Azure AZ-104 study guide
Azure AZ-104 · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate is an intermediate-level Microsoft certification for administrators who implement, manage, and monitor an organization's Azure environment, including virtual networks, storage, compute, identity, security, and governance. Candidates usually sit within a larger cloud infrastructure team and coordinate with networking, security, database, application development, and DevOps roles, so the credential assumes familiarity with operating systems, networking, servers, and virtualization, plus working experience with PowerShell, Azure CLI, the Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager templates or Bicep files, and Microsoft Entra ID. The Azure AZ-104 study guide has 5 sections and about 1,710 words.
01Manage Azure identities and governance
Every Azure RBAC assignment is a triple: a security principal (user, group, service principal, or managed identity), a role definition, and a scope. Scopes nest as management group subscription resource group resource, and permissions flow downward.
337 words, about 2 min02Implement and manage storage
Most storage questions are decided at creation time. Standard general-purpose v2 covers blobs, files, queues, and tables.
352 words, about 2 min03Deploy and manage Azure compute resources
VMs, VM scale sets, App Service, Container Instances, AKS, and Functions each map to a scenario. For VMs, know the size families (B burstable, D general purpose, E memory optimized, F compute optimized, N GPU) and the disk types: Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, Premium SSD v2, and Ultra Disk.
333 words, about 2 min04Implement and manage virtual networking
Plan VNet address space so it never overlaps another VNet you might peer with or any on-premises range. Azure reserves five IP addresses in every subnet (network address, gateway, two for DNS, and broadcast), so a /24 yields 251 usable addresses.
325 words, about 2 min05Monitor and maintain Azure resources
Platform metrics are numeric, near real time, and retained for 93 days; you can alert on them but cannot query them with KQL. Resource logs flow to a Log Analytics workspace and are queried with KQL; interactive retention defaults to 30 days and can extend to 730, with long-term archival to a storage account.
363 words, about 2 min