AZ-305 Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert Practice
Begin your Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert preparation with free AZ-305 exercises. Candidates can start immediately with the free version, then upgrade to the premium version with an access code for deeper practice, wider question coverage, and stronger exam-readiness support.
Start with free AZ-305 exercises, then upgrade for deeper preparation
The exercises on this page are offered free so candidates can begin immediately. The premium version is available for learners who want a broader, more intensive preparation experience and requires a valid access code before entry.
Begin at no cost
Use the free version to start building confidence with AZ-305 domains before deciding whether to unlock the full premium practice experience.
- Free entry point for candidates who want to test readiness first.
- Topic-based practice across the 10 AZ-305 preparation sections.
- Useful for early revision, quick diagnostics, and first-stage confidence building.
Unlock deeper AZ-305 practice
The premium version is designed for candidates who want more serious preparation, stronger topic coverage, and a more complete practice environment. It highlights 1000+ premium exercises, detailed explanations, real-exam-standard practice, and timed conditions that better simulate the AZ-305 exam atmosphere. Premium access requires a purchased access code and is positioned for learners who need deeper exam-style revision before taking AZ-305.
- Best for candidates preparing seriously for the Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert exam.
- 1000+ premium exercises with detailed explanations and stronger revision depth.
- Timed practice conditions help simulate the pressure and pacing of the real exam.
- Use an access code to unlock the premium preparation pathway.
Free exercise coverage
What the Free AZ-305 Exercise Page Covers
This free AZ-305 exercise page is organized into 10 clear sections so learners can begin with structured architect-level practice instead of treating Azure solution design as one large block. It covers architecture requirements, logging, monitoring, identity, authorization, secrets and keys, governance, data storage, business continuity, compute, application architecture, networking, and migration in a practical and manageable way.
Move between identity, governance, storage, compute, and networking during revision so the services connect more naturally and solution architect decisions become easier to interpret.
Architecture Fundamentals and Design Requirements
Build the architect-level judgement AZ-305 expects before selecting Azure services. This section helps you translate business goals into functional and non-functional requirements, assess workload characteristics, identify constraints, and make defensible trade-off decisions across reliability, security, performance, governance, and cost.
- Gather business, technical, regulatory, migration, and operational requirements before recommending a solution
- Separate functional requirements from non-functional requirements such as availability, scalability, performance, security, compliance, cost, and maintainability
- Assess workload patterns including bursty or steady demand, stateful or stateless behavior, latency sensitivity, and throughput pressure
- Recognize constraints such as data residency, regional availability, legacy dependencies, delivery timelines, skills, and budget boundaries
- Apply Azure Well-Architected Framework pillars to design decisions rather than treating Azure services as isolated products
- Use Cloud Adoption Framework concepts including landing zones, governance, management, and migration planning
- Evaluate design trade-offs involving consistency, availability, recovery objectives, operational complexity, and total cost
Logging Strategy Design
Learn how to design a logging solution that captures the right signals, routes them to the right destinations, and supports audit, security, troubleshooting, compliance, and cost control. This section focuses on what to log, where logs should go, and why each routing choice matters in an Azure architecture.
- Differentiate platform logs, resource logs, activity logs, audit logs, security logs, and workload telemetry
- Identify security-relevant logs such as sign-in logs, audit logs, Key Vault access logs, NSG flow logs, firewall logs, and application events
- Design Log Analytics workspace strategy using centralized, per-subscription, or per-workload models where appropriate
- Route diagnostic settings to Log Analytics, Storage accounts, Event Hubs, SIEM platforms, or third-party monitoring tools
- Use Event Hub as a log streaming backbone for SIEM, SOAR, and external analytics integrations
- Plan retention, archive, filtering, table selection, and data volume control to manage log cost without losing critical evidence
- Consider multi-region logging, separation of duties, tenant boundaries, and subscription boundaries in enterprise designs
Monitoring and Observability Design
Prepare to recommend monitoring designs that combine metrics, logs, traces, alerts, dashboards, health signals, and incident response. This section helps candidates understand how Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Service Health, Resource Health, and Sentinel fit into operationally mature solutions.
- Distinguish platform metrics, log-based insights, distributed traces, dependency telemetry, and user-impact signals
- Use Azure Monitor for metrics, log queries, alerts, action groups, dashboards, and operational workbooks
- Design alerting strategies using metric alerts, log alerts, SLO/SLA thresholds, customer-impact signals, and escalation paths
- Apply action groups for email, SMS, webhook, ITSM, and automation-driven response patterns
- Use Application Insights for instrumentation, distributed tracing, dependency tracking, and application performance monitoring
- Understand when Service Health and Resource Health are needed for platform awareness and resource-level diagnostics
- Integrate security monitoring through Microsoft Sentinel when SIEM correlation, incident management, and advanced detection are required
Authentication Design
Strengthen your ability to recommend secure sign-in architectures for cloud-only, hybrid, internal, external, and customer-facing scenarios. This section focuses on identity models, tenant strategy, MFA, Conditional Access, legacy authentication blocking, and external identity decisions.
- Compare cloud-only and hybrid identity models and understand where Microsoft Entra ID, synchronization, and identity boundaries matter
- Evaluate single-tenant and multi-tenant identity approaches based on isolation, administration, compliance, and collaboration requirements
- Design MFA strategy by user risk, workload sensitivity, privileged access, device status, and business impact
- Use Conditional Access patterns based on location, device risk, user group, application sensitivity, and session controls
- Plan legacy authentication blocking to reduce identity compromise risk in modern Azure environments
- Design B2B collaboration with guest access controls, invitation governance, and lifecycle management
- Recognize when customer identity or a separate identity architecture is needed for external-facing applications
Authorization Design
Learn how to recommend access-control designs that give users, teams, applications, and administrators the right level of access at the right scope. This section focuses on Azure RBAC, custom roles, least privilege, privileged access, managed identities, service principals, and hybrid authorization considerations.
- Design Azure RBAC assignments across management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and individual resources
- Choose built-in roles or custom roles based on job function, operational need, and least-privilege requirements
- Model access for platform teams, application teams, auditors, security teams, and managed service providers
- Use Privileged Identity Management for just-in-time activation, approvals, time-bound access, and access reviews
- Plan break-glass administrator accounts with controlled use, strong monitoring, and clear emergency procedures
- Recommend managed identities or service principals instead of shared credentials for applications and automation
- Consider on-premises authorization patterns, trust boundaries, and secure access paths in hybrid solutions
Secrets, Certificates, and Key Management Design
Design secure handling of secrets, keys, and certificates across applications, platforms, pipelines, and regulated workloads. This section covers Azure Key Vault architecture, access models, rotation, certificate lifecycle, HSM requirements, managed identities, and secure configuration patterns.
- Design Key Vault boundaries by environment, region, application ownership, sensitivity, and operational model
- Choose Azure RBAC or vault access policies based on governance, administration, security, and compatibility needs
- Plan key rotation, secret expiration, certificate renewal, and lifecycle monitoring to reduce operational risk
- Decide when HSM-backed keys or managed HSM are required for regulatory, security, or key isolation reasons
- Use managed identities and Key Vault references to prevent secrets from being stored in code, scripts, configuration files, or pipelines
- Support secure deployment patterns where applications retrieve secrets safely at runtime
- Align secret, certificate, and key management with auditability, separation of duties, and compliance expectations
Governance, Compliance, and Identity Governance Design
Understand how enterprise Azure environments are structured, controlled, and kept compliant at scale. This section covers management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, tagging, Azure Policy, initiatives, remediation, identity governance, access reviews, entitlement concepts, and separation of duties.
- Design management group hierarchies that reflect enterprise scale, policy inheritance, compliance boundaries, and administration models
- Choose subscription strategies based on environment, business unit, workload criticality, ownership, or regulatory boundary
- Use resource groups by lifecycle, ownership, deployment pattern, and operational management requirements
- Create tagging strategies for owner, cost center, environment, data classification, workload criticality, and lifecycle status
- Apply Azure Policy initiatives, assignments, effects, remediation, and compliance reporting to enforce standards
- Use policy-driven tagging, deny, audit, append, and deployIfNotExists patterns where appropriate
- Design identity governance through access reviews, lifecycle controls, entitlement concepts, and separation of duties
Data Storage Design: Relational Data
Prepare to recommend relational data platforms based on compatibility, performance, scalability, manageability, resilience, and cost. This section focuses on Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on Azure VMs, managed PostgreSQL and MySQL, service tiers, scaling patterns, backup, encryption, and failover design.
- Compare Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server on Azure VMs using compatibility, administration, migration, and control requirements
- Recognize when Azure Database for PostgreSQL or Azure Database for MySQL is a better architectural fit
- Select service tiers, compute tiers, provisioned models, serverless models, and sizing approaches based on workload behavior
- Design vertical scaling, read replicas, sharding concepts, and elastic pool patterns for performance and cost optimization
- Plan backup strategy, point-in-time restore, long-term retention, and operational recovery requirements
- Use encryption at rest and in transit as part of secure relational data architecture
- Tie geo-replication and failover choices to RPO, RTO, availability, regional strategy, and business continuity needs
Data Storage Design: Semi-Structured, Unstructured, Integration, and Analytics
Learn how to choose storage and analytics architectures for documents, key-value data, large files, data lakes, ingestion pipelines, streaming patterns, reporting, and analytical workloads. This section connects data shape, access pattern, protection, durability, performance, cost, and downstream analysis.
- Use Cosmos DB-style design thinking for global distribution, partitioning, consistency, and semi-structured access patterns
- Compare document, key-value, and wide-column data models at a scenario and architecture level
- Choose Blob Storage, Data Lake Storage Gen2, or Azure Files based on analytics needs, hierarchical namespace, file sharing, and application access patterns
- Select redundancy options such as LRS, ZRS, GRS, and GZRS based on durability, availability, recovery, and regional requirements
- Design hot, cool, and archive tiering with lifecycle policies to balance performance and cost
- Protect data using soft delete, versioning, immutability, replication, and backup concepts with clear design intent
- Recommend batch, streaming, ETL, ELT, pipeline, messaging, warehouse, lakehouse, BI, API, and ML-serving patterns where appropriate
Business Continuity and Infrastructure: HA/DR, Compute, App Architecture, Network, and Migration
Complete the AZ-305 syllabus with the combined architecture decisions that support resilient, scalable, secure, and migration-ready Azure solutions. This section covers backup, disaster recovery, high availability, compute selection, application architecture, integration, caching, deployment, migration, connectivity, network security, and traffic routing.
- Translate RPO and RTO targets into backup, recovery, replication, failover, and high availability designs
- Design availability for compute, relational data, semi-structured data, unstructured data, hybrid workloads, and multi-region solutions
- Select VM-based, container-based, serverless, and batch compute options based on control, scaling, operational effort, and workload behavior
- Design application architecture using messaging, event-driven patterns, API integration, caching, configuration management, and automated deployment
- Assess servers, applications, databases, and unstructured data for migration using Cloud Adoption Framework-aligned thinking
- Recommend migration approaches for IaaS, PaaS, databases, files, and phased modernization scenarios
- Design Internet connectivity, VPN, ExpressRoute, private access, segmentation, firewalling, WAF, routing, acceleration, load balancing, and global or regional traffic distribution
This free 10-section structure supports stronger AZ-305 preparation by breaking Azure solution architecture into manageable domains while still showing how identity, governance, observability, data platforms, continuity, compute, networking, migration, and cost-aware design connect across the platform.
Choose a Free AZ-305 Practice Section
Open any free section directly to begin focused revision. After using the free version, candidates who want more depth can move to the premium version and enter with a valid access code.
Each free section opens in a new tab. For deeper preparation, use the premium version with an access code: open AZ-305 premium practice.
Why candidates should start free and consider premium access
The free version gives candidates a low-risk way to begin AZ-305 practice immediately. The premium version is positioned for candidates who want more complete preparation, more serious revision, and access-code protected practice beyond the free starting point.
The structure separates Azure solution architecture into recognizable design domains so learners can quickly identify whether they need to review requirements, identity, authorization, governance, storage, high availability, compute, networking, migration, monitoring, or cost-aware trade-off decisions.
This free-to-premium pathway is especially useful because candidates can first confirm that the content style works for them, then buy an access code when they are ready to move into a more intensive premium preparation environment.
Why the free and premium structure works for learners
Have questions?
Frequently Asked Questions
These short answers explain how to use the free AZ-305 exercises and when to move to the premium version.
Are the AZ-305 exercises on this page free?
Yes. The exercises on this page are offered free so candidates can begin AZ-305 practice immediately. The free version is a useful starting point before moving to the premium version.
What is the premium version?
The premium version is the upgraded AZ-305 preparation option for candidates who want deeper practice beyond the free version. It requires a valid access code before users can enter.
How do candidates access the premium version?
Candidates should buy an access code, activate it, and then use the premium AZ-305 practice link provided on this page. The premium link is designed as a clear upgrade path after the free exercises.
Should candidates start with free or premium practice?
Candidates can start with the free version to test their readiness and understand the question flow. Those preparing seriously for the exam should consider premium access because it provides a stronger preparation pathway.