Microsoft Certified — Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)
The core Azure operations certification, testing whether you can implement, manage and monitor an Azure environment — identity, governance, storage, compute, virtual networking and monitoring.
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- Microsoft Learn — Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate certification page
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The AZ-104 is the operations certification for Azure — the day-to-day of running an environment someone else designed. It sits closer to the job than the architecture exams do, and it is broader than any single week of that job.
What the weights tell you to study
The weights are fairly flat: identity and compute lead at 24% each, storage and networking take 19%, and monitoring is the lightest at 14%. No domain dominates, and no domain can be skipped. That flatness is the exam's real difficulty — five subjects at once, each deep enough to have its own tooling.
Identity is where to start regardless. Microsoft Entra ID underpins the other four domains, and role assignments show up in storage, compute and networking questions alike.
What the exam is actually like
Interactive components. Microsoft states the exam may include them, which in practice can mean working in a live portal rather than choosing from four answers. Clicking through the real portal during preparation is not optional — you need to know where things are, not just what they are called.
One hundred minutes is tighter than it appears once interactive tasks are involved. They take longer than multiple choice and are worth pacing for.
Multiple tools, one answer. The prerequisites name the portal, PowerShell, the Azure CLI, ARM templates and Bicep. Questions specify which to use, and the correct az flag is not the correct PowerShell parameter. Pick one tool for daily work, but read questions carefully for which one they are asking about.
Where the marks are lost
Networking, for the same reason as every cloud exam: NSGs, route tables, peering and DNS resolution fail in ways that look alike from the portal. Build a two-VNet peering scenario and break it deliberately.
Backup and recovery is the other gap. It spans storage and compute, belongs cleanly to neither in most study material, and is reliably examined.
Before you book
700 out of 1,000 to pass. The pricing is regional — Microsoft publishes the local figure at checkout — so the cost depends on where you sit it.
The validity is the detail worth knowing: 12 months, renewed free through an online assessment on Microsoft Learn. Shorter than the two- or three-year cycles elsewhere, but the renewal is unproctored, takes far less preparation, and costs nothing. Treat this as an annual habit rather than a three-year milestone.
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Exam domains
Manage Azure identities and governance
24%Implement and manage storage
19%Deploy and manage Azure compute resources
24%Implement and manage virtual networking
19%Monitor and maintain Azure resources
14%Preparation path
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Read the official study guide and note the weighting ranges
Microsoft publishes the skills measured as ranges rather than fixed percentages — identity and governance and compute are each 20–25%, storage and networking each 15–20%, and monitoring 10–15%. The weights above are those midpoints scaled so they sum to 100, which keeps every one of them inside its official range; treat the ranges as authoritative. The current version took effect on 17 April 2026.
~3 hours - 2
Work the free Microsoft Learn paths end to end
Microsoft's own learning paths track the exam objectives more closely than any third-party course, because the same team writes both. They include sandboxed Azure environments, so you can complete most of the hands-on work without spending anything or risking your own subscription.
~35 hours - 3
Practise in a real subscription, not only the sandbox
The exam expects fluency across the portal, PowerShell, the Azure CLI and Bicep for the same task, because real administration mixes all four. Build a virtual network with peering, deploy VMs across availability zones, configure NSGs and then deliberately break connectivity and diagnose it with Network Watcher.
~40 hours - 4
Take the free practice assessment and the exam sandbox
Microsoft offers an official practice assessment at no cost, plus a sandbox that reproduces the exam interface including its interactive question types. Run the sandbox at least once: candidates lose time on exam day learning the interface rather than answering questions.
~10 hours - 5
Plan the renewal before you sit the exam
Unlike AWS and CNCF certifications, this one expires after 12 months. Renewal is free and takes an unproctored online assessment on Microsoft Learn, available from six months before expiry — but if you let it lapse you retake the full paid exam. Put the date in a calendar the day you pass.
~2 hours
Frequently asked questions
Career Roadmaps
- Cloud Architect RoadmapA path into cloud architecture as the job it actually is — trade-off analysis, migration of systems you did not write, disaster recovery you have rehearsed, decision records, and influence without formal authority.
- DevOps Engineer RoadmapA structured path from Linux fundamentals through cloud infrastructure, automation, containers, and monitoring to a production-ready DevOps engineering career.