The short version
AZ-305 is Microsoft’s design exam for Azure architects. It does not ask you to click through portals. It asks you to read a set of business requirements and pick the Azure design that meets all of them. This guide follows the study guide Microsoft lists as “Skills measured as of April 17, 2026”.
What the exam is
The full name is Exam AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions. It is the one required exam for the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert credential. Microsoft frames the role as advising stakeholders and turning business requirements into designs that follow the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.
Most questions boil down to one habit: find the requirement that rules out the tempting answer. Two services may both work. The one that fits the stated cost limit, recovery target, data residency rule, or “minimize administrative effort” wins.
Who it is for
Microsoft describes the candidate as someone with advanced experience and knowledge of IT operations: networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data platforms, and governance. You should also have experience with Azure administration, Azure development, and DevOps processes. In practice that means Azure administrators moving toward architecture, cloud and infrastructure engineers who already shape designs, and consultants who defend designs to customers.
The exam page itself lists no prerequisite exam. The credential does, though: Microsoft says you must also hold Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate to become an Azure Solutions Architect Expert. The prerequisites page goes through both.
Format at a glance
| Item | What Microsoft says |
|---|---|
| Exam code | AZ-305 |
| Role | Azure solutions architect |
| Passing score | 700 on a scale of 1 to 1,000 (a scaled score, not 70%) |
| Time | 100 minutes of exam time for role-based exams without labs; 120 minutes if the exam may contain labs |
| Number of questions | Not published for this exam; Microsoft says most exams have 40 to 60 |
| Delivery | Scheduled through Pearson VUE |
| Languages | 10, including English, Spanish, French, Portuguese (Brazil), and Italian |
| Retirement date | None listed |
Details on scoring, question types, and retakes are on the exam format page.
The four domains and their weightings
| Domain | Weighting |
|---|---|
| Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions | 25-30% |
| Design data storage solutions | 20-25% |
| Design business continuity solutions | 15-20% |
| Design infrastructure solutions | 30-35% |
Identity, governance, and monitoring
Logging and monitoring, authentication and authorization (including secrets, certificates, and keys), and governance: management groups, subscriptions, tagging, compliance, and identity governance.
Data storage
Relational data (service choice, tiers, scalability, protection), semi-structured and unstructured data, and data integration and analysis. Expect trade-offs between cost, performance, and features.
Business continuity
Backup and disaster recovery for compute, databases, and unstructured data, plus high availability for compute and data. Recovery objectives drive nearly every answer here.
Infrastructure
The biggest domain. It covers compute (virtual machines, containers, serverless, batch), application architecture (messaging, events, APIs, caching, configuration, deployment), migrations, and networking.
Official source
For the vendor’s own pages, see the Microsoft Learn AZ-305 exam page and the AZ-305 study guide. They are the final authority if anything here differs.
More guides for AZ-305
- AZ-305 Study Plan: 4-Week and 8-Week
- AZ-305 Sample Questions With Answers
- Is AZ-305 Hard? An Honest Difficulty Check
- AZ-305 Renewal and Retakes Explained
- Is AZ-305 Worth It? An Honest Look
- AZ-305 Cheat Sheet: Key Facts to Review
- AZ-305 vs AZ-400: Which Exam First?
- AZ-104 vs AZ-305: Which First?
Next step
Read the domains explained page to see where your hours should go. When you want to check yourself, our AZ-305 practice tests are five original practice sets across these four domains. They test your design judgment; they do not replace Microsoft’s learning material or time in Azure.
Frequently asked questions
Does AZ-305 expire?
Microsoft says associate, expert, and specialty certifications need annual renewal, so the Azure Solutions Architect Expert credential does. Renewal is a free, unproctored online assessment taken in a six-month window before the expiry date.
Is AZ-305 hands-on?
Microsoft does not publish its question types for each exam. The exam is about designing, so expect to choose designs from requirements rather than build resources. Some role-based exams may contain labs, and Microsoft tells you the exam time when you register.
Is the exam in English only?
No. Microsoft lists 10 languages. The English version is updated first, and other languages follow roughly eight weeks later.