AZ-305 Exam Guide: Domains, Weights, and How It Differs from AZ-104

AZ-305 covers four design domains and requires 700 out of 1000 to pass. The English version was updated on April 17, 2026, and the exam has no announced retirement date.

The important thing to understand before booking it is that AZ-305 is not a harder AZ-104. It asks a different kind of question.

The four domains

Microsoft publishes these weight ranges on the exam page:

• Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions (25 to 30 percent). Authentication and authorization design, governance structures, and how you monitor what you build.
• Design data storage solutions (20 to 25 percent). Choosing between relational, non-relational and unstructured storage options given access patterns, consistency needs and cost.
• Design business continuity solutions (15 to 20 percent). Backup, recovery and high availability design, including what recovery objectives the business actually requires.
• Design infrastructure solutions (30 to 35 percent). The heaviest domain. Compute, application architecture, networking and migration design.

How it differs from AZ-104

The subject matter overlaps a lot. The framing does not.

AZ-104 asks whether you can do something: configure this network security group, deploy this scale set, set up this backup policy. There is usually one correct procedure.

AZ-305 asks which option you should choose. The scenarios describe a business situation with constraints, and several answers are technically functional. The exam tests whether you pick the one that fits the stated requirements, which means reading the scenario for the constraint that eliminates the others: a recovery point objective, a compliance boundary, a budget ceiling, a latency requirement.

Practically, this changes how you study. Memorizing service capabilities is necessary but not sufficient. You need to know which service wins under which constraint, and that is a comparative skill. Knowing what Azure Site Recovery does is AZ-104. Knowing when Site Recovery is the right answer and when a zone-redundant deployment already satisfies the requirement is AZ-305.

A related habit that helps: when you get a practice question wrong, do not just learn the right answer. Work out what would have had to change in the scenario for each other option to become correct. That is the actual skill being assessed.

Do you need AZ-104 first?

Not formally. Microsoft lists no related exams as prerequisites for AZ-305.

In practice, the exam assumes advanced experience across IT operations including networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data platforms and governance, plus experience with Azure administration, Azure development and DevOps processes. That is a wide base. Most people who pass have either done the administration work professionally or hold AZ-104.

If you have neither, the gap is usually not conceptual understanding but exposure to the tradeoffs, which is hard to get from reading alone.

The Well-Architected Framework is not optional reading

Microsoft explicitly frames the architect role around translating business requirements into designs that align with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework.

This shows up in the exam. Questions are frequently decidable by asking which of the framework pillars the scenario is emphasizing: reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence or performance efficiency. If a scenario stresses cost constraints, the answer that is most reliable but most expensive is usually wrong on purpose. Reading the framework pillars is one of the highest-return uses of study time for this exam specifically.

Renewal

AZ-305 sits on the expert path and follows the standard annual renewal rule: it expires after 12 months and renews for free through a short, unproctored, open-book assessment on Microsoft Learn. The full rules are in our post on Azure certification expiry.

Preparing

Because the exam rewards comparative judgment, practice questions are more useful here than for the fundamentals exams, provided the explanations tell you why the wrong options are wrong rather than only naming the right one.

Our AZ-305 practice exam follows the official four-domain split and every explanation addresses the distractors as well as the correct answer, with a link to the relevant Microsoft documentation. You can try 20 questions free to see whether the format matches how you want to study.

Bottom line

Four domains weighted toward infrastructure design, 700 to pass, no formal prerequisite but a substantial assumed background, and a question style that rewards choosing between valid options rather than recalling procedures. Read the Well-Architected Framework pillars, and practice explaining why the wrong answers are wrong.