Azure AZ-204 study guide
Azure AZ-204 · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate is an intermediate-level Microsoft certification aimed at developers who build end-to-end solutions on Azure. Microsoft lists its product as Azure, its role as Developer, and its subject as application development, and notes it was last updated 01/14/2026. The credential targets professionals who take part in every phase of development - requirements gathering, design, development, deployment, security, maintenance, performance tuning, and monitoring - and who typically partner with cloud solution architects, database administrators, DevOps engineers, and infrastructure administrators. Microsoft recommends at least two years of programming experience, plus proficiency with Azure SDKs, the Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and related tooling. The Azure AZ-204 study guide has 5 sections and about 1,626 words.
01Develop Azure compute solutions
App Service is the default choice for HTTP workloads. The App Service plan is the unit of compute: tier and instance count drive CPU, memory, and features, so two web apps on the same plan share resources.
311 words, about 2 min02Develop for Azure storage
Blob storage holds unstructured data. Understand tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive): Archive is offline, so reads fail until rehydration completes (hours).
317 words, about 2 min03Implement Azure security
The modern pattern: an app authenticates with a managed identity, gets a token from Microsoft Entra ID, and uses it to call Key Vault, Storage, or SQL. No secrets in code or app settings.
340 words, about 2 min04Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions
Application Insights is the app-side telemetry store: requests, dependencies, exceptions, traces, custom events, and metrics, correlated by operation Id for distributed tracing. The SDK is configured with a connection string (instrumentation keys are legacy).
327 words, about 2 min05Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services
API Management fronts APIs: products and subscriptions (keys), policies evaluated in order at inbound/outbound/backend/on-error, rate-limit and quota policies, JWT validation, response caching, and versioning. Policies are XML, and the scope where you define them (global, product, API, operation) determines precedence.
331 words, about 2 min