Microsoft · AZ-305 · Expert
Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305) — Practice Questions and Mock Exam
Practice real AZ-305 questions, never dumps. Alex explains every answer, and your readiness score tells you when you're ready to pass.
Checked against Microsoft · July 2026Current exam version
Overview
About the exam
The AZ-305 certification validates advanced skills in designing cloud and hybrid solutions on Microsoft Azure. It covers designing identity, governance, and monitoring solutions, data storage solutions, business continuity solutions, and infrastructure solutions. Candidates must demonstrate the ability to make architectural decisions across compute, networking, security, and data based on business requirements.
This expert-level certification is designed for experienced cloud architects and senior engineers who advise stakeholders and translate business requirements into secure, scalable, and reliable Azure solutions. Passing AZ-104 (Azure Administrator) is required to earn the Solutions Architect Expert certification.
Exam Domains
What's on the exam
The exam consists of 40–60 questions to be completed in approximately 100 minutes (100 minutes if labs are included). Question types include multiple-choice, multiple-select, drag-and-drop, hot area, and case study formats. Questions focus on architecture design decisions, requiring you to evaluate trade-offs between cost, performance, security, and operational excellence. Case studies present complex multi-service architectures.
Design solutions for logging and monitoring, design authentication and authorization solutions, and design governance including management group structure, compliance, and identity governance
Design data storage for relational data (database service/compute tiers, scalability, protection), semi-structured and unstructured data (storage solutions balancing features/performance/cost, durability), and data integration/analysis
Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery (recovery objectives, compute/database/unstructured data recovery) and design for high availability (compute, relational data, semi-structured and unstructured data)
Design compute solutions (VMs, containers, serverless, batch), application architecture (messaging, event-driven, API integration, caching, configuration, automated deployment), migrations (Cloud Adoption Framework, IaaS/PaaS migration, database/data migration), and network solutions (internet/on-premises connectivity, performance, security, load balancing/routing)
SourceMicrosoft study guide
Format
What to expect
Watch out
Where candidates struggle
This expert exam focuses on design and architecture decisions, not implementation. Candidates with strong hands-on skills but limited experience in solution design and trade-off analysis often struggle.
- 01Design Trade-offs — Failing to evaluate solutions against all pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework including cost optimization.
- 02Hybrid Identity — Not understanding Microsoft Entra ID sync options and hybrid identity architectures for complex enterprise scenarios.
- 03Data Platform Choice — Confusing when to recommend Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, or Azure Storage for specific workloads.
- 04HA and DR Design — Overlooking recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements when designing disaster recovery.
- 05Cost Optimization — Ignoring cost implications of architectural decisions, especially around reserved instances, spot VMs, and tier selection.
Details
Exam logistics
Delivered via Pearson VUE online or at testing centers. Available in English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, and more. The certification is valid for 1 year with a free renewal assessment on Microsoft Learn.
SourceMicrosoft exam page
Before you book the exam
Would you pass AZ-305 today?
Take the free readiness check. Answer real AZ-305 questions and get your readiness score across every domain.
Take the free readiness check20 questions · freeReach 80% readiness by exam day. Pass, or your money back.