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Intro
Exam AZ-305, Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions, is for people who translate business requirements into designs for cloud and hybrid solutions on Azure. It is one of the requirements for the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification. This guide turns the AZ-305 skills outline into manageable study tasks, with CertMonk as one option for reviewing what you learn. The exam scope comes from Microsoft Learn’s AZ-305 page; the study plan below is our suggested approach.
Exam at a glance
| Detail | AZ-305 |
|---|---|
| Exam code | AZ-305, Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions |
| Passing score | 700 |
| Questions | See the exam page and Microsoft’s exam policies |
| Time | See the exam page and Microsoft’s exam policies |
| Question types | See the exam page and Microsoft’s exam policies |
| Languages | English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (Traditional) and Italian |
| Price | Check the vendor’s site for current pricing |
| Retirement | None listed |
Source: Microsoft Learn’s AZ-305 page, reviewed November 7, 2026.
Version update: Microsoft states that the English version of this exam was updated on April 17, 2026, and that localized versions follow roughly eight weeks later, though timing can vary. Use the study guide linked from the exam page to see the latest changes, and make sure your materials match the current skills measured.
Exam domains and weights
| Domain | Weight | In plain English |
|---|---|---|
| Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions | 25–30% | Plan who gets access, how rules are enforced and how a solution is observed. |
| Design data storage solutions | 20–25% | Choose how data is stored, protected and made available. |
| Design business continuity solutions | 15–20% | Plan for backup, recovery and keeping services available through disruption. |
| Design infrastructure solutions | 30–35% | Choose compute, networking, application architecture and migration approaches. |
Domain labels and weights follow Microsoft’s exam page. Use the full official exam objectives as your coverage checklist; a domain’s weight should help allocate attention without becoming a reason to skip smaller topics.
What each domain really tests
Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
This domain asks you to design the controls that surround a workload. Start with identity: how users and applications authenticate, how access is granted and how privileged access is limited. Compare approaches for external users and for service-to-service access.
Then study governance. Learn how management groups, subscriptions, policies and role assignments organize and constrain an environment, and how secrets and keys are protected. For monitoring, decide what data a solution should produce and where it should go. Write one sentence for each design: what risk it reduces and what it costs in complexity.
Design data storage solutions
Match the data to the service. Compare relational, non-relational and analytical needs, and the trade-offs among consistency, scale, latency and cost. For unstructured data, study storage account options, redundancy choices and access tiers.
Add data integration. Learn when a team would move or transform data, and which services support that work. Practice reading a requirement for the deciding factor, such as global distribution, query style or retention, before choosing a service. Include protection of data at rest and in transit as part of every design.
Design business continuity solutions
Separate availability from recovery. Study how redundancy within and across regions keeps a service running, and how backup and disaster recovery services bring one back. Learn the terms recovery time and recovery point, and use them to judge whether a design meets a stated need.
Review high availability for compute, data and networking separately. For each design, write what failure it tolerates and what it does not. Include how a team would test the plan, since an untested plan is a guess.
Design infrastructure solutions
This is the heaviest domain. Compare compute options such as virtual machines, containers and serverless, and decide which fits a described workload. Study application architecture ideas including messaging, event-driven designs, caching and APIs.
Cover networking: connectivity between sites and clouds, traffic distribution, name resolution and securing network paths. Include migration approaches for moving existing workloads to Azure. Throughout, connect choices to the Azure Well-Architected Framework, which Microsoft names as a design reference. Practice finding the stated constraint, such as cost, operational effort or latency, that decides between two plausible options.
The coverage above is organized from Microsoft’s published skills summary; the note-taking exercises are study suggestions.
A realistic 30-day study plan
Treat this as a starting schedule, not a deadline you must meet. Aim for a focused session most days, with time for reading, recall and review. Microsoft describes candidates as having advanced experience across IT operations, plus experience in Azure administration, development and DevOps, so if you are newer to Azure, extend the plan and build foundations first.
Days 1–7: identity and governance
Save the skills outline and mark each item as familiar, uncertain or new. Spend the week on identity, governance and monitoring designs. After each session, close your notes and explain one design decision aloud.
Keep a learning log with three columns: topic, misunderstanding and next action. A next action should be specific, such as comparing two ways to control access. “Study more” is too broad to help tomorrow.
Days 8–14: data storage
Work through data storage and integration. Make a comparison sheet that lists each option, the workload it suits and a limitation. At the end of the week, revisit week one without looking at your notes first.
Reserve one session for catching up. If several concepts remain unclear, reduce the new material instead of lengthening your study days.
Days 15–19: business continuity
Cover availability, backup and disaster recovery. Draw a simple design and mark what happens if a datacenter or region is lost. Use untimed practice to expose reasoning gaps, then return to the relevant topic before trying again.
Days 20–27: infrastructure
Give the infrastructure domain several separate sessions: compute, application architecture, networking and migration. End the week with mixed review. Record correct guesses as uncertain knowledge. They need follow-up even though a practice score may count them as correct. Add timed practice once you can explain trade-offs without help, and separate knowledge gaps from rushed reading.
Days 28–30: make a readiness decision
Review concise notes and remaining uncertainties. Check the exam version and booking details directly with Microsoft. If important topics still feel unfamiliar, plan another week; finishing a calendar is not evidence that learning is complete.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
- Mixing old and updated material. The English exam was updated in April 2026, so confirm that each resource covers the current skills measured.
- Choosing a familiar service over the requirement. Underline the deciding constraint in each scenario before picking an option.
- Treating availability and recovery as the same thing. State which failures each design survives and how it recovers.
- Ignoring cost and operational effort. A technically valid design may be wrong if a simpler one meets the need.
- Counting lucky guesses as mastery. Flag them for review alongside incorrect responses.
- Repeating a familiar set until the score rises. Return to the underlying concept and explain it without answer choices.
How to use practice questions well
Begin untimed. Read the explanation for your selected answer and for each alternative, then identify the distinction you missed. Wrong-answer explanations matter because they can reveal why a familiar term does not fit the situation being described.
CertMonk offers explanations for every answer choice, randomized practice tests, timed practice and an untimed learning mode, plus flip-card flashcards, study games and progress by exam domain. Use those tools for different jobs: explanations for reasoning, flashcards and games for recall, and domain progress to choose what to review next.
After a practice session, choose a small number of gaps to repair. Read the relevant material, write a short explanation and revisit it later. Add timed practice when the concepts feel more stable. Treat practice results as feedback about your preparation, not a prediction of your exam result.
Free practice questions
Use the free samples below to explore the format and review the explanations without a purchase.
A multiplayer game uses a custom protocol over UDP and TCP, and its servers run behind public endpoints in three Azure regions. Players must be sent to the region with the lowest network latency, and unhealthy regions must be skipped automatically. The game client resolves a DNS name before connecting. Which service should the architect use for global routing?
- AAn internal Standard Load Balancer in each regional network
- BAzure Application Gateway in each region with a WAF policy
- CAzure Traffic Manager using the performance routing method
- DAzure Front Door with origin groups in each region
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: C. Azure Traffic Manager using the performance routing method
Correct. Traffic Manager works at the DNS layer, so it is protocol-agnostic. Performance routing returns the closest healthy endpoint, and health probes remove failed regions.
Why not the others
- A. An internal load balancer distributes traffic inside one virtual network. It has no public or cross-region routing role.
- B. Application Gateway is a regional layer-7 HTTP load balancer. It neither routes between regions nor handles custom UDP traffic.
- D. Front Door is a global reverse proxy for HTTP and HTTPS only, so it cannot carry a custom UDP protocol.
Takeaway: For global routing of non-HTTP traffic, use a DNS-based (Traffic Manager) or layer-4 global option; Front Door and Application Gateway are HTTP(S)-only layer-7 services.
Source: How Traffic Manager works
A company wants its 150 on-premises Windows and Linux servers monitored with the same data collection rules, alerts, and workbooks that it uses for Azure virtual machines, all managed from the Azure portal. Which approach should the architect recommend?
- AInstall the legacy Log Analytics agent on each server and connect it to the workspace with the workspace ID and key.
- BEnable VM insights from the Azure portal on each on-premises server directly, without any other onboarding.
- CForward every server’s events to a syslog collector virtual machine in Azure and monitor only that collector.
- DOnboard the servers to Azure Arc and deploy the Azure Monitor Agent extension, then associate the existing data collection rules.
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: D. Onboard the servers to Azure Arc and deploy the Azure Monitor Agent extension, then associate the existing data collection rules.
Correct. Arc-enabled servers are represented as Azure resources, so the Azure Monitor Agent can be deployed as an extension and managed with the same data collection rules, policies, and alerts as Azure virtual machines.
Why not the others
- A. The legacy Log Analytics agent was retired in August 2024. Its replacement, the Azure Monitor Agent, is the supported collector.
- B. The portal can manage only resources that exist in Azure. On-premises servers must first be projected into Azure through Azure Arc.
- C. A forwarder can move some Linux logs, but it does not give each server an Azure identity for policy, per-server data collection rules, or Windows event collection.
Takeaway: Bring on-premises servers under Azure Monitor by onboarding them to Azure Arc and deploying the Azure Monitor Agent with data collection rules, the same model used for Azure virtual machines.
Source: Migrate from Log Analytics agent to Azure Monitor Agent
A SaaS provider keeps 5,000 tenants spread across 40 Azure SQL databases, several tenants per database. Large tenants are sometimes moved to their own database as they grow, and the application must always connect each request to the database that currently holds that tenant, without hard-coded connection strings. What should the architect recommend?
- AA shard map manager with the Elastic Database client library for data-dependent routing by tenant ID
- BA configuration file in each application instance that maps tenant IDs to connection strings, redeployed after every move
- CPlace all 40 databases in one elastic pool so that the pool routes each tenant’s requests
- DA failover group over the 40 databases, with the application connecting through its listener
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: A. A shard map manager with the Elastic Database client library for data-dependent routing by tenant ID
Correct. The shard map records which database holds each tenant key, and data-dependent routing opens a connection to the right shard for each request; moves update the map instead of the application
Why not the others
- B. A static file per instance goes stale during moves and needs a redeployment each time, which is the hard-coding the provider wants to avoid
- C. Elastic pools share compute and storage resources among databases. They do not route requests to the database that holds a tenant
- D. A failover group listener redirects connections between primary and secondary replicas for disaster recovery. It knows nothing about tenants
Takeaway: For sharded multitenant Azure SQL, use a shard map manager with the Elastic Database client library so data-dependent routing sends each tenant to the right database, even as tenants move.
A team runs a payment API in a region that has a paired region and keeps its secrets in Azure Key Vault in that region. They ask what happens to the vault if the whole region is unavailable for a long time, and whether they must build replication themselves. What should the architect tell them?
- AReads and writes continue in the paired region the moment the outage begins
- BContents are replicated to the paired region and Microsoft can fail over, after which the vault is read-only
- CNothing replicates automatically, so a second vault kept current by backups is the only option
- DZone redundancy already protects the vault from the loss of an entire region
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: B. Contents are replicated to the paired region and Microsoft can fail over, after which the vault is read-only
Correct. Key Vault replicates asynchronously to the paired region, Microsoft may trigger failover for a prolonged outage, and the failed-over vault supports only limited, mostly read, operations.
Why not the others
- A. Failover is Microsoft-managed, best effort, and can come after a long delay. Afterward the vault is read-only.
- C. Key Vault replicates contents within the region and to the paired region by default. Backups are an option for other needs, not the only one.
- D. Zone redundancy protects against a zone failure inside the region. A region outage needs the paired-region replication.
Takeaway: Key Vault replicates to the paired region in most regions and Microsoft may fail over during a prolonged outage, leaving the vault read-only. For tighter objectives, build separate vaults per region with backup and restore.
Source: Reliability in Azure Key Vault
An on-premises PostgreSQL server must move to Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server with downtime limited to a short cutover. The team wants a fully managed tool integrated into the Azure portal and CLI rather than the classic Database Migration Service. What should the architect recommend?
- Apg_dump and pg_restore during a maintenance window
- BAn Azure Data Factory pipeline that copies each table nightly
- CAzure Site Recovery replication of the PostgreSQL VM
- DThe migration service in Azure Database for PostgreSQL in online mode
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: D. The migration service in Azure Database for PostgreSQL in online mode
Correct. The built-in migration service is a managed tool in the portal and CLI; online mode keeps the source running until you initiate cutover.
Why not the others
- A. Dump and restore is an offline migration; the database is unavailable for the whole copy.
- B. Nightly table copies miss changes between runs and don’t migrate schema objects or provide a controlled cutover.
- C. Site Recovery moves the whole VM, not the database into the managed flexible server.
Takeaway: Microsoft recommends the migration service in Azure Database for PostgreSQL (portal and CLI) over classic DMS; online mode limits downtime to the cutover.
Source: Migrate online to Azure Database for PostgreSQL with the migration service
FAQ
Is AZ-305 the only exam for Azure Solutions Architect Expert?
Microsoft lists AZ-305 as part of the requirements for Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert. Check the certification page for the complete requirements.
What changed in the April 2026 update?
Microsoft states that the English exam was updated on April 17, 2026, and points to its study guide for the details of the changes. Review that guide against your materials.
What experience does Microsoft expect?
Microsoft describes advanced experience and knowledge of IT operations, such as networking, identity, security and business continuity, plus experience in Azure administration, development and DevOps. Use that to judge your starting point.
Is 30 days enough to prepare?
It can be a useful planning window, but your starting knowledge and available time decide whether it is realistic. Extend it if you cannot yet explain the design trade-offs or compare services against a requirement.
Which domain should I focus on?
Design infrastructure solutions carries the largest weight, but identity, governance and monitoring is close behind. Keep every domain on your checklist and use the weights to balance your time.
How should I decide what to revise next?
Start with concepts you cannot explain and mistakes that recur across practice sessions. Use domain weights to balance the remaining schedule, while keeping every domain on your checklist.
Next step
Try free practice questions → https://app.certmonk.app/samples
