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AI-200 study resources

Updated September 27, 2026

The best AI-200 resources are free: Microsoft’s skills outline, the Azure documentation for each named service, and an Azure subscription you build things in. Add realistic practice questions to find your weak domain. The one thing to be careful with is older material, because much of what is labelled AI-200 online was written for AZ-204 and only partly updated.

Start with the official material

The skills outline. Four domains, between 20% and 30% each, with the data domain the largest. It fits on two pages and names every service and technique the exam covers. Read it before anything else and keep it open while you study.

The Azure documentation. For each service in the outline — Container Registry, App Service, Container Apps, AKS, Cosmos DB for NoSQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Managed Redis, Service Bus, Event Grid, Functions, Key Vault, App Configuration and Azure Monitor — the quickstarts and how-to guides are the best study material there is. They are current, and the exam is written against the same behaviour they describe.

The exam sandbox. Ten minutes in Microsoft’s demo shows the interface and question types. It contains no real content, but it removes surprises on the day.

Microsoft’s practice assessment, once it appears. Microsoft says these usually arrive within eight weeks of an exam leaving beta.

Lab work is the differentiator

AI-200 describes things you build and asks what is wrong or missing. Six labs cover most of it:

  1. Build and run a container three ways. Build with az acr build, run on App Service, Container Apps and AKS. On AKS, remove the registry permission and read the pod events.
  2. Scale on a queue. A Container App with a Service Bus KEDA rule that scales to zero.
  3. Vector search twice. The same embedded data set in Cosmos DB, with a vector policy and index, and in PostgreSQL with pgvector and HNSW. Check with EXPLAIN that PostgreSQL uses the index.
  4. Cache and invalidate. A cache-aside read through Azure Managed Redis with a TTL, then update the source and see what goes stale.
  5. Fail on purpose. A Function that throws on bad Service Bus messages, until they land in the dead-letter queue. An Event Grid subscription to a dead endpoint, dead-lettered to storage.
  6. No secrets, full traces. A managed identity reading Key Vault, and the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry distro in two services, joined into one trace and queried with KQL.

Delete the resource group after each session. AKS, PostgreSQL and Managed Redis cost money while idle.

Worth paying for

Practice tests written for AI-200, not adapted from AZ-204. Their value is diagnosis: they show which domain is weakest while there is still time to fix it. The free 20-question test here is weighted like the real exam and is a good first check.

A small Azure budget. Twenty or thirty dollars of lab time, spent deliberately, teaches more than any course.

What to avoid

AZ-204 courses and question banks. The storage domain was replaced, not updated, and API Management, Blob Storage lifecycle rules and shared access signatures are no longer in the outline. If a resource spends an hour on Blob Storage and none on pgvector, it was written for the old exam.

Braindumps. They break Microsoft’s exam agreement, risk revocation of every certification you hold, and do not help with scenario questions that describe a situation rather than recite a fact.

Portal click-path memorisation. Menus change. The exam asks which service, setting, command or query meets a requirement, not where a button is.

A sensible order

  1. Read the skills outline once.
  2. Work through the four domains using the documentation and the labs above, following the four-week study plan.
  3. Take the practice test and find your weakest domain.
  4. Go back to that domain’s documentation and repeat its lab.
  5. Book once you score 80% or more on realistic questions twice in a row.

Is this the right exam?

If you build back-end services on Azure, yes. If your work is models, prompts and agents, AI-103 fits better. See the Azure AI certification path for how the exams relate.