Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert

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Exam at a Glance

AZ-305 measures whether you can work as an Azure solutions architect: turning business requirements into designs for cloud and hybrid solutions on Azure that align with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework. It is a design exam: almost every question asks you to recommend a service or pattern, not to click through a portal.

 

What the Exam Covers

The exam has four domains with unequal weights: infrastructure is the highest-weight domain, with identity, governance, and monitoring close behind, while data storage and business continuity are smaller but decision-dense. Every domain asks the same question: given these requirements, which Azure service or pattern do you recommend, and why?

 

Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions — 25-30%

Logging, log routing, and monitoring solutions; authentication and identity management, authorizing access to Azure and on-premises resources, managing secrets, certificates, and keys; and governance (management group, subscription, and resource group structure with a tagging strategy, compliance management, and identity governance).

 

Design data storage solutions — 20-25%

Relational data (choosing a store, service and compute tiers, scalability, data protection), semi-structured and unstructured data (choosing a store, balancing features, performance, and cost, protection and durability), and solutions for data integration and data analysis.

 

Design business continuity solutions — 15-20%

Recovery solutions for Azure and hybrid workloads that meet stated recovery objectives, backup and recovery for compute, databases, and unstructured data, and high availability for compute, relational data, and semi-structured and unstructured data.

 

Design infrastructure solutions — 30-35%

Compute (virtual machine-based, container-based, serverless, and batch solutions), application architecture (messaging, event-driven architecture, API integration, caching, configuration management, automated deployment), migrations (evaluating a migration with the Cloud Adoption Framework, assessing on-premises servers, data, and applications, migrating workloads, databases, and unstructured data to IaaS and PaaS), and networking (internet and on-premises connectivity, network performance and security, load balancing and routing).

 

The full bullet-level list lives in the official study guide. Treat it as your checklist:

The Official AZ-305 Study Guide

 

How This Maps to CertiAce Practice Modules

The CertiAce question bank is organized by the same six learning paths Microsoft uses for the AZ-305 course (one per exam domain, plus the design-prerequisites refresher and the Well-Architected Framework path), so you can drill each area in isolation:

 

Where AZ-305 Fits

AZ-305 is not an entry point: to become a Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert you must earn the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification (exam AZ-104) in addition to passing AZ-305, and AZ-104 is the only certification that qualifies. Whichever order you take the exams in, the expert certification is issued only once you hold both. Taking AZ-104 first is the sensible route: it builds the hands-on administration foundation that AZ-305 design questions are judged against. If you already hold it and work with Azure regularly, go straight to AZ-305 preparation.

Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert

 

Before You Start

The exam assumes advanced, broad IT operations experience and hands-on Azure administration, plus awareness of Azure development and DevOps processes. Check yourself against this table. Anything unfamiliar is where your preparation should start:

 

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Step-by-Step Study Plan

How long you need depends on where you start. Treat these estimates as planning guidance and adjust them to your starting knowledge and weekly study hours:

 

Step 1: Read the Official Study Guide

Skim the full skills-measured list once, and mark every bullet you could not confidently design a solution for. That marked-up list is your personal syllabus: everything else in this plan exists to clear it. Note how nearly every bullet starts with "recommend", "evaluate", or "specify": that is the altitude the exam tests at.

The Official Study Guide

 

Step 2: Schedule Your Exam

Choose a realistic target date after reviewing the skills list and your available study time. A date on the calendar turns studying into a countdown, so pick one using the prep-time table above and plan backwards from it.

Certification and Exam Details Page

 

Step 3: Work Through the Official Learning Path

Complete the six AZ-305 learning paths on Microsoft Learn, the same six areas the CertiAce practice modules use. Take notes on concepts you cannot explain in simple terms, pay special attention to why one service is recommended over another, and flag anything that needs hands-on practice for Step 5.

Official Learning Path Course Page

 

Step 4: Watch a Full Video Course

No dedicated CertiAce video course exists for AZ-305, so this plan uses John Savill's AZ-305 study playlist: a series of free whiteboard sessions that work through the design areas on the skills list, including the service decision trees the exam keeps returning to. Watch it end to end, pause on the decision-tree videos and redraw them from memory, and note every pair of services you still cannot confidently compare. His single-video Study Cram (in the resources below) is an excellent final review a day or two before the exam.

AZ-305 Design Azure Infrastructure Study Playlist

 

Step 5: Get Hands-On Practice

AZ-305 is a design exam: it rewards matching requirements to services, not memorized portal steps, so the practice that pays off is architectural, plus enough time in a subscription that the services you recommend are ones you have actually configured. Make sure you personally work through:

• Whiteboarding an architecture against written requirements, then comparing it to a reference architecture in the Azure Architecture Center
• The Architecture Center's decision guides for compute, data stores, load balancing, and messaging
• One sentence per service pair you confuse (Application Gateway versus Front Door, Service Bus versus Event Hubs, Azure Backup versus Azure Site Recovery) on when you would pick each
• A Well-Architected Framework review of a design you already run, pillar by pillar
• Building a hub-and-spoke network with private endpoints, a zone-redundant web tier behind a load balancer, and a database with a failover group and backup policy, in a free account, then tearing it down

The official course repository holds the instructor-led class's case studies: written requirements you design a solution for, in the same analyze-then-recommend format the real exam uses.

Official AZ-305 Course Case Studies

 

Step 6: Benchmark Your Knowledge

Use CertiAce to benchmark your readiness module by module. The practice modules map to the exam domains as shown above, so use the module mapping and the topics behind your missed questions to identify the skills-measured areas to revisit. Microsoft also offers a free official practice assessment (in the resources below) as a second signal. Aim for consistent performance across every module, not one lucky high score; if a topic is unstable, go back to the learning path and the decision guides for that area.

CertiAce AZ-305 Exam Practice

 

Step 7: Take the Exam

The day before, review only your weak topics: no brand-new material. On exam day, read the requirement bullets carefully: most wrong options fail exactly one stated requirement, so eliminate against each bullet in turn, and when two options survive, tiebreakers such as "minimize cost" or "minimize administrative effort" decide it. Answer what is asked, not the most impressive architecture you know.

Worth knowing before you sit down:

• Microsoft Learn is available during the exam in a split screen. Use it to check details you genuinely need: the timer keeps running, and the exam is deliberately too long to look up every answer. Browsing is limited to Microsoft Learn itself (no Q&A, practice assessments, or profile), and personal notes and other websites are unavailable.
• You can take unscheduled breaks, but the clock keeps running and you cannot return to questions you already saw.
• Case studies lock when you leave them: finish each one before moving on, because you cannot revisit its questions afterwards.
• Try the exam sandbox beforehand so the question formats and interface hold no surprises: Exam Sandbox

 

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Additional Learning Resources