How To Pass AZ-304
AZ-304 is one of two required exams to get the Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Certification. The other required exam is AZ-303. In this post, I’ll tell you exactly how I studied for and passed the AZ-304 exam.
The AZ-304 exam covers a wide variety of Azure services. For this reason, it’s not possible to learn all the material from one source. I used many different sources to prepare for the exam including Pluralsight courses, the official study guide, Microsoft Learn modules, Microsoft documentation, a few blogs, and the official practice exam. I’d recommend going through these resources in the following order:
1. Video Courses
The outline of skills tested by the AZ-304 exam can be downloaded from this page:
It may be initially overwhelming to look at this outline due to the large number of skills and Azure services specified. In addition to that, the description of the skills are vague such as “recommend a solution for authentication”. Authentication is a large and extensive topic and we could spend a very long time learning about it. Clearly, in order to study for this exam in a reasonable amount of time, we need to focus on just the aspects of the skills which are being tested.
Taking a prepared set of video courses will give us a much better idea of what is being tested and will help us to focus on learning the important parts. I strongly recommend the AZ-304 learning path from Pluralsight, which is what I used. It consists of several video courses which cover most of the skills tested by the AZ-304 exam. If you don’t have a Pluralsight subscription, you can always sign up for a free 10 day trial. Also, if you have a Visual Studio subscription, you should be able to get a few months of free credit on Pluralsight. There are also similar sets of video courses on other platforms such as Cloud Academy and A Cloud Guru.
For most video courses, the corresponding set of slides are available for download. It’s a great idea to download these for when you’re reviewing the material later on. Also, I’d highly recommend taking notes as you’re watching these videos, because not all the information is included in the slides. If you don’t take notes, then it’s cumbersome to go back to the video and search for what you’re looking for. After I completed watching the entire set of courses, I found some value in watching them all a second time. The videos are densely packed with content so it’s easy to miss or forget something the first time.
2. Official Study Guide
There are some topics which the Pluralsight courses don’t cover and some topics which they don’t cover in enough detail. For example, I didn’t see any mention of Azure Batch and Azure Virtual WAN in the Pluralsight courses and both of those are in the official exam skills outline. Reading the official AZ-304 study guide is a great way to learn whatever the Pluralsight courses were missing. It’s also a good way to review the content learned from the Pluralsight courses in a different format.
The official study guide follows the official exam skills outline very closely, so reading it will give you some confidence that you know at least something about the vast majority of skills being tested. The authors also draw attention to content that is particularly likely to be tested. At the end of each section of the study guide, a case study with a set of practice questions is provided which will help you to verify if you’ve understood the content.
3. Additional Resources
Even after taking the Pluralsight courses and reading the official study guide, there were still some skills in the exam outline which I knew nothing about. For example, neither the study guide, nor the Pluralsight courses mentioned Azure AD Connect Cloud Sync and Azure Resource Graph. I also felt that some skills were not covered in enough detail such as Azure Site Recovery, Azure Synapse analytics and Azure Migrate. These remaining skills can be learnt by using Microsoft Learn, Microsoft documentation and other blog posts. I’ve listed the additional resources I used below:
- Monitoring
- Security/Identity
- Governance
- Data Storage
- Data Integration
- Site Recovery
- Compute Services
- Networking Services
- Migration
4. Official Practice Exam
Now that we’ve studied for all the basic material covered by the exam, it’s time to take the official practice exam. The practice exam is definitely quite representative of the actual one. It will help you get used to the format of the questions and mechanics of answering them. The practice exam will also help you to identify your weak points and gaps in your knowledge. For every question you get wrong, the practice exam will give you a detailed explanation of the correct answer and also provide you with links to resources with more information.
A few of the questions in the practice exam were almost identical to ones found on the actual exam. So if you make sure to complete every question in the practice exam, you are guaranteed to get at least a few questions right on the real one.
5. Take The Exam
If you’ve done everything above, you have a pretty good chance of passing the exam. When I took it, the duration of the exam was 120 minutes and there were a total of 60 questions to answer. There were some questions grouped into case studies within the exam. Those questions had to be completed as a separate set from the rest of the exam. Unlike the other questions on the exam, the answers to those case study questions cannot be reviewed after the case study has been completed.
I recommend completing the questions quick enough to leave about 10-15 minutes to review the answers. As you’re reviewing the answers, you may realize the correct answer to a question which weren’t sure about before.
Happy studying and good luck on the exam!
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