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AZ-900 study plan: pass in 4 weeks

Updated September 28, 2026

Four weeks is a comfortable timeline for AZ-900 at four to six hours a week, even with no cloud experience. Spend week 1 on cloud concepts, weeks 2 and 3 on Azure architecture and services because it is the largest domain, and week 4 on management and governance plus review. If you already use Azure at work, two weeks is usually enough.

Before you start

  • Read the official skills outline once, end to end. It is two pages and every line starts with “describe”, which tells you the depth expected.
  • Create a free Azure account if you can. You do not need to build anything for AZ-900, but clicking through the portal makes the names stick. Set a budget alert on day one and delete what you create.
  • Keep a two-column list of commonly confused pairs: availability set versus availability zone, VPN Gateway versus ExpressRoute, Azure Policy versus RBAC, and so on. Add to it every session. It becomes your revision sheet.

Week 1: cloud concepts (25–30%)

Goal: explain the cloud to someone who has never used it.

  • Cloud computing and the shared responsibility model. Who is responsible for what in on-premises, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The customer always keeps responsibility for their data, devices, accounts and identities.
  • Cloud models. Public, private and hybrid, and a typical use case for each.
  • Consumption-based model and pricing. Capital versus operational expenditure, pay-as-you-go, and how reserved capacity lowers cost for predictable workloads.
  • Serverless. What it means that you do not manage servers, and how billing follows execution.
  • Benefits. High availability, scalability (vertical and horizontal), elasticity, reliability, predictability, security, governance and manageability.
  • Service types. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, with two examples of each.

Task: draw the shared responsibility table from memory. Then write one sentence for each benefit that a manager would understand.

Week 2: Azure architecture, compute and networking (first half of 35–40%)

Goal: know how Azure is organised and where things run.

  • Physical structure. Datacenters, regions, region pairs, sovereign regions and availability zones. Know what each protects you from.
  • Logical structure. Resources, resource groups, subscriptions and management groups, and how they nest. Settings applied higher up are inherited below.
  • Compute. Virtual machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, availability sets, Azure Virtual Desktop, containers and Functions. Know what a VM needs besides itself: disk, network interface, virtual network.
  • Application hosting. Web apps, containers and virtual machines: which gives you most control and which least management.
  • Networking. Virtual networks, subnets, peering, Azure DNS, VPN Gateway and ExpressRoute, and the difference between public and private endpoints.

Task: in the portal, open the create screen for a virtual machine and read every field without creating it. Note which ones map to objectives.

Week 3: storage, identity and security (second half of 35–40%)

Goal: know where data lives and who can reach it.

  • Storage services. Blob, Files, Queue, Table and managed disks, and what each is for.
  • Access tiers. Hot, cool, cold and archive, and the trade-off between storage cost and access cost.
  • Redundancy. LRS, ZRS, GRS and GZRS, and the read-access variants. Know which survive a zone failure and which a region failure.
  • Moving data. AzCopy, Azure Storage Explorer and Azure File Sync; Azure Migrate and Azure Data Box for migrations.
  • Identity. Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Entra Domain Services, SSO, MFA, passwordless, external identities and Conditional Access.
  • Security. Azure RBAC, Zero Trust, defense in depth and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Task: fill a table of the four redundancy options against “survives a disk failure / a datacenter failure / a region failure”. Then do the same for RBAC versus Conditional Access versus Azure Policy.

Week 4: management and governance (30–35%) and review

Goal: answer “how much will this cost, who is allowed to do it, and how will we know it is healthy?”

  • Cost. Factors that affect cost, the pricing calculator, Cost Management budgets and alerts, and tags for allocating spend.
  • Governance. Microsoft Purview, Azure Policy and resource locks.
  • Tools. The portal, Cloud Shell, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, Azure Arc, infrastructure as code, and Azure Resource Manager with ARM templates.
  • Monitoring. Azure Advisor, Azure Service Health and Azure Monitor with Log Analytics, alerts and Application Insights.

Review: take the free 20-question practice test mid-week, then Microsoft’s free practice assessment. Spend the remaining days on the domain you scored lowest, using its guide in this section.

If you already use Azure

Compress weeks 1 to 3 into one. Spend the second week on the parts people who work in Azure often skip: the exact definitions in cloud concepts, storage redundancy names, Purview, Arc and the pricing calculator. Experience helps, but AZ-900 asks for Microsoft’s vocabulary, and daily work does not always use it.

If you come from another cloud

Most concepts transfer: regions, zones, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS and shared responsibility are the same ideas. The names do not. Spend week 1 lightly and put the time into weeks 2 and 3, mapping each Azure service to the one you know.

How to know you are ready

  • You can explain the shared responsibility model and the three service types without notes.
  • You can name the resource hierarchy from management group down to resource, and say what inherits.
  • You can tell Azure Policy, RBAC and resource locks apart in one sentence each.
  • You score 80% or more on realistic practice questions twice in a row, on different question sets.

Then book it. See the exam format for the mechanics and the exam day guide for the day itself.