Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Exam Prep

Architecture practice

Build an AZ-305 design round

Unofficial Microsoft AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions · English skills measured April 17, 2026 · verified September 11, 2026. Independently authored; not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.

32 curated architecture scenarios: 8 identity/governance/monitoring, 8 data storage, 6 continuity and 10 infrastructure. Rounds sample uniformly without replacement. Foundations and trade-offs are author-assigned levels, not calibrated exam difficulty.

Official domain weights: 25–30%, 20–25%, 15–20% and 30–35%, respectively. These describe the blueprint, not this round's sampling. This is untimed, single-answer practice; it does not reproduce the official exam's full scope, case-study interface, response formats or possible labs. Microsoft does not disclose the exact exam-specific format mix.

Official blueprint and hands-on study resources · Official exam experience

The Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification also requires Azure Administrator Associate. AZ-305 practice confers no credential. Check current scheduling, eligibility and renewal requirements with Microsoft.

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The active seed will use the longest complete Unicode prefix within 128 UTF-16 units.

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Review this practice round

AZ-305 · English blueprint April 17, 2026 · original bank 2026.09.11. This score describes only this curated round. It is not a Microsoft scaled score, a pass prediction or evidence of certification. Pair practice with the full study guide and hands-on design and implementation. Microsoft and Azure are Microsoft trademarks.

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Domain performance

Correct and missed answers by official domain for this round. Domains absent from the chart were not sampled. Use the missed-item sources to review that domain, then practise a focused set and check the full official guide.

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Answer ledger

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A legacy application that needs administrator access to its operating system cannot move unchanged to every Azure hosting service. Virtual machines preserve that control, but the team still has to maintain the guest operating system. An architecture recommendation must account for both the requirement it satisfies and the responsibility it leaves behind.

Azure solutions architecture connects decisions about compute, networking, identity, storage and recovery. A hybrid design also connects Azure services with systems outside Azure, such as an existing datacenter. AZ-305, Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions, focuses on recommending designs that meet business and technical requirements across these areas. Recognizing a service name is only part of the work. The recommendation must fit the application's dependencies, the expected demand and the team's operating capabilities.

Some requirements eliminate an option before cost or convenience is considered. An application that cannot be rewritten may need its existing hosting model preserved. Rarely read data may still need immediate retrieval. A system that must survive a regional outage needs more than protection against one failed server. Reading these constraints accurately prevents a familiar Azure service from becoming an unsuitable default.

Access design has several distinct responsibilities. They often appear together in one solution, but one control does not automatically satisfy the others.

Authentication: Verifies the identity of a person or application requesting access.
Authorization: Determines which actions that identity may perform and on which resources.
Governance: Applies organizational rules, such as restricting deployments to approved regions, even when a person has permission to create resources.

The distinction matters when an application uses a managed identity. Azure can manage its credentials, avoiding an application secret that the team must store and rotate, while resource permissions still need to be granted deliberately. Removing a stored credential does not mean granting unrestricted access. Likewise, permission to create a resource does not make every location or configuration acceptable.

Storage decisions require the same attention to consequences. A lower capacity price can come with higher access costs or a retrieval delay. Blob archive storage requires rehydration before its content can be read, so it cannot satisfy a requirement for immediate reads without that extra step. Access frequency, retention and retrieval expectations must be considered together rather than choosing solely by the price of stored data.

Reliability also depends on the failure being addressed. An availability zone is a separated group of datacenters within an Azure region. Using multiple zones can protect a suitably configured workload against a zone failure, but it does not by itself protect against losing the entire region. Redundant running capacity also serves a different purpose from retained backups, which support recovery of earlier data after deletion or corruption. The recovery design must include the application's dependencies, not just its web servers.

The Azure Solutions Architect Expert credential requires Azure Administrator Associate certification as well as AZ-305. Microsoft expects substantial experience with Azure administration and related operating disciplines. Architecture study therefore works best alongside hands-on design, deployment and recovery exercises. A practice result can identify decisions to revisit, but it does not establish certification or the ability to operate a production system safely.

How to Use This Tool:

Use an untimed round to practise choosing one recommendation under each scenario's stated assumptions. The practice is independently authored and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.

Choose a Domain / practice focus and Question count. The initial setup uses All four domains · uniform practice with 8 questions. A focused domain narrows the pool; Foundations · author-assigned and Trade-offs · author-assigned are author groupings, not calibrated difficulty levels. The count menu shows the sizes available for the chosen focus.
Choose Feedback timing. After each answer reveals the correction, explanation and source before you continue. At the end records each choice without revealing correctness until the completed review.
Enter an optional Replay seed under Advanced when you need a reproducible round. Leaving it blank uses a fixed default, not a newly randomized round on every start. Surrounding spaces are removed, and long seeds are shortened to a complete Unicode prefix within 128 UTF-16 text units. Some emoji use two units, so this is not always a limit of 128 visible characters.
Select Start exam practice. If it is disabled, choose a listed focus, feedback timing and question count. Read the first scenario and choose one of its four answers. Selecting an answer records and locks it immediately in both feedback modes; there is no separate submission or answer-editing step.
Continue with Next question after each recorded answer. Once every question is answered, select View results.
End round clears the current attempt and returns to setup. It does not submit a partly answered round for a final score.
Review the Missed answer review and Answer ledger. Use Retry missed to practise only incorrect items, or a domain practice button to start a focused round. Replay same seed repeats the same round with answers cleared; Try a new seed reseeds the round but can still select familiar questions.

Interpreting Results:

The summary reports correct answers out of all questions in the completed round. The Answer ledger lets you compare your choice with the correct answer, explanation and supporting source for every question. A correct choice is most useful when you can also explain which requirement makes the alternatives unsuitable.

Domain performance shows counts of correct and missed answers, not official exam weights or standardized skill ratings. An absent domain was not sampled. A domain with one correct answer has much less evidence behind it than a larger set, even when neither has any misses. Use the actual missed explanations to choose a focused round rather than treating bar length as a ranking of your overall competence.

Perfect round means that every selected question was answered correctly. It is not a readiness band, a pass prediction or a credential. Microsoft technical exams use scaled scores, with 700 as the passing threshold; that does not mean 70% correct, and this practice score has no conversion to that scale. Replaying known questions can reinforce explanations, but broader preparation still requires unfamiliar scenarios, the full official objectives and hands-on work.

Technical Details:

Resource permissions, deployment rules, retrieval behavior and failure tolerance constrain an Azure design in different ways. A valid recommendation must satisfy the relevant combination. For example, Azure role-based access control (RBAC) may permit a deployment while an applicable Azure Policy assignment still rejects its location.

Matching an Azure design to its requirements

The following distinctions explain representative decisions in the practice bank. Each recommendation depends on the qualifications in its scenario rather than applying to every workload.

Representative Azure architecture requirements, recommendations and important boundaries
Requirement	Recommendation	Important boundary
Reject deployments in unapproved regions	Assign an Azure Policy rule that denies disallowed locations.	RBAC permission and descriptive tags alone do not enforce the location restriction. Assignment scope and exceptions matter.
Authenticate an application without storing its own credential	Use a supported managed identity with only the required resource permissions.	Both the application hosting service and the target service must support the intended identity flow. Authentication does not replace authorization.
Read rarely accessed block blobs without rehydration	Evaluate hot, cool or cold storage against access and retention needs.	Archive requires rehydration before content is read. Low storage cost does not guarantee low total cost.
Keep a web tier serving after one availability zone fails	Use redundant instances across supported zones with routing to healthy instances.	Dependencies and surviving capacity must also support the failure. A single zonal instance does not provide this protection.
Reach a supported service privately and prevent public access	Use a private endpoint, correct private name resolution and the service's public-access restriction.	A private endpoint alone does not necessarily disable the public endpoint. The Domain Name System (DNS) must resolve the service to the intended private address.

Recovery requirements introduce two separate time limits. The recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable loss of data measured in time. The recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time to restore business operations. Backup retention describes how long recovery points are kept, not either of these objectives. Replication, retained recovery points and tested restoration procedures must collectively meet the stated requirements.

Counting correct and answered questions

Practice scoring gives one point for the keyed answer and zero for an incorrect answer. There is no partial credit, negative marking or domain weighting. If C is the correct-answer count and N is the total number of questions selected for the round, the point total is C and round accuracy is:

Accuracy (%) = 100 \times \frac{C}{N}

The denominator includes every selected question, not just those already answered. With A denoting the answered-question count, progress measures completion rather than correctness:

Progress (%) = 100 \times \frac{A}{N}

Practice answer scoring and the treatment of unanswered questions
Answer condition	Points	Effect on counts
Selected answer matches the keyed answer	1	Increases answered and correct counts.
A different offered answer is selected	0	Increases answered and missed counts.
No answer has been selected	0	Remains in the round denominator without increasing answered or missed counts.

Points range from 0 to N, and accuracy and progress range from 0% to 100%. Completion requires A to equal N. Only then is the final review available: C equal to N produces Perfect round, while C below N produces Start with the missed answers. No intermediate percentage threshold assigns a pass or readiness label.

Raw accuracy and progress remain unrounded. The displayed progress percentage rounds to the nearest whole percent, with half-percent ties upward. For example, five answered questions in an eight-question round give 62.5% progress, displayed as 63%, regardless of how many were correct. The main completed score retains exact counts. Feedback timing changes when corrections are shown, not the points awarded.

Question selection and blueprint scope

The target is the English AZ-305 skills outline dated April 17, 2026. Its four domain weights describe the official exam blueprint. Practice instead samples individual questions uniformly without replacement from the chosen pool. There are no domain quotas, so a short all-domain round need not include every domain.

Practice pools and available round sizes compared with official AZ-305 domain weights
Practice focus	Questions in pool	Available round sizes	Official domain weight
All four domains · uniform practice	32	4, 8, 16, 32	Not applied
Identity, governance, and monitoring	8	4, 8	25% to 30%
Data storage	8	4, 8	20% to 25%
Business continuity	6	4, 6	15% to 20%
Infrastructure	10	4, 8, 10	30% to 35%
Foundations · author-assigned	11	4, 8, 11	Not an official domain
Trade-offs · author-assigned	21	4, 8, 16, 21	Not an official domain

The two author-assigned groups divide the same 32 questions into 11 foundations questions and 21 trade-off questions; they do not add another bank. Questions do not repeat within one round, but separate rounds can overlap. Selecting all 32 questions covers this bank once, not the full set of official skills or possible examination questions.

Reproducibility requires the same bank edition, practice focus, question count, feedback mode and active seed, plus the same missed-item subset for a missed-only retry. Both question order and answer-option order are seeded. A changed seed is not a guarantee of unseen questions, and a full-pool round necessarily reuses the same questions. A missed-only retry has a smaller denominator and should not be compared with the original full round as an equivalent test.

Accuracy Notes:

The bank and its source-verification labels are dated September 11, 2026. They identify a fixed set of original English scenarios, not continuous verification of Azure service behavior or exhaustive objective coverage. For example, the official outline includes application caching, application configuration management and automated application deployment, but this bank has no dedicated question for each of those objectives.

The development-database scenario needs a specific freshness qualification. It marks General Purpose serverless with auto-pause enabled as correct, and its Hyperscale alternative makes an unconditional auto-pause claim. Service guidance updated September 29, 2026 also documents Hyperscale serverless auto-pause and auto-resume as preview features. Do not turn the bank's comparison into a blanket claim that Hyperscale cannot pause. Preview restrictions, active connections and incompatible features can affect actual behavior.

The practice does not reproduce case-study navigation, multiple-answer formats, possible labs or the complete exam experience. Microsoft does not disclose the exact exam-specific format mix. Scenario assumptions about service support, region, licensing and compatibility are not guarantees for a real deployment. Check current exam arrangements and credential requirements separately, and verify service-specific conditions before applying an architectural recommendation.

Privacy Notes:

Scoring takes place in the browser, but the page address carries encoded attempt information, including the seed, round, recorded answers and current position. This information is not encrypted. A compatible saved link can restore the attempt, and anyone receiving it can inspect the included responses. Addresses can remain in browser history and reach the website when loaded or reloaded, so avoid personal information or secrets in a replay seed.

Chart and document features can load third-party resources, and opening a reference contacts its publisher. Browser scoring is therefore not a promise of zero network activity or complete offline operation. Exported answer ledgers also contain your responses; share them with the same care as an attempt link.

Worked Examples:

Recovery targets rather than backup retention

Choose Business continuity, 6 questions and After each answer. The round includes a business that accepts at most 15 minutes of lost committed data and requires restoration within two hours. Selecting the answer with an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of two hours is marked correct and earns one point. Reversing the values is incorrect because it assigns the restoration limit to data loss. The explanation directs attention to recovery procedures and protection frequency rather than treating a retention setting or product name as proof that the objectives are met.

A short round with two untested domains

For the September 11, 2026 bank, choose All four domains · uniform practice, 4 questions, After each answer and the replay seed literal-az305. This round contains two data-storage questions and two infrastructure questions. If both storage answers and one infrastructure answer are correct, the summary is 3/4, equivalent to 75% of this round. Domain performance shows two correct storage answers, one correct infrastructure answer and one infrastructure miss. Identity and business continuity are absent because neither was sampled. Retry missed then contains only the one incorrect question; a later 1/1 confirms that retry, not success across all four domains.

FAQ:

Why can a saved attempt be unavailable?

Damaged links and attempts incompatible with the current question bank can be rejected rather than restored. After Saved attempt unavailable, use Reset saved attempt to clear it and start again. A warning that the current attempt could not be saved is different: the saved attempt is cleared from the URL while answers remain on the current page. Keep the page open and use Retry saving before relying on its address to preserve progress; reloading would lose unsaved answers.

What should I do if the domain chart does not load?

Use Retry chart. Chart failure does not remove the completed Answer ledger or missed-answer explanations, and the domain-performance CSV remains available without a rendered chart.

References:

Study guide for Exam AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions, Microsoft.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Microsoft.
Exam scoring and score reports, Microsoft.
Exam duration and exam experience, Microsoft.
Choose an Azure compute service, Microsoft.
Architecture strategies for identity and access management, Microsoft.
Overview of Azure Policy, Microsoft.
Access tiers for blob data, Microsoft.
What are availability zones?, Microsoft.
Architecture strategies for disaster recovery, Microsoft.
What is a private endpoint?, Microsoft.
Auto-pause and auto-resume in the serverless compute tier for Azure SQL Database, Microsoft, updated September 29, 2026.