AZ-104 study plan

Your step-by-step plan

1. Map the blueprint and book a date

   Day 1

   Read the official AZ-104 skills outline and the five domains with their weights. Book a provisional date now: a fixed date turns open-ended study into a plan and is the strongest predictor of actually sitting. Note that Identities and Governance (23 percent) and Compute (24 percent) together are nearly half the exam, so they earn the most time.

2. Lock the governance precedence rules

   Week 1

   Start with the control plane because its rules recur everywhere: deny assignments override role assignments, locks block writes and deletes regardless of RBAC, budgets only notify, and Policy re-evaluates every 24 hours. Drill the SSPR licence line and the least-privilege built-in roles. Use this guide's recall prompts, cover the answer, decide from the rule, then reveal.

3. Drill storage and compute defaults

   Weeks 1 to 3

   These two domains are fact-dense and high-weight. Fix the redundancy ladder (LRS, ZRS, GRS, GZRS) and that account type is set at creation, then the compute behaviours: ARM idempotency, percent versus count autoscale, disk durability nines, and per-instance App Service billing. Get hands-on in a free or trial subscription so the limits stick from doing, not just reading.

4. Build the networking service map

   Weeks 3 to 4

   Networking carries the harder load-balancing objective, so build a clean map: regional versus global peering, NSG and Firewall and Bastion for secure access, and Load Balancer (layer 4) versus Application Gateway (layer 7) versus Traffic Manager (DNS, global). Burn in the NSG rule behaviour that changes affect only new connections. Place each service from the requirement before you read the options.

5. Cover monitoring and recovery

   Week 4

   The smallest domain but dependable marks if you know the exact defaults: Metrics versus Logs, one destination type per diagnostic setting, suppression beating apply-action-group, and default platform-managed encryption in a Recovery Services vault. These are pure precision questions, so memorise the limits and move on.

6. Drill weak domains, then space the review

   Week 5

   Use your per-domain accuracy to attack the two domains dragging you down, not to re-read what you already know. Then space it: revisit each domain's recall prompts after a few days and again a week later. Spacing roughly doubles what sticks compared with cramming, which matters for a fact-heavy exam like this one.

7. Sit a timed mock and calibrate

   Weeks 5 to 6

   Take at least one full timed mock under exam conditions to rehearse pacing, the flag-and-return habit, and the case-study format. Treat the score as a per-domain readiness signal, not a single number, and review every missed question, naming the exact default or limit you got wrong, before you book or sit.

Frequently asked questions