Azure AZ-305 study guide
Azure AZ-305 · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
Exam AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions is the required exam for the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification. It targets architects who design cloud and hybrid solutions on Azure across compute, networking, storage, monitoring, and security, and who translate business requirements into designs aligned with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. The Azure AZ-305 study guide has 4 sections and about 1,566 words.
01Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
Microsoft Entra ID is the control plane for identity in Azure. For hybrid estates, the sync method is a deliberate choice: password hash synchronization (PHS) is the simplest, supports leaked-credential detection, and keeps working if on-premises fails; pass-through authentication (PTA) validates passwords on-premises but depends on agent health and connectivity; federation (AD FS) is the most complex and is justified only by a hard requirement for on-premises claims or third-party MFA.
423 words, about 2 min02Design data storage solutions
Blob storage for unstructured objects and static content; Azure Files when an application needs an SMB or NFS mount (lift-and-shift); managed disks for VM block storage; Queue for simple messaging; Table for key-value; Data Lake Storage Gen2 (blob with a hierarchical namespace) for analytics engines. Get this first step right and most questions collapse to one answer.
384 words, about 2 min03Design business continuity solutions
RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime; RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. Every architecture question is really asking which pattern meets the stated RTO/RPO at the lowest cost.
352 words, about 2 min04Design infrastructure solutions
Choose VMs when you need OS-level control; VM scale sets for stateless autoscaling; App Service for web apps and APIs with minimal operations; AKS when you need container orchestration and scheduling control; Container Instances for burst or isolated short-lived containers; Functions on the Consumption plan for spiky event-driven work and on the Premium plan when you need VNet integration or no cold start; Logic Apps for integration workflows across SaaS systems. Move up the abstraction ladder only as far as the requirement forces you.
407 words, about 2 min