Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305) — Practice Questions and Mock 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.

Infrastructure solutions carry the most weight at 30–35%: compute choices (VMs, containers, serverless), application architecture, migration planning, and network design all sit here. Identity, governance, and monitoring follow at 25–30%, covering authentication, authorization, and compliance decisions rather than day-to-day administration. Data storage design takes 20–25%, and business continuity (backup, disaster recovery, high availability) closes the blueprint at 15–20%.

The exam rewards breadth over depth in each area: a compute recommendation, a storage recommendation, and a network recommendation for the same scenario are graded independently, so a wrong call in one domain doesn't excuse skipping the others.

AZ-305 draws 40–60 questions from a mix of multiple-choice, multiple-select, drag-and-drop, ordering, and dropdown-selection formats inside a 100-minute window. Items center on architecture trade-offs: a business requirement is described, and you weigh cost, performance, security, and operational impact before recommending a design rather than listing implementation steps.

Every domain of the AZ-305 exam has enough questions in the pool to practice it in depth. A mock exam asks 50 questions in one sitting, on the same 100-minute clock as the real thing.

How long you'll need depends on how much hands-on experience you bring. The rest is set by the vendor: how the exam is delivered, how soon you can retake it, and how long the credential stays valid.

AZ-305 runs through Pearson VUE, either online with a remote proctor or at an authorized testing center, and is offered in English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, and several other languages depending on location. Certification holds for one year, and Microsoft opens a free renewal assessment on Learn starting six months before it expires.

AZ-305 tests design judgment, not implementation, and candidates with strong hands-on skills but little practice weighing trade-offs against the Well-Architected Framework, including cost, often underperform here. Hybrid identity is a frequent gap: Microsoft Entra ID sync options and hybrid architectures for complex enterprise scenarios go untested in most administrator-level prep. Choosing between Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and Azure Storage gets confused when candidates don't have a clear model for matching data shape to service. High-availability and disaster-recovery questions hinge on recovery time and recovery point objectives specifically, not general resilience awareness, and cost optimization (reserved instances, spot VMs, tier selection) is graded as part of the design, not an afterthought.