Before you start: the exam facts
Get these facts clear before you study any Azure service.
- The study guide belongs to Microsoft. Microsoft publishes Study guide for Exam AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions on Microsoft Learn, and it is free. This course does not reproduce it. It teaches the skills measured as of April 17, 2026. Do: bookmark the guide and check it for updates before you book. Microsoft updates the English version of the exam first.
- Passing score. You need a score of 700 or greater to pass.
- The certification needs two credentials. Passing AZ-305 does not by itself make you a Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert. You must also hold the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification, which you earn with exam AZ-104. Do: make sure your Administrator Associate certification is current.
- Renewal. Microsoft associate and expert certifications expire every year. You renew them by passing a free online assessment on Microsoft Learn.
- Independence. LevelUpWith is independent of Microsoft and cannot promise that you will pass. Microsoft's free Practice Assessment and exam sandbox are good extra checks.
The four sections and their weightings
The exam has four sections:
| Section | 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% |
What this means for your study plan:
- Infrastructure carries the most weight. It covers compute, application architecture, migrations and networking.
- Identity, governance and monitoring comes second, so together these two sections make up more than half of the exam.
- Business continuity is the smallest section, but questions about recovery objectives and high availability come up throughout the other sections too.
- Nearly every skill starts with the verb "Recommend". AZ-104 tested whether you could configure a service. AZ-305 tests whether you can choose the right one.
Do: spend your study time roughly in proportion to these weightings.
The role the exam expects you to play
The study guide describes the architect's job as advising stakeholders and translating business requirements into designs for Azure solutions that align with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Architects work with developers, administrators, security engineers and data engineers. They need to understand how a decision in one area affects the whole solution.
The decision method used in every level
Every later level follows the same four steps. Use them on every scenario question.
- Requirements. Pick out the hard constraints in the scenario, such as "must", "minimize cost", "no data loss", "on-premises users" or "least administrative effort". Write them down. The wording is chosen deliberately.
- Options. List the Azure services or designs that could meet those requirements.
- Trade-offs. Compare the options against the requirements. Rule out any option that fails a hard constraint, even if it is a good service in general.
- Recommendation. Choose the option that meets every stated requirement with the least extra cost and complexity. On this exam, that is usually the expected answer.
Worked example. A company needs to cut hosting costs for an internal web app and wants the least administrative effort.
- Requirements: lower cost, minimal administration.
- Options: keep the app on virtual machines, or move it to a managed platform (PaaS) service.
- Trade-offs: virtual machines give full control, but you have to patch and manage them. A managed platform takes most of that work away.
- Recommendation: the managed platform option, because "least administrative effort" settles the choice.
Framework 1: the Azure Well-Architected Framework
The Well-Architected Framework (WAF) applies to individual workloads. It has five pillars, and each pillar covers different concerns:
- Reliability: resiliency, availability and recovery.
- Security: protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data, and detecting and mitigating threats.
- Cost Optimization: cost modelling, budgets and cutting waste.
- Operational Excellence: observability across the workload, DevOps practices and safe deployments.
- Performance Efficiency: scalability, scaling out, and load testing.
The pillars often pull against each other. For example, adding a second region improves Reliability but raises cost. Do: for each requirement in a scenario, write down which pillar it belongs to. The pillar tells you which trade-off the question is testing.
Framework 2: the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure
The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) applies to the organization's journey to the cloud. It is less about any single workload. Its current Azure adoption phases are:
- Strategy: what should our Azure adoption look like?
- Plan: how will we prepare?
- Ready: how will we build our Azure landing zone?
- Adopt: how will we migrate, modernize and build workloads?
- Govern: how will we control the environment?
- Secure: how will we protect it?
- Manage: how will we operate and optimize it over time?
A simple way to tell them apart: WAF asks "Is this workload well designed?" CAF asks "Is the organization adopting Azure in a controlled way?" Questions about governance and migration often draw on CAF thinking. Questions about the design of a single service usually draw on the WAF pillars.
What the exam asks about this
- The exam does not ask for the passing score or the weightings. Those facts are for planning your study.
- It does give you scenarios, including multi-part case studies, where you have to find the requirements and pick the option that meets all of them.
- Wrong answers are often real services that would work but break one constraint, such as cost, effort or region. Use the four steps to find that broken constraint.
- Expect questions that point to WAF pillars (resiliency, cost, security) and to CAF ideas (landing zones, governance, migration phases).
Key takeaways
- A score of 700 or greater passes. The study guide is Microsoft's, free on Microsoft Learn, and covers skills measured as of April 17, 2026.
- The Expert certification needs AZ-305 and an active Azure Administrator Associate certification.
- Section weightings: Infrastructure 30–35%, Identity/governance/monitoring 25–30%, Data storage 20–25%, Business continuity 15–20%.
- The method for every question: requirements, options, trade-offs, recommendation.
- WAF has five pillars and applies to a workload. CAF covers the organization's adoption, from Strategy through to Manage.