The short version
AZ-305 has four domains. Infrastructure is the largest at 30-35%, then identity, governance, and monitoring at 25-30%, data storage at 20-25%, and business continuity at 15-20%. Weightings and skills come from Microsoft’s study guide dated April 17, 2026. The traps and practice tips below are our own general advice, not Microsoft statements.
| 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% |
Microsoft notes that the bullets under each skill illustrate how it is assessed and that related topics may be covered. Most questions cover generally available features.
Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions (25-30%)
What it covers. Three groups of skills. Logging and monitoring: recommend a logging solution, a way to route logs, and a monitoring solution. Authentication and authorization: authentication and identity management, authorizing access to Azure and to on-premises resources, and managing secrets, certificates, and keys. Governance: structure for management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups, tagging, compliance, and identity governance.
In practice. You decide how people and workloads sign in, what they may touch, and how you will see what happened. A question might give you twenty subscriptions that need the same policy, or an app that must read a secret without storing a password.
Typical traps.
- Mixing up where a control applies. A role assignment, a policy, and a tag are different tools at different scopes.
- Choosing a diagnostic setting when the stem wants alert notification, or the other way around.
- Picking the strongest key-protection option when a cheaper one meets the stated requirement.
What to practice. Management group inheritance, managed identities versus service principals, Azure Monitor routing, and the options for guest and external access.
Design data storage solutions (20-25%)
What it covers. Relational data (choosing a service, a service tier and compute tier, scalability, protection), semi-structured and unstructured data (including balancing features, performance, and cost, plus protection and durability), and data integration and analysis.
In practice. You match a workload to a service: a lift-and-shift SQL Server with Agent jobs, a globally distributed document store, an archive of files that must not be changed for years.
Typical traps.
- Choosing the highest tier when the stem says budget decides.
- Forgetting a feature gap between neighboring options, such as SQL services that look alike but differ on instance-level features.
- Confusing redundancy, which survives a failure, with backup, which recovers from deletion or corruption.
What to practice. Service tiers, consistency choices in a globally distributed database, blob tiering and immutability, and when integration and analytics services fit.
Design business continuity solutions (15-20%)
What it covers. Backup and disaster recovery: recovery solutions for Azure and hybrid workloads that meet recovery objectives, and backup and recovery for compute, databases, and unstructured data. High availability for compute, relational data, and semi-structured and unstructured data.
In practice. You start from two numbers: how much data you can lose (RPO) and how long you can be down (RTO). Those numbers pick the design.
Typical traps.
- Offering high availability when the stem needs recovery from user error, or the reverse.
- Ignoring the unit of failure: a disk, a zone, a region.
- Overbuilding. A cross-region design is wrong when the requirement is only zone-level resilience.
What to practice. The difference between backup, replication, and failover; zone versus region options; and a one-line RPO/RTO check for every design you read.
Design infrastructure solutions (30-35%)
What it covers. Four groups. Compute: components for a workload, virtual machine, container, serverless, and batch solutions. Application architecture: messaging, event-driven design, API integration, caching, application configuration, and automated deployment. Migrations: evaluating servers, data, and applications, using the Cloud Adoption Framework, and migrating to IaaS and PaaS, databases, and unstructured data. Networking: connecting Azure to the internet and to on-premises networks, optimizing performance and security, and load balancing and routing.
In practice. It is the broadest domain, so questions range from queue versus event choices to how to link a datacenter to Azure.
Typical traps.
- Choosing between messaging and event services by name rather than by behavior (who pushes, who pulls, what is kept).
- Picking a migration method without checking downtime and whether software may be installed in guests.
- Selecting a load-balancing service without checking whether the traffic is regional or global, and web or non-web.
What to practice. A comparison table of compute options, one of messaging and event services, one of load-balancing services, and the logic of connecting on-premises networks.
More guides for AZ-305
- AZ-305 Exam Format, Scoring, and Retakes
- Is AZ-305 Hard? An Honest Difficulty Check
- AZ-305 Prerequisites and Skills 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
Use the study plan to schedule these domains, and read the sample questions to see how the traps look in a question. Our AZ-305 practice tests cover all four domains with explanations on every option.
Frequently asked questions
Which domain should I study first?
Start with your weakest. If you are unsure, begin with identity and governance, because those ideas appear in the other domains.
Do I need to memorize prices?
Microsoft’s skills list asks you to recommend solutions, not recall prices. You do need to understand cost trade-offs between options and tiers.
Are preview features tested?
Microsoft says most questions cover generally available features, and the exam may include preview features if they are commonly used.