AZ-305 asks you to recommend Azure designs across four domains, and Microsoft publishes how much each domain counts. Split your study hours by those weights, practice each domain on the free written case studies from Microsoft's AZ-305 course, and keep the last week for one combined case study and timed practice. With about 10 hours a week, that takes six weeks.
Domains and weights
Microsoft's AZ-305 study guide lists the skills measured as of April 17, 2026, in four domains:
- 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%
Almost every objective under those domains starts with "Recommend", and the few others start with "Specify" or "Evaluate". So the exam tests whether you can choose a design that fits stated requirements. The guide's change log for the April 2026 update records one change, a minor edit to the audience profile, so the domains and objectives themselves did not change.
Exam format
- Passing score. You need 700 on a scale of 1 to 1,000. Microsoft's scoring page says this is a scaled score and may not equal 70% of the points.
- Guessing. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, and multi-part questions usually give one point for each correct part. Answer every question.
- Time. The AZ-305 exam page does not state a duration. Microsoft's exam duration page gives 100 minutes for associate and expert exams without labs and 120 minutes for those that may contain labs, and you are told your exam's time when you register. The same page says most Microsoft exams have between 40 and 60 questions.
- Breaks. Once you start a break, you cannot go back to any question you saw before it, including questions in a case study.
- Microsoft Learn during the exam. You can open Microsoft Learn in a split screen while you answer, and the timer keeps running. Microsoft warns that if you look things up for every question, you will not finish in the time allowed.
- Question types. Microsoft does not say in advance which question types an exam uses. Its exam sandbox lets you try each type in the real exam interface.
- Price. As of October 7, 2026, the exam page shows $165 for the United States. Taxes are extra, and the price depends on the country where you take the exam.
The certification prerequisite
Passing AZ-305 alone does not make you an Azure Solutions Architect Expert. The certification page lists AZ-305 as the one required exam. It also says you must earn the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification, which comes from passing exam AZ-104. If you do not hold it yet, budget time for AZ-104 as well.
If core Azure services are still new to you, Microsoft's free AZ-305 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Prerequisites learning path covers the basics it says you need before you begin studying for AZ-305.
Study hours by weight
Plan in hours first, then turn the hours into weeks. Six weeks at about 10 hours a week gives you 60 hours. Keep the last 10 for the final week, and split the other 50 by the midpoint of each domain's weight. For infrastructure, the midpoint of 30-35% is 32.5%, and 32.5% of 50 hours is 16.25, so about 16 hours.
| Domain | Weight | Midpoint | Hours of 50 | Microsoft case study to practice |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | 30-35% | 32.5% | 16 | Compute, app architecture, network |
| Identity, governance and monitoring | 25-30% | 27.5% | 14 | Governance, authentication and authorization |
| Data storage | 20-25% | 22.5% | 11 | Relational storage, non-relational storage |
| Business continuity | 15-20% | 17.5% | 9 | No formal case study; use the recovery targets in the network case |
The rounded hours add up to 50. If you have more or fewer hours, keep the same proportions.
Before week 1, take Microsoft's free practice assessment, linked from the exam page. Microsoft says it shows the style, wording and difficulty of the questions. Note which domain each question you miss seems to test. If one of the two heavy domains, infrastructure or identity, is clearly your weakest, move a few hours to it from the domain you already use at work.
Business continuity asks for backup and high availability designs for databases and unstructured data, so study it after data storage. The Fabrikam Residences case study, which belongs to the monitoring part of the identity domain, says it needs the compute, relational data, non-relational data, authentication and application architecture case studies done first. It therefore waits for the final week and takes its time from those 10 hours.
- Week 1. Identity, governance and monitoring.
- Week 2. The rest of identity, then data storage.
- Week 3. The rest of data storage, then business continuity.
- Week 4. The rest of business continuity, then infrastructure.
- Week 5. Infrastructure.
- Week 6. About 3 hours on Fabrikam Residences, about 5 on timed sets of practice questions you have not seen, and about 2 on a second pass at the domain where you still lose the most points.
Working through the case studies
Microsoft's AZ-305 course repository publishes a written case study for most course modules. Each gives a company's requirements and asks you to recommend and justify a design. Every one ends with the same question, how your design uses the Well-Architected Framework pillars. The case pages give no model answers, and you can do them on paper with no Azure subscription.
Write your design before you look anything up. Then check each choice on Microsoft Learn and note, next to it, the requirement that decided it.
Identity, governance and monitoring
Microsoft's learning path for this domain is AZ-305: Design identity, governance, and monitor solutions. Its governance objectives include the structure of management groups, subscriptions and resource groups, tagging and compliance.
The governance case study practices the hierarchy decision. Each department of two business units tracks its own Azure spend while central IT reports costs company-wide, and the case asks for two alternative management group and subscription hierarchies and your reason for picking one. It then asks for at least two ways to keep a project's test VMs low cost and named for the project, with non-compliance flagged automatically.
The authentication and authorization case study practices bringing in users from other organizations and deciding how workloads reach a database. The 75 employees of an acquired retailer have on-premises accounts, and the 15 partner employees already have identities in their own Microsoft Entra tenant, so the case asks for a separate process for each group. It also asks for a secure way for a VM to query Azure SQL, and for an on-premises server to reach the same database without storing credentials in its code or configuration files.
Data storage
This domain covers relational data, semi-structured and unstructured data, and data integration and analysis. The learning path is AZ-305: Design data storage solutions.
The relational storage case study practices designing a database service for a SQL Server workload moving off an on-premises Always On availability group. Its three primary concerns are high availability, slow browsing on pages with many items, and exposure of personal or financial data. Your design has to cover authentication, authorization, pricing, performance and high availability.
The non-relational storage case study practices matching storage options to how each kind of data is used. Product media is served on the public website, marketing literature is opened from a mapped drive and from the website, and corporate documents must be kept for set periods, with most seldom opened after a year. The case asks directly whether you would use blob access tiers and immutable storage. Answer for each kind of file separately, because it says your recommendations may differ by data.
Microsoft's data integration module has no formal case study, so cover those two objectives from the learning path.
Business continuity
The first objective in this domain asks for a recovery solution "that meets recovery objectives", so practice turning a recovery time and a recovery point into a design. The learning path is AZ-305: Design business continuity solutions.
Microsoft's business continuity module has no formal case study. The network case study gives you targets to work from instead. Its three-tier BI application, with a SQL Server Always On availability group behind it, needs a 99.99% availability SLA, a 10-minute recovery point objective and a 2-hour recovery time objective. Design the high availability and disaster recovery for that application now, and do its network design later in the infrastructure weeks.
Infrastructure
This is the heaviest domain. It covers compute, application architecture, migrations and networking. The learning path is AZ-305: Design infrastructure solutions.
The compute case study practices choosing a compute service for each tier from its load. At peak, 1,750 customers an hour visit the website and the front-end servers hit their limits, though they are often idle off hours. The middle tier gets 75 to 125 support requests an hour with long waits, and a legal requirement keeps all resources in one region.
The app architecture case study practices designing for work that arrives faster than it can be processed. Customer image uploads sometimes outpace the existing scanning API, every image must be scanned, and costs should stay low with serverless used where possible.
The network case study practices connectivity and network security choices, and asks how your compute and relational storage designs change the network. Its constraints include an ExpressRoute circuit whose failover is not decided yet, a CFO who wants to avoid paying for a second, redundant circuit, and a rule that all traffic between on-premises sites and Azure passes through a single virtual network. Migration has no formal case study, so take its objectives from the learning path.
Checking a weak area again
After you have studied a weak area, take a case study you have already done, change one requirement and design again. In the compute case, drop the single-region rule. In the non-relational case, make the corporate documents frequently read. Check each new choice on Microsoft Learn as before. If you can trace every change in your design to the changed requirement, move on. If you cannot, go back to the learning path module for that objective.
Booking the exam
Book when you can work through each case study without notes, trace each choice to a stated requirement, and finish a timed set of practice questions you have not seen with no domain where you keep losing points. Try the exam sandbox before exam day so the interface is familiar.
If the first attempt does not go well, Microsoft's retake policy lets you retake after 24 hours, then makes you wait 14 days between later attempts, with at most five attempts in 12 months. Each retake is paid.
For the timed sets in week 6 you need questions you have not already seen. CramHQ's free AZ-305 assessment takes about 15 minutes, needs no credit card and shows which areas are weakest afterwards. The Pass Plan costs $34.99 once for 12 months of access, and adds repair tasks ordered by how many exam points each gap costs, six practice tests and a 50-question timed simulation.