AZ-305 exam guide: format, domains, preparation
Who the exam is for
AZ-305 (Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions) is the exam for the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification. It is aimed at architects who design solutions on Azure: identity, governance and monitoring, data storage, business continuity, and infrastructure (compute, application architecture, migrations and networking).
This is an expert certification with a prerequisite: the certification page states that you must earn the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification (exam AZ-104) to become an Azure Solutions Architect Expert. The study guide's audience profile describes designs that align with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.
The study guide lists the skills measured as of April 17, 2026. It states that most questions cover features that are generally available, that questions on preview features may appear if those features are commonly used, and that related topics may be covered. Almost every skill bullet starts with "Recommend…" without naming a product: the exam asks you to choose between services, not to configure one.
Exam format
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Exam code | AZ-305 |
| Prerequisite | Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate |
| Duration | Not stated on the AZ-305 pages. Microsoft's general exam duration page gives 100 minutes for associate and expert role-based exams without labs and 120 minutes for those that may contain labs, and says it does not provide a list of exams with labs. |
| Number of questions | Not published for AZ-305. The same general page says most Microsoft certification exams contain between 40 and 60 questions, and that the number can vary. |
| Question types | The general exam experience page describes types such as multiple choice, drag and drop, hot area and case studies. |
| Passing score | 700 or greater |
| Proctoring | Proctored exam |
| Languages | English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (Traditional), Italian |
| Skills outline version | Skills measured as of April 17, 2026 |
| Renewal | Expert certifications expire annually; the study guide says you can renew by passing a free online assessment on Microsoft Learn. |
Domains and weights
The study guide gives each domain a weight range rather than a single figure.
| Domain | Weight | Main skill groups |
|---|---|---|
| Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions | 25–30 % | Logging and monitoring (including routing logs); authentication, identity management and authorization to Azure and on-premises resources; secrets, certificates and keys; management groups, subscriptions, resource groups and tagging; compliance and identity governance |
| Design data storage solutions | 20–25 % | Relational data (service tier, compute tier, scalability, data protection); semi-structured and unstructured data, balancing features, performance and cost; data integration and data analysis |
| Design business continuity solutions | 15–20 % | Backup and disaster recovery that meet recovery objectives, for compute, databases and unstructured data, including hybrid workloads; high availability for compute, relational data and semi-structured or unstructured data |
| Design infrastructure solutions | 30–35 % | Compute (virtual machines, containers, serverless, batch); application architecture (messaging, event-driven, API integration, caching, configuration management, automated deployment); migrations using the Cloud Adoption Framework; network connectivity, performance, security, load balancing and routing |
What changed recently
The change log in the study guide compares the outline before and after April 17, 2026 and marks only a minor change to the audience profile. Read the change log in the study guide itself before your exam.
Because AZ-305 asks you to recommend services, retirements matter: an answer built on a retired product is a wrong answer. A few changes recorded in the product documentation:
- Azure Active Directory has been renamed Microsoft Entra ID. New name for Azure AD
- The Log Analytics agent was retired on August 31, 2024; Azure Monitor Agent replaces it. Migrate to Azure Monitor Agent
- Application Gateway v1 was retired on April 28, 2026. Application Gateway v1 retirement
- Azure Front Door (classic) retires on March 31, 2027 and no longer supports profile creation. Front Door tier migration
- Azure Blueprints (preview) will be retired on January 31, 2027, with a phased retirement beginning July 31, 2026. Azure Blueprints overview
- Support for the Azure Functions in-process model ends on November 10, 2026. Azure Functions runtime versions
- Azure Cache for Redis (Basic, Standard and Premium tiers) will be retired on September 30, 2028. Azure Cache for Redis retirement FAQ
- Kubenet networking for Azure Kubernetes Service will be retired on March 31, 2028. Legacy CNI options for AKS
How to prepare
- Check that you hold, or are preparing, the Azure Administrator Associate certification, which is required for the expert title. Our AZ-104 guide covers that exam.
- Read the official certification page and the exam page for scheduling, languages and exam policies.
- Go through the official study guide bullet by bullet. For each "Recommend…" bullet, list the Azure services that could answer it and the requirement (cost, availability, recovery objectives, security) that makes one better than the others.
- Follow the Microsoft Learn AZ-305 prerequisites learning path, then read the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework, which the audience profile names.
- Give the most time to infrastructure design and to identity, governance and monitoring, which carry the highest weight ranges.
- The exam page also offers a free practice assessment and an exam sandbox to try the exam interface.
- Practise with our AZ-305 practice exam under time pressure, then work through your weak areas in the free study mode.
Our practice questions are multiple choice and based on written documentation; they do not reproduce case studies or interactive components. Read each scenario's requirements carefully: in design questions, one constraint often rules out an otherwise valid service.
Practice Exam AZ-305: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
25 free questions with explanations, no account needed.