AZ-304: Microsoft Azure Architect Design retired March 31, 2022.<\/strong> It is no longer an active certification exam to book. Microsoft’s retirement announcement<\/a> explains that AZ-303 and AZ-304 were succeeded by AZ-305. The old exam addressed valuable architecture concepts, but a historic study outline is not reliable evidence for present exam registration, current service availability, or 2026 technical requirements.<\/p>\n Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert currently requires the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate prerequisite certification<\/strong> and passing the AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam<\/strong>. This is an important distinction: the architect award is not described merely as \u201ctwo exams\u201d with no credential prerequisite. Read Microsoft’s expert certification requirements<\/a> before preparing or paying for an exam.<\/p>\n This article preserves its historical AZ-304 address to answer an older-code search accurately. It does not recommend booking or buying training for a retired exam. Someone considering an Azure architecture role should compare prior administrator experience, the current AZ-305 design skills, and the operational work required to support a real Azure system.<\/p>\n Historically, AZ-304 evaluated decisions about secure and reliable Azure architecture: identity and governance, networking, compute, data storage, business continuity, and cost-sensitive design. Those ideas remain useful to architects, but the Azure product catalog, authorization mechanisms, service options, and certification rules have changed since 2022. An old diagram or question can be informative without being an accurate current implementation recommendation. When a service or feature is uncertain, consult versioned Microsoft Learn documentation for the present deployment.<\/p>\n The April 17, 2026 AZ-305 blueprint<\/a> evaluates designing identity, governance, and monitoring solutions (25\u201330%), data storage solutions (20\u201325%), business continuity (15\u201320%), and infrastructure solutions (30\u201335%). These are published weight ranges; they do not promise an exact count of questions by topic. To prepare well, analyze trade-offs rather than memorize which portal button configures a service.<\/p>\n For example, compare two possible deployment topologies for an application used by employees across regions. Write down data residency, service availability, recovery-point objective, recovery-time objective, required identities, network constraints, anticipated traffic, and cost ceilings. A private endpoint design can fail without correct DNS; a resilient compute layout is not sufficient if critical storage or identity services lack appropriate recovery. Explain each chosen boundary and what evidence would test it.<\/p>\n Azure Administrator Associate validates the ability to implement, manage and monitor Azure resources. AZ-104 covers operational identity and governance, storage, compute, networking, and monitoring; architecture design overlaps these technologies but asks different questions. A solution architect needs to know why a design might require separate authorization at the Azure control plane, the service data plane and the network. A developer, administrator or security engineer may own different implementation steps, but the architect still has to account for their dependencies.<\/p>\n Someone beginning with Azure might strengthen role-based skills before taking on architecture scenarios. An experienced administrator could instead compare their designs against the AZ-305 skills measured, particularly decision trade-offs involving recovery, reliability, compliance and migration. Neither a retired AZ-304 practice score nor a generic course certificate establishes readiness for the current exam.<\/p>\n Consider a business application that serves regional employees, processes confidential records and must remain usable during common infrastructure failures. Define target availability, acceptable data loss, required restoration time, approved regions, users and partner connections, security responsibilities, and estimated utilization. Draw alternative architectures only after identifying which constraints are hard requirements. Do not turn every resilience feature on by default; redundancy, monitoring and cross-region replication all create costs and operating responsibilities.<\/p>\n For identity, map human, application and managed identities and determine where Microsoft Entra sign-in, Azure RBAC, service data authorization and network restrictions are enforced. Privilege should be assigned at the smallest practical scope. A login being accepted does not imply permission to modify a storage account or read its data. Use the Azure resource hierarchy<\/a> to reason about parent policy, role inheritance and locks before approving any design.<\/p>\n For networking, document the public and private entry paths, the DNS resolution clients expect, virtual network segmentation, inspection or firewall placement and explicitly permitted egress. Prove how the design would behave if a resolver returned the wrong address or a required route were absent. Availability zones, failover instances and redundant storage support different failure cases; specify which data must be restored and which application dependencies must move together. A hypothetical design must be described as a proposal until tested against real service capabilities.<\/p>\n Calculate a plausible total cost from current regional service rates, storage retention, network egress, standby capacity and monitoring data. Decide whether a simpler architecture meets the real requirement. A cross-region deployment can look attractive on a diagram but exceed permitted data residency or recovery budgets. In a design review, record the accepted compromises and how an operator can detect or reverse a bad change.<\/p>\n Evaluate who owns on-call support, secrets, backup verification and policy changes. If the application cannot access storage, distinguish a credential problem from DNS or a blocked route. If a new release fails, document version compatibility and rollback steps. A design is stronger when the administrator can test its assumptions through a safe change preview, a denied-access test and a restoration rehearsal rather than trusting fluent claims about resilience.<\/p>\n First, review the official the current expert credential requirements and confirm your Administrator Associate prerequisite. Second, obtain the current AZ-305 study guide and map its four domains to worked system-design decisions. Third, build a small portfolio: a requirement brief, alternatives matrix, Azure topology, threat and identity boundaries, data flow, recovery assumptions, and estimated cost. Use authoritative Microsoft docs to validate each proposed service feature and any preview restrictions.<\/p>\nWhat AZ-304 assessed and what changed<\/h2>\n
Current AZ-305 blueprint and architect judgment<\/h2>\n
Why the Azure Administrator prerequisite matters<\/h2>\n
Build a scenario with measurable requirements<\/h2>\n
Assess supportability, cost, and recovery<\/h2>\n
Practical current preparation steps<\/h2>\n