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AZ-305 study plan: pass in 4 weeks

Updated October 9, 2026

Four weeks is realistic for AZ-305 if you already hold AZ-104 or work with Azure and can study 8–10 hours a week. Because the exam tests design decisions, the plan swaps labs for design exercises: each week you take a short business scenario, choose services, and write down why the alternatives lose. Cover identity and governance first, data second, business continuity third, and keep infrastructure, the largest domain, for the last week when you can combine everything. Without hands-on Azure experience, add an AZ-104-style foundation first.

Before you start

  • Read the official skills outline once, end to end. It lists every “recommend” objective.
  • Take the free Microsoft practice assessment cold. The score does not matter; the per-domain breakdown does.
  • Open the Azure Architecture Center and the Well-Architected Framework pillars (reliability, security, cost optimisation, operational excellence, performance efficiency). Exam answers lean on these.
  • Start a one-page “decision table” where you note, for each service, when to pick it and when not to. You will use it all four weeks.

Week 1: identity, governance and monitoring (25–30%)

Goal: design who can do what, how the estate is organised, and how it is observed.

  • Logging and monitoring: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics workspace design (one central versus several), diagnostic settings, routing logs to Event Hubs or storage, Application Insights.
  • Authentication and authorization: Microsoft Entra ID, B2B and external identities, Conditional Access, managed identities versus service principals, Azure RBAC, Entra Connect or cloud sync for hybrid, Entra application proxy for on-premises apps.
  • Secrets: Key Vault, access models, certificates and keys.
  • Governance: management group, subscription and resource group structure, tagging, Azure Policy, blueprints-style standardisation, access reviews and entitlement management.

Design exercise: a company with three business units, 25 subscriptions and a rule that data must stay in two regions. Draw the management group tree, name the policies, and decide where logs go.

Week 2: data storage (20–25%)

Goal: match data shape and access pattern to a service and a tier.

  • Relational: Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on a VM, open-source database services; purchasing and service tiers, serverless, elastic pools, Hyperscale, read scale-out and sharding, encryption and auditing.
  • Semi-structured and unstructured: Cosmos DB and its consistency levels, Blob Storage tiers and lifecycle, Azure Files, Data Lake Storage, redundancy options.
  • Data integration and analysis: Azure Data Factory, Synapse and Fabric concepts, Databricks, Event Hubs and Stream Analytics at a recommend-level.

Design exercise: pick storage for an order system, product catalogue, uploaded images, a seven-year audit archive and a reporting layer, with a cost reason for each.

Week 3: business continuity (15–20%)

Goal: turn RPO and RTO into a service choice.

  • Backup and disaster recovery: Azure Backup, Recovery Services vault versus Backup vault, Azure Site Recovery, backup for databases and blobs, immutable storage.
  • High availability: availability sets, availability zones, zone-redundant services, paired regions, failover groups and geo-replication for databases, redundancy options for storage.

Design exercise: for a three-tier app, write the RPO and RTO for each tier, then pick the cheapest design that meets them. Repeat with the budget halved.

Week 4: infrastructure (30–35%) and review

Goal: assemble everything into complete solutions.

  • Compute: VMs, scale sets, App Service, Container Apps, AKS, Azure Container Instances, Functions, Logic Apps, Batch.
  • Application architecture: Service Bus, Event Grid, Event Hubs, API Management, Azure Cache for Redis, App Configuration, deployment automation.
  • Migrations: the Cloud Adoption Framework, Azure Migrate, rehost versus refactor choices, Database Migration Service, Data Box and AzCopy for data.
  • Networking: hub-and-spoke, Virtual WAN, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, Front Door, Application Gateway, Load Balancer, Traffic Manager, Firewall, private endpoints, DDoS protection.

Review: take the free 20-question practice test mid-week and repeat the official practice assessment. Spend the last days on the domain with the lowest score, using its guide in this section.

If you are already experienced

Compress weeks 1 and 3 if you design identity and recovery for a living, and spend the time on the unfamiliar areas: data integration, messaging versus eventing, migration planning and caching. Read the Azure Architecture Center reference architectures and note why each service was chosen.

How to know you are ready

  • Given a requirement, you can name the service and say in one sentence why its closest alternative fails.
  • You can map an RPO and RTO to a recovery design without looking anything up.
  • You score 80% or more on realistic practice questions twice in a row, on different question sets.
  • You can explain the Well-Architected trade-off in your last three wrong answers.

Then book it. The exam format covers the mechanics and the exam day guide the day itself.