AZ-304 Exam Study Guide (Microsoft Azure Architect Design)
You can access AZ-304 Exam Microsoft official page here
Preparing for the AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design exam? Don’t know where to start? This post is the AZ-304 Study Guide, which helps you to achieve the Microsoft Azure Certified Solutions Architect expert certification.
Note: You also need to clear AZ-303 to achieve this certification.
This post contains a curated list of articles from Microsoft documentation for each objective of the AZ-304 exam. Please share the post within your circles so it helps them to prepare for the exam.
Skills Measured
- Design Monitoring (10-15%)
- Design Identity and Security (25-30%)
- Design Data Storage (15-20%)
- Design Business Continuity (10-15%)
- Design Infrastructure (25-30%)
AZ-304 Exam Free Study Guide
For each test objective, I’ve compiled a thorough collection of articles from Microsoft documentation. Please feel free to forward this page to your friends and coworkers in order to assist them in preparing for the test .
Design Monitoring (10-15%)
Design for Cost Optimization
- Recommend a solution for cost management and cost reporting
- What is Azure Cost Management & Billing?
- Recommend solutions to minimize costs
- Optimization of costs
Design a Solution for Logging and Monitoring
- Determine levels and storage locations for logs
- Configure logging
- Plan for integration with monitoring tools including Azure Monitor and Azure Sentinel
- Microsoft Azure Sentinel
- Recommend appropriate monitoring tool(s) for a solution
- Check this PS module on the recommendation for monitoring tools (Free Trial)
- Choose a mechanism for event routing and escalation
- Check this PS module on Event Routing and Escalation (Free trial)
- Recommend a logging solution for compliance requirements
- Audit activity reports in the Azure Active Directory portal
Design Identity and Security (25-30%)
Design Authentication
- Recommend a solution for single-sign-on
- What is single sign-on (SSO)?
- Recommend a solution for authentication
- Right authentication method for Azure AD hybrid identity solution
- Authentication & verification methods available in Azure AD
- Identity & access management (IAM)
- Recommend a solution for Conditional Access, including multi-factor authentication
- Common conditional access policies
- Recommend a solution for network access authentication
- Azure network security overview
- Recommend a solution for a hybrid identity including Azure AD Connect and Azure AD Connect Health
- Authentication method for Azure AD hybrid identity solution
- Recommend a solution for user self-service
- Self-service sign-up for Azure AD?
- Recommend and implement a solution for B2B integration
- YouTube video: Azure AD B2B authentication
Design Authorization
- Choose an authorization approach
- Authorization behavior
- Recommend a hierarchical structure that includes management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups
- What are the Azure management groups?
- Recommend an access management solution including RBAC policies, access reviews, role assignments, physical access, Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Azure AD
- Grant a user access to Azure resources using the Azure portal
- Manage user access with Azure AD access reviews
- Add or remove Azure role assignments
- Start using Privileged Identity Management
- Create a new tenant in Azure AD
- Identity Protection, Just In Time (JIT) access
- Identity Protection policies
- Secure your management ports with just-in-time access
Design Governance
- Recommend a strategy for tagging
- Resource naming & tagging decision guide
- Recommend a solution for using Azure Policy
- Enabling & managing a Key Vault policy
- Recommend a solution for using Azure Blueprint
- Working with Azure Blueprints
Design Security for Applications
- Recommend a solution that includes KeyVault
- What can be stored in KeyVault? & KeyVault operations
- Azure Key Vault keys, secrets & certificates overview
- KeyVault regions
- Products available by region
- Recommend a solution that includes Azure AD Managed Identities
- Using managed identity to access Azure Resource Manager
- Recommend a solution for integrating applications into Azure AD
- Integrating applications with Azure AD
Design Data Storage (15-20%)
Design a Solution for Databases
- Select an appropriate data platform based on requirements
- Selecting an Appropriate Data Storage Service in Microsoft Azure
- Recommend database service tier sizing
- Service tiers in the DTU-based purchase model
- Recommend a solution for database scalability
- Dynamically scale database resources with minimal downtime
- Scaling out with Azure SQL Database
- Recommend a solution for encrypting data at rest, data in transmission, and data in use
- Information protection & encryption
Design Data Integration
- Recommend a data flow to meet business requirements
- PS Course: Design and Document Data Flow (Free trial)
- Recommend a solution for data integration, including Azure Data Factory, Azure Data bricks, Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse Analytics
- Copy & transform data in Azure Synapse Analytics using Azure Data Factory
Select an Appropriate Storage Account
- Choose between storage tiers
- Access tiers for Azure Blob Storage: hot, cool & archive
- Recommend a storage access solution
- Select an appropriate storage account
- Recommend storage management tools
- PS Video: Azure Storage Management Tools (Free trial)
Design Business Continuity (10-15%)
Design a Solution for Backup and Recovery
- Recommend a recovery solution for Azure hybrid and on-premises workloads that meet recovery objectives (RTO, RLO, RPO)
- Reduce disaster recovery time with Azure Site Recovery
- Design an Azure Site Recovery solution
- Recommend a site recovery replication policy
- Replication policy
- Recommend a solution for site recovery capacity
- Plan capacity for Hyper-V VM disaster recovery
- Plan capacity & scaling for VMware disaster recovery to Azure
- Recommend a solution for site failover and failback (planned/unplanned)
- About on-premises disaster recovery failover/failback
- Disaster recovery drill
- Run a failover from on-premises to Azure
- Recommend a solution for the site recovery network
- About networking in Azure VM disaster recovery
- Recommend a solution for recovery in different regions
- Set up disaster recovery to a secondary Azure region for an Azure VM
- Recommend a solution for Azure Backup management
- Management for Azure VM backup in Recovery Services vault
- Design a solution for data archiving and retention
- o Recommend storage types and methodology for data archiving
- o Identify business compliance requirements for data archiving
- o Identify requirements for data archiving
- o Identify SLA(s) for data archiving
- o Recommend a data retention policy
Design for High Availability
- Recommend a solution for application and workload redundancy, including compute, database, and storage
- Make all things redundant
- Azure Storage redundancy
- Recommend a solution for autoscaling
- Learn about Autoscaling
- Identify resources that require high availability
- Azure High Availability: Basic Concepts and a Checklist
- Identify storage types for high availability
- Introduction to the core Azure Storage services
- Recommend a solution for geo-redundancy of workloads
- Use geo-redundancy to design highly available applications
Design Infrastructure (25-30%)
Design a Compute Solution
- Recommend a solution for compute provisioning
- Choose an Azure compute service for your application
- Determine appropriate compute technologies, including virtual machines, App Services, Service Fabric, Azure Functions, Windows Virtual Desktop, and containers
- Pluralsight course: Choose an appropriate compute solution
- Recommend a solution for containers
- AKS versus ACI and the configuration of each one
- The best choice between ACI or AKS or Web App for containers
- Recommend a solution for automating compute management
Design a Network Solution
- Recommend a solution for network addressing and name resolution
- Public IP addresses
- Name resolution for resources in Azure virtual networks
- Recommend a solution for network provisioning
- Recommend a solution for network security
- Private endpoints
- What is Azure Private Endpoint?
- Firewalls
- What is Azure Firewall?
- Gateways
- What is Azure Application Gateway?
- Recommend a solution for network connectivity to the Internet, on-premises networks, and other Azure virtual networks
- Connectivity services
- Recommend a solution for automating network management
- Recommend a solution for load balancing and traffic routing
- Traffic Manager routing methods
- Load balance Windows VM in Azure
Design an Application Architecture
- Recommend a microservices architecture including Event Grid, Event Hubs, Service Bus, Azure Queue Storage, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and webhooks
- Building serverless microservices in Azure
- Building microservices on Azure
- Recommend an orchestration solution for the deployment of applications including ARM templates, Logic Apps, or Azure Functions
- Select an automation method
- Azure Automation runbook types
- o Choose which resources or lifecycle steps will be automated
- o Design integration with other sources such as an ITSM solution
- IT Service Management Connector Overview
- recommend a solution for monitoring automation
- Monitor runbooks with metric alerts
- Recommend a solution for API integration
- Design an API gateway strategy
- Design an API Gateway Strategy
- Determine policies for internal and external consumption of APIs
- Policies in Azure API Management
- Publishing internal APIs to external users
- o Recommend a hosting structure for API management
- o Recommend when and how to use API Keys
Design Migrations
- Assess and interpret on-premises servers, data, and applications for migration
- Assess VMware VMs for migration to Azure VMs
- Migrate your .NET web app or service to Azure App Service
- Migrate SQL Server to Azure SQL Database offline using DMS
- Recommend a solution for migrating applications and VMs
- YouTube video: How to migrate your VMs, databases, and apps to Azure using Azure Migrate
- Recommend a solution for migration of databases
- Determine migration scope, including redundant, related, trivial, and outdated data
- Supported scopes of migration
This brings us to the end of the AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Study Guide
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