development concepts—Bedrock Knowledge Bases/Agents/streaming, RAG (chunking, embeddings, vector search, reranking), agent safety controls, AI governance, prompt governance, model evaluation, PII protection, and jailbreak detection—you can now look up the foundational AWS building blocks (compute/storage/IAM/cost) individually. Definitions were reviewed against the latest facts, including tidying up retired services.

We enriched the glossary to a reference-book level. For SOA-C03 we increased entries roughly 6.6× (around 500 terms), so you can look up not just services but sub-services and features individually (e.g., CloudWatch logs/metrics/alarms, each Auto Scaling policy, IAM policy mechanics, and core networking/security/reliability concepts). We also greatly improved how often the in-text tooltips light up (meaning, glossary link, add-to-flashcards) and reviewed definitions for accuracy and currency against the latest facts (including tidying up retired services).

We added three features to the learning-stats page. (1) “Exam readiness” — a 0–100 score per certification estimating how close you are to passing, from your accuracy, domain coverage, and practice volume. (2) “Study rhythm” — a weekday × time-of-day heatmap showing when you study most and when you score best. (3) “Do next” — your due reviews and weakest domain gathered at the top so you can jump straight into practice or review with one tap.

We now support AWS’s new professional certification, Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIP-C01). Learn production FM integration, RAG, agentic AI, and Responsible AI with real services—Amazon Bedrock (AgentCore / Knowledge Bases / Guardrails / Prompt Management & Flows), SageMaker, Strands Agents/Agent Squad, and MCP. We provide a 5-chapter, 19-section textbook aligned to the official five domains (FM integration & data 31% / implementation & integration 26% / safety, security & governance 20% / operational efficiency & optimization 12% / testing & validation 11%), plus 120 exam-style scenario questions, a glossary, and diagrams.

The learning-stats page (/stats) now shares the same glass + neon look as the home page and dashboard. The top groups your overall-accuracy ring with key numbers (answered, questions, to-review, study time, and last-30-days practice), and the by-certification / by-domain / by-difficulty breakdowns are consolidated into a single card you can switch with one tap. Chart colors now carry meaning by accuracy (weak = red, watch = orange, good = blue, strong = purple), and the accuracy-trend line shifts from red (low) to purple (high) so progress is obvious at a glance. Everything reads clearly in both dark and light themes.

We reworked how XP is awarded to be fairer and better aligned with real learning. (1) Harder certifications (Professional / Specialty, etc.) now grant more XP per correct answer. (2) You can no longer farm XP by re-answering the same question — the first correct answer gives full XP, while reviews grant partial XP only when they’re due. (3) Beyond correct answers, learning actions now earn XP too: finishing a textbook section, completing a mock exam, and accumulating study time. (4) Levels now require progressively more XP as you climb. You now also see the XP you earned right after answering, and textbook sections auto-mark as read once you reach the end. Your existing XP carries over unchanged.

In your profile settings, you can now set a custom image (JPEG / PNG / WebP) as your avatar. Images are automatically cropped to a square and shown on your dashboard and public profile. The preset emoji avatars are still available too.

The dashboard and profile pages (after sign-in) now share the same look and feel as the home page (glass + neon). Your greeting, today’s tasks, quick actions, study plan, achievements, and study calendar are now cleaner and consistent in both dark and light themes.

Instiq, previously offered as a public beta, is now officially launched. You can use the full set of study materials, question banks, and learning features across 50+ IT certifications (AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and GitHub). Everything is free to use for now (some features will become paid later). We’ll keep improving the content and features, so please share any feedback or requests via Contact.

We refreshed the signed-out home page so the whole page now shares the hero’s glass-and-neon look. The certification picker is now a cleaner set of vendor-colored cards, and we added a “three steps to passing” walkthrough. From the news section to the closing call to action, the design is consistent — making it easier for first-time visitors to grasp the whole picture.

Your notes (highlights & memos) and vocabulary (flashcards) are now combined into a single “My library”. Switch between them with tabs on one page — managing the points you saved and the cards you study in the same place. Your existing /notes and /vocabulary links still work and open the matching tab.

Your time spent reading and practicing is now tracked automatically and shown as “Study time” in your learning stats. Only active foreground time is counted — idle or background tabs are not. We record only your own learning data, with no ad tracking. See your stats on /stats or your profile (time accrues from this release onward).

You can now get study reminders. Three types are available — “your streak is at risk”, “you’ve been away (a nudge to return)”, and a “weekly summary” — each with its own on/off and delivery time. Choose how to receive them: browser push and/or email. Delivery times follow your device’s timezone. Configure it from “Notifications & reminders” on your profile page. To use browser push on iPhone / iPad, add the site to your Home Screen and open it as an app (email works without this).

We switched signup confirmation-code emails to be sent from our own domain (no-reply@instiq.net) with SPF/DKIM authentication. This reduces the chance of confirmation emails landing in spam and improves deliverability. If an email still doesn’t arrive, please check your spam folder or use the resend option on the signup screen.

We published an "Operator Information" page summarizing the operator, the person in charge, the address, and how to get in touch — reachable from the "Legal" section of the footer. We also prepared a notation based on the Specified Commercial Transactions Act in preparation for future paid offerings.

We audited every certification's questions with multi-axis AI checks (including English accuracy and clarity) and fixed mistranslations and explanation inconsistencies. We also analyzed coverage at the level of learning objectives and added questions for previously under-tested fundamentals (data formats, generative-AI evaluation metrics, the shared responsibility model, tracking service updates, and more).

We validated the in-scope services of Google Cloud certifications against the official exam guides (PDF) and refreshed glossary, textbook, and question coverage. We added explanations and questions for core services such as Artifact Registry, Filestore, Cloud NGFW, Cloud Interconnect, and Cloud Trace (Associate Cloud Engineer), Cloud Armor (Cloud Digital Leader), and Cloud Run (Generative AI Leader).

For the main Azure certifications (AZ-104/204/500/700/305/400, DP-300/700/600/100, AI-102), we validated the exam scope against Microsoft’s official "Skills measured" study guides and added explanations and questions for services that were previously thin. Newly added/strengthened services include Azure Container Apps, Azure Container Registry, Azure Advisor, Azure Virtual WAN, Microsoft Defender for Servers, RAG with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search, Azure App Configuration, Azure AI Content Understanding/Video Indexer, Microsoft Fabric Mirroring/Direct Lake/XMLA endpoint, Azure Route Server, and Azure Arc-enabled SQL. Use them in each certification’s glossary, textbook, and practice questions.

For all Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform certifications, we audited that the major in-scope services appear across the glossary, textbook, and questions, and filled the gaps. We added term-linked explanations of services that were thin per cert (Azure Key Vault, Azure Bastion, Azure Machine Learning, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Private Link, Microsoft Cost Management, Microsoft Intune, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, and more) and added service-identification questions covering them. We also broadened the cert tagging of existing terms. This completes the service-coverage pass across all AWS, GitHub, Google Cloud, and Azure certifications.

For all 14 Google Cloud certifications, we audited that the major in-scope services appear across the glossary, textbook, and questions, and filled the gaps. We added glossary terms such as VPC, firewall rules, service accounts, Cloud Shell, Deployment Manager, Cloud Billing, Cloud Endpoints, and API Gateway, and broadened the cert tagging of existing terms (App Engine, Cloud DNS, Cloud NAT, Security Command Center, Secret Manager, Vertex AI, and more). In the textbook we added term-linked explanations of services that were thin per cert (App Engine, Cloud CDN, Cloud Identity, BigQuery, VPC Flow Logs, Dataplex, Private Service Connect, and others), and added service-identification questions covering them. Use them in the cert-filtered glossary, word-book, and practice questions.

For the five GitHub certifications (Foundations, Actions, Advanced Security, Administration, Copilot), we audited that the major in-scope services/features appear across the glossary, textbook, and questions, and filled the gaps. We added glossary entries such as GitHub Packages, dependency graph, Code of conduct, code review, configuration variables, Copilot-supported editors, GitHub Connect, and usage metrics, and improved the surfaces/cert tags of existing entries (OIDC, gh CLI, caching, security advisories). In the textbook we added an explanation of the dependency graph to the GitHub Foundations security section and named the supported editors (Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains) in the Copilot explanation.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Security Operations Engineer." Study all six sections of the official exam guide—platform operations, data management, threat hunting, detection engineering, incident response, and observability—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn integrating Google SecOps (SIEM/SOAR), Security Command Center, GTI, and Cloud IDS; log ingestion with parsers/UDM normalization and Event Threat Detection; event/entity data with aliasing-based enrichment; hunting with Logs Explorer/BigQuery, retrohunt, toxic combinations, and entity risk score; YARA-L detection rules, reference lists, Risk Analytics, and the entity graph; forensic/root-cause analysis, SOAR playbooks, and case management; plus dashboards/KPIs (MTTD/MTTR) and silent source detection—the SOC practice of Google Cloud. This completes all nine Professional-tier Google Cloud certifications.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Machine Learning Engineer." Study all six sections of the official exam guide—low-code AI, managing data and models, scaling into ML models, serving and scaling, automating ML pipelines, and monitoring AI solutions—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn BigQuery ML/AutoML/Tabular Workflows, Model Garden ML APIs and RAG (Vertex AI Agent Builder), Dataflow/TFX preprocessing and Vertex AI Feature Store, Vertex AI Workbench and experiment tracking (Experiments/TensorBoard); custom training/Kubeflow/distributed training (TPU/GPU, Reduction Server/Horovod)/hyperparameter tuning/fine-tuning; batch/online inference, Model Registry, A/B testing, private endpoints, quantization/distillation/pruning; Vertex AI Pipelines/Cloud Composer, CI/CD, Vertex ML Metadata/lineage; plus Vertex AI Model Monitoring (skew/drift), Explainable AI, and Responsible AI—the Vertex-AI-centered ML practice of Google Cloud. The eighth of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Cloud Security Engineer." Study all five sections of the official exam guide—configuring access, securing communications and boundary protection, ensuring data protection, managing operations, and supporting compliance—via a textbook (5 chapters, 10 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn Cloud Identity/GCDS/SSO and Workforce/Workload Identity Federation, keyless service accounts; IAM least privilege/deny policies/conditions/Privileged Access Manager/org policies; Identity-Aware Proxy/Cloud Armor/Cloud NGFW/VPC Service Controls/Private Google Access; Sensitive Data Protection (DLP)/CMEK/Cloud EKM/Cloud HSM/Confidential Computing/Vertex AI security; Binary Authorization/Artifact Analysis/Security Command Center/Cloud IDS/aggregated sinks; plus Assured Workloads/Access Transparency & Approval/regionalization—the security practice of Google Cloud. The seventh of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Cloud Network Engineer." Study all six sections of the official exam guide—designing/planning a VPC network, implementing a VPC network, configuring managed network services, hybrid/multicloud interconnectivity, managing/monitoring/troubleshooting network operations, and cloud network security—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn network tiers and Shared VPC/VPC peering/Network Connectivity Center, IPAM and global/regional dynamic routing; Cloud Interconnect (Dedicated/Partner/Cross-Cloud) and HA VPN, Cloud Router BGP; load balancing (internal/external, L7/L4, NEGs), Cloud CDN, and Cloud DNS; private GKE and Dataplane V2; VPC Flow Logs/Packet Mirroring and Network Intelligence Center; plus Cloud Armor (WAF/DDoS)/Cloud NGFW/Secure Web Proxy—the networking practice of Google Cloud. The sixth of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer." Study all five sections of the official exam guide—bootstrapping/maintaining an organization, building/implementing CI/CD pipelines, applying SRE practices, observability/troubleshooting, and optimizing performance/cost—via a textbook (5 chapters, 10 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn resource hierarchy and org policies, Shared VPC/Private Service Connect, Workload Identity; Cloud Build/Cloud Deploy/Artifact Registry and deployment strategies (canary/blue-green); Secret Manager/Binary Authorization/SLSA; SLI/SLO/SLA and error budgets, MIG/Cloud Run/GKE autoscaling and incident mitigation; Ops Agent/OpenTelemetry/Managed Service for Prometheus, Logs Explorer, distributed tracing (Cloud Trace); plus Active Assist and FinOps (Spot VMs/CUD/SUD/network tiers)—the DevOps/SRE practice of Google Cloud. The fifth of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Cloud Database Engineer." Study all four sections of the official exam guide—designing scalable, highly available databases; managing across multiple technologies; migrating data solutions; and deploying—via a textbook (4 chapters, 8 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn choosing Cloud SQL/Spanner/Bigtable/Firestore/AlloyDB, zonal/regional/multi-regional placement with RTO/RPO and PITR, maintenance windows and session poolers, IAM/auditing/CMEK, slow-query diagnosis and index design, migration with Database Migration Service/Datastream/Transfer Appliance and reverse replication, plus HA with failover drills, read replicas, and synchronous/asynchronous replication—the database practice of Google Cloud. The fourth of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Data Engineer." Study all five sections of the official exam guide—designing data processing systems, ingesting and processing, storing, preparing/using for analysis, and maintaining/automating—via a textbook (5 chapters, 10 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn IAM/encryption/PII and data governance, pipelines with Dataflow/Dataproc/Pub/Sub and Cloud Composer, BigQuery/BigLake/Bigtable/Spanner with partitioning/clustering, BI Engine/BigQuery ML/Analytics Hub, and Dataproc clusters/BigQuery reservations and monitoring/fault tolerance—the data-engineering practice of Google Cloud. The third of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Cloud Developer." Study all four sections of the official exam guide—designing cloud-native applications, building and testing, configuring for deployment, and integrating with Google Cloud services—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn platform choice and APIs (REST/gRPC, Apigee), secure design with Secret Manager/IAP/Binary Authorization, storing data and consistency, Cloud Build/Artifact Registry and CI testing, deploying to Cloud Run/GKE, and Pub/Sub integration and observability (Cloud Logging/Trace, Error Reporting)—the developer practice of Google Cloud. The second of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud professional certification "Professional Cloud Architect." Study all four sections of the official exam guide—designing and planning, managing and provisioning, security and compliance, and analyzing/optimizing technical and business processes—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn requirements-driven architecture, choosing compute/storage/DB, availability/scalability/DR (RTO/RPO), migration and hybrid connectivity, IaC and networking, IAM and organization policies/encryption/compliance, and cost optimization and SRE/CI-CD—the architect practice of Google Cloud. The first of the Professional tier.

We now support the Google Cloud associate certification "Associate Google Workspace Administrator." Study all six sections of the official exam guide—users/domains/directory, core services, data governance and compliance, security policy and access control, browsers and endpoints, and monitoring and troubleshooting—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn user provisioning (CSV/GCDS/SCIM) and OUs/admin roles, configuring Gmail/Drive/Calendar/Meet, Vault retention/holds/eDiscovery, DLP/data regions, 2-step verification/SAML SSO/context-aware access, Chrome and endpoint management, and reports/audit logs and troubleshooting—the practice of Workspace administration.

We now support the Google Cloud associate certification "Associate Data Practitioner." Study all four sections of the official exam guide—data preparation and ingestion, data analysis and presentation, data pipeline orchestration, and data management—via a textbook (4 chapters, 11 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn data ingestion into BigQuery/Cloud Storage/Cloud SQL, SQL analysis and visualization with Looker/Looker Studio, pipelines with Dataflow/Dataform/Cloud Composer, and IAM least privilege, storage classes and lifecycle, and CMEK/CSEK/GMEK encryption keys—the data practice of Google Cloud.

We now support the Google Cloud associate certification "Associate Cloud Engineer." Study all five sections of the official exam guide—setting up the environment, planning and configuring, deploying and implementing, operating, and configuring access and security—via a textbook (5 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), a 100-question bank, and a glossary. Learn resource hierarchy and IAM, Compute Engine/GKE/Cloud Run/Cloud Functions, VPC and firewalls/load balancers, Cloud Monitoring/Logging, and service accounts with least privilege—the operational practice of Google Cloud.

We now support the Google Cloud foundational generative AI certification "Generative AI Leader." Study all four domains of the official exam guide—fundamentals of generative AI, Google Cloud generative AI offerings, techniques to improve output, and business strategies—via a textbook (4 chapters, 10 sections, each with a figure), an 80-question bank, and a glossary. Learn how foundation models and LLMs work, Gemini/Vertex AI/Imagen/Veo/Chirp, prompt engineering and grounding/RAG, and responsible AI (SAIF, data governance)—the knowledge to apply generative AI in business.

Instiq now supports its first Google Cloud (GCP) certification, “Cloud Digital Leader.” Study all six sections of the official exam guide—digital transformation with Google Cloud, data transformation, innovating with AI, modernizing infrastructure and applications, trust and security, and scaling with operations—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, each with a figure), an 80-question bank, and a glossary. Learn key Google Cloud services such as Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Vertex AI/Gemini, and Cloud IAM/BeyondCorp from a business perspective.

We added “Glossary” to the header menu (alongside Textbook, Questions, and Review), and on mobile you can now reach the glossary from the “Learn” section of the menu—so you can quickly look up unfamiliar terms while studying.

We unified the icons across the site into an Instiq-original design derived from our logo (hexagon, blue-to-purple gradient, ascending steps). Icons and emoji throughout navigation, the dashboard, stats, questions, and the textbook now share one consistent, on-brand look.

We now support the GitHub intermediate administrator certification “GitHub Administration (GH-100).” Study all five domains—manage identities & access (SAML SSO/SCIM/EMU, roles and teams), administer the Enterprise environment (deployment scenarios & licensing, user support), implement secure development & compliance (policies & rulesets, GHAS, API/apps), manage GitHub Actions (governance & runners, secrets & Vault), and monitor & optimize usage (audit log, cost optimization)—via a textbook (5 chapters, 11 sections, with figures), a 100-question bank, and a glossary, aligned with the latest official skills (July 2026 update).

We now support the GitHub intermediate security certification “GitHub Advanced Security (GH-500).” Study all six domains—security suites & ecosystem, Secret Protection (formerly secret scanning), supply chain security (Dependabot/Dependency Review), Code Security (CodeQL), security operations (prioritization and remediation), and security suites administration—via a textbook (6 chapters, 12 sections, with figures), a 100-question bank, and a glossary, aligned with the latest official skills (July 2026 update) including the renamed domains.

We now support the GitHub intermediate certification “GitHub Copilot (GH-300).” Study all six domains—responsible use (risks and validation), Copilot features (IDE/CLI, Agent Mode/Edit Mode/MCP, org policy), data and architecture, prompt engineering, developer productivity, and privacy/exclusions/safeguards—via a textbook (6 chapters, 13 sections, with figures), a 100-question bank, and a glossary, aligned with the latest official skills (January 2026 update).

We now support the GitHub intermediate certification “GitHub Actions (GH-200).” Study all five domains—authoring/managing workflows, consuming/troubleshooting, authoring/maintaining actions, managing Actions for the enterprise, and securing/optimizing automation—via a textbook (5 chapters, 12 sections, with figures), a 100-question bank, and a glossary, aligned with the latest official skills (January 2026 update). Start from the certification selector in the header or the cert picker.

We fixed several main pages (textbook, question bank, ranking, learning stats, review, my notes, dashboard, etc.) whose browser-tab and search titles/descriptions stayed in Japanese while in English mode (/en); they now display in English. Japanese mode is unaffected.

We added “streak freeze,” which automatically protects your streak when you miss a day. You earn one freeze for every 7-day streak (up to 3), and if you skip a day, your next answer automatically spends a freeze to keep your streak going. See how many you have under “Achievements” on your profile. No payment needed — they accumulate as you keep studying.

PDF/print used to be per-section; now you can also export a whole chapter or the whole book. In the textbook reader, the “⎙ PDF” menu (top right) offers “this section / this whole chapter / whole book.” It opens a print-friendly page — choose “Save as PDF” in your browser’s print dialog to export everything at once. Great for offline reading or paper review.

You can now give a 👍 like to comments on each question. Tap once to like a helpful comment and see the count; tap again to undo (no double-counting per person). Log in to use it.

We made profiles richer. From your My Page you can set a preset avatar, a short bio, and the certifications you’re studying or have obtained. Choose who can see it — private (only you), logged-in users, or public — and toggle each item (bio, target certs, level/XP, badges, streak) on or off individually. It’s private by default and only visible to others when you opt in. Set a public URL (handle) and others can view your profile via a share link.

We added more badges that reflect your progress. New badges are now granted automatically when you meet the conditions: “🌅 Early bird” / “🌙 Night owl” (answer questions in those hours), “🏅 Domain master” (20+ answers and 85%+ accuracy in a domain), “🧹 Review cleared” (no review items left due), “🎓 Exam passed” (reach the pass line in exam/mock mode), and “💯 Perfect exam” (all correct on a 10+ question exam). You can see your badges on your profile.

The ranking page now switches between “All-time” and “This week.” “This week” is a weekly ranking based only on the XP you earn during the current week, and it resets every Monday at 00:00 Japan time. Even if the all-time top is hard to catch, a strong week can put you near the top. Earning XP by answering questions counts toward both the all-time and weekly boards automatically.

You can now export the glossary and your vocabulary in formats that flashcard apps import directly. On the glossary page, one tap exports the terms you have filtered (by certification or search) for Anki / Quizlet, with the certification code added as a tag. Each vocabulary deck now offers an “Export” menu with CSV (for spreadsheets), Anki, and Quizlet. Everything is generated on your own device and nothing is sent externally — Anki reads the exported .txt as-is, and Quizlet imports it by pasting.

We unified the learning-stats colors around the site’s brand color (purple) for a more refined look. Accuracy is now shown as shades of purple (darker = higher), consistently across the per-certification and per-domain bars, the accuracy trend, the last-30-days practice volume, and the study-calendar shading. The pass-guideline line uses an amber tone that stands out clearly against the purple, and incorrect answers in the volume chart are shown in a quiet neutral gray. Contrast is tuned for both light and dark themes.

We made the learning-stats page clearer and better at keeping you going. Each section heading now has a “?” icon with an on-the-spot explanation. “Last 30 days” gained Y-axis (count) and X-axis (date) labels, stacked correct/incorrect bars, and a 30-day total plus daily average. The study calendar has a cleaner color scale with a counted legend and weekday/month labels, alongside a big “🔥 current streak / 🏆 longest streak” display and a nudge when you haven’t studied yet today. We also added an accuracy trend (7-day moving average), a pass-guideline line on each accuracy bar (matched to each exam’s passing score), and progress toward your next badge.

We are adding the distinctions between easily-confused term pairs (e.g., visibility timeout vs message retention, EFS vs EBS) to question explanations, so you can study them in the glossary and as flashcards. We publish each certification as it is completed. [Done] DVA-C02 (Developer – Associate), MLS-C01 (Machine Learning – Specialty), ANS-C01 (Advanced Networking – Specialty), CLF-C02 (Cloud Practitioner – Foundational), AIF-C01 (AI Practitioner – Foundational), SAA-C03 (Solutions Architect – Associate), SCS-C02 (Security – Specialty), SOA-C02 (SysOps Administrator – Associate), SCS-C03 (Security – Specialty), SOA-C03 (CloudOps – Associate), SAP-C02 (Solutions Architect – Professional), DOP-C02 (DevOps Engineer – Professional). All targeted AWS certifications are now complete.

We added a diagram to each of the “in-scope service coverage” sections in the SOA-C03 (CloudOps Engineer – Associate) and SCS-C03 (Security – Specialty) textbooks (12 sections total, one at the end of each chapter). Each diagram groups the services the same way as the section summary (e.g., databases / storage / recovery control), bringing these sections in line with the “one figure per section” style used elsewhere.

We tidied the home page calls-to-action. "Start free (sign up)" is now the primary path, with "try without signing up (book and questions)" alongside it. The hero notes that "Chapter 1 needs no signup," and after you pick a certification we add a gentle prompt to sign up. The idea: try it freely first, then sign up if you like it.

We are cross-checking each certification against its official “in-scope services” list and progressively improving coverage across three axes—glossary, textbook, and questions—publishing each certification as it is completed. [Done] DOP-C02 (DevOps Engineer – Professional), SAP-C02 (Solutions Architect – Professional), SAA-C03 (Solutions Architect – Associate), DVA-C02 (Developer – Associate), DEA-C01 (Data Engineer – Associate), ANS-C01 (Advanced Networking – Specialty), MLA-C01 (Machine Learning Engineer – Associate), MLS-C01 (Machine Learning – Specialty), AIF-C01 (AI Practitioner – Foundational), CLF-C02 (Cloud Practitioner – Foundational), SOA-C03 (CloudOps Engineer – Associate), and SCS-C03 (Security – Specialty): each now covers 100% of in-scope services in the glossary, adds textbook explanations for previously missing services, and adds exam-style questions for core services.

We added a “Glossary” button to the certification cards on the home page. Tap it to open the glossary filtered to that certification, alongside Textbook and Questions.

We reworked how study plans are built. The setting changed from “intensity” to “weekly study time”, and plans now auto-organize into three phases—Input (textbook) → Practice (questions) → Final (mock & review)—based on how much of the textbook you’ve read. The top of your dashboard now shows “today’s tasks” plus the rest of this week.

You can now keep multiple study plans, one per certification. Pick a certification and intensity (light/standard/intense) when creating one, and see “this week’s tasks” gathered across all plans at the top of your dashboard. Each plan shows a pace estimate and can be exported to your calendar (.ics). We also added a dedicated dashboard URL (/dashboard), a link to My page, and an “active certification” label.

On the dashboard, we added a "?" mark to the top-right of each feature button—textbook, questions, review, stats, vocabulary, notes, and ranking. Tap it to see a short overview of what each feature does, so newcomers can get started with confidence.

We revamped the header certification switcher so you can search by code or name. You can filter by vendor (AWS/Azure/GitHub) and see full names and levels, making it faster to find the certification you want.

We reorganized links into three groups—Learn, My learning, and Info. On mobile you can now reach every feature from the header menu (≡), and your stats, vocabulary, notes, and ranking are gathered on the dashboard and My page.

You can now rate each textbook section ★1–5 for clarity (when signed in). Your ratings help us improve the materials.

We reviewed questions and explanations across all certifications and fixed numerous technical errors, answer-key issues, and unclear wording—including a display issue with explanation summaries.

Terms, Privacy Policy, FAQ, and Contact are now available in Japanese and English, with language-specific URLs (hreflang) for search engines.

Added AI-300 "Operationalizing Machine Learning and Generative AI Solutions" as the successor to DP-100 (5 chapters + 100 questions), covering MLOps and GenAIOps.

Added AWS CloudOps Engineer (SOA-C03) and Security – Specialty (SCS-C03), including the latest scope such as container operations and generative-AI application security.

Added Cloud and AI Security (SC-500, successor to AZ-500) and Microsoft 365 Copilot & Agent Administration (AB-900, successor to MS-900).

Added AI-901, AI-103, and AI-200 as successors to the retiring AI-900, AI-102, and AZ-204, with quick links to switch from retiring certifications to their successors.