Guide to Prepare for AZ-304 Exam – Microsoft Azure Architect Design – Techbytes

Guide to Prepare for AZ-304 Exam - Microsoft Azure Architect Design

Are you preparing for the AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design exam but do not know where to get started? To get the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification, there are two exams that you need to pass: the AZ-303 and AZ-304.

The courses are designed to equip you with handy IT skills, which the exams test and the certification validates your specific Azure skillset, giving you a competitive edge in today’s crowded IT job market. AZ-304 is incredibly beneficial and helps you develop the knowledge and skills you need to complete Azure cloud solutions architect (CSA) projects.

While AZ-303 (Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies) and AZ-304 (Microsoft Azure Architect Design) complement each other, this guide will majorly focus on AZ-304, discussing how you can learn and prepare for the exam. Read on to find tips that will help you tackle your AZ-304 exam successfully.

Overview of AZ-304: Microsoft Azure Architect Design

Microsoft Azure Solutions Architects are experts with the right skills to design and implement Azure solutions. They advise key stakeholders and translate their business requirements into definitive and dependable cloud solutions.

That said, AZ-304 is for IT professionals who have expertise in designing and implementing solutions running on Microsoft Azure. The exam tests your ability to design scalable, reliable, and secure solutions that help transform business requirements. For this reason, candidates for the AZ-304 exam should have advanced knowledge and experience in IT operations, including networking, virtualization, security, storage, disaster recovery, data platforms, identity, budgeting, business continuity, and governance.

Thankfully, there are plenty of useful resources that you can download and go through as you prepare for your exam. Microsoft Learn provides you with some free online training and learning paths for different Microsoft technologies. You will most certainly find some helpful modules and learning paths here.

Pre-requisites

According to Microsoft, candidates for the AZ-304 exam should be expert-level Azure administrators with hands-on experience with Azure DevOps and the development processes. In other words, they should have advanced experience with IT operations and extensive knowledge of key concepts in this area. Besides, they should understand how changes in these concepts can affect their ultimate solution.

You need to have a healthy skills balance among three Azure job roles: administrator, developer, and architect. If you are pretty new, Azure administrator involves deploying, managing, and troubleshooting all sorts of Azure resources; Azure development involves coding and maintaining Iaas and PaaS Azure-based applications, while Azure architect is all about your ability to choose Azure services that help devise viable and reliable solutions to meet business goals and financial/technical constraints for a particular customer.

Skills measures in AZ-304: Microsoft Azure Architect Design exam

The AZ-304 tests your knowledge of five subject areas. Here is what you need to learn:

Relevant Microsoft Docs have much of what you need to learn as you prepare for the AZ-304 exam.

1. Design Monitoring (10 - 15%)

Cost optimization designing

• Recommending Azure solutions that help businesses minimize costs
• Recommending solutions for managing and reporting costs
• Designing Azure solutions for logging and monitoring
• Determining levels and storage locations for logs
• Recommending a logging solution that augments compliance requirements
• Recommending relevant and useful monitoring tools for Azure solutions
• Planning integration with monitoring tools such as Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor
• Recommending and selecting appropriate mechanisms for event routing and advancing

2. Designs Identity and Security (25 - 30%)

Design authentication

• Recommending an authentication solution
• Recommending viable solutions for Single Sign-On
• Recommending a viable self-service for users
• Recommending a reliable network access authentication solution
• Suggesting a solution for Conditional Access such as multi-factor authentication.
• Recommending and implementing B2B integration solutions
• Recommending an Azure-based solution for hybrid identity. For instance, Azure AD Connect Health and Azure AD Connect

Design authorization

• Choosing a dependable approach for authorization
• Recommending a hierarchial structure featuring management groups, resources groups, and subscriptions.
• Recommending access management solutions, including Azure AD Identity Protection, RBAC policies, Just in Time (JIT) VM Access, Privileged Identity Management (PIM), access review, physical access, and role assignments.

Design Governance

• Recommending solutions for using Azure Blueprint and Azure Policy
• Recommending a tagging strategy
• Designing Security for applications
• Recommend KeyVault regions and operations and what can be stored in KeyVault
• Recommending solutions that help with the integration of applications into Azure AD
• Recommending a security solution that includes Azure AD Managed Identities

3. Designing Data Storage

Designing Database solutions

• Recommend a solution for encrypting data at rest, data in transmission, and data in use
• Recommending a solution for scaling database
• Recommending database service tier sizing
• Selecting a useful data platform depending on business requirements

Data integration designing

• Recommend an Azure-based solution for data integration featuring Azure Data Lake Azure Data Bricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.
• Recommend a reliable data flow for specific business requirements

Selecting appropriate data storage accounts

• Recommending storage access and management tools and solutions
• Choosing appropriate storage tiers

4. Designs Business continuity

Designing reliable backup and recovery solutions

• Design Azure Site recovery solutions, including site recovery network, site recovery capacity, site failover, and failback solutions, and recommend site recovery replication policy.
• Recommending solutions for recovery in various regions
• Recommending on-premises workloads and Azure hybrid solutions that align with recovery adjectives.
• Recommending an azure Backup management solution
• Designing a solution for archiving and retaining data - storage types and data archiving methodologies, identifying data archiving requirements and SLAs, identifying data archiving compliance requirements for businesses, recommending data retention policies.

Designing for high availability

• Identifying resources requiring high availability and their storage types
• Recommend autoscaling solutions
• Recommending solutions to address application and workload redundancy
• Recommending solutions for geo-redundancy of workloads

5. Design Infrastructure

Designing solutions for computing

• Recommending a solution for compute provisioning and automating compute management
• Determining appropriate technologies for computing, including Azure Functions, App Services, Window Virtual Desktop, virtual machines, and Service Fabric.
• Recommending a solution for containers

Designing network solutions

• Recommending solutions for network provisioning and security (Gateways, Firewalls, and Private endpoints)
• Recommending a solution for network addressing and name solution
• Suggesting a mechanism for automating network management
• Recommending a solution to balance load and route traffic

Designing applications architecture

• Recommend an API integration solution with API management hosting structure, API gateway strategy, how to use the API keys, and policies regulating internal and external consumptions of APIs.
• Recommend architecture for micro-services - Service Bus, Storage Queues, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Grid plus Hubs.
• Recommend a strategy for deploying applications, including automation methods, resources, and life-cycles to be automated, solutions to monitor automation, and ways o integrate with other sources

Design migrations

• Identify on-premise servers, data, and apps for migration
• Recommend solutions for migrating databases
• Recommend solutions for migrating applications

Final Thought

To pass the AZ-304 exam, you need to have hands-on experience and broadly understand all necessary concepts. Microsoft Learn is a great resource that provides skill training on various Azure topics. Along with reading relevant resources, don’t forget to work with Microsoft Azure on a daily basis. Thankfully, creating an Azure account where you can practicing AZ-304 labs is pretty straightforward.

Best wishes and Happy Studying as you prepare for the Exam!