AZ-305 Azure Solutions Architect
Course overview
Administrators build what's on the ticket. Architects decide what should be on the ticket. AZ-305 tests whether you can read requirements — uptime, budget, compliance, latency, team skills — and recommend the Azure design that satisfies them, with trade-offs stated out loud. This course uses Microsoft's skills outline as of April 17, 2026, the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) and the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).
Credential path
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Prerequisite certification | Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) must be held to be awarded the Expert certification |
| Exam | AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions |
| Passing score | 700 |
| Price | $165 USD in the U.S. |
| Renewal | Annual free online assessment |
| Weights | Identity, governance & monitoring 25–30% · Data storage 20–25% · Business continuity 15–20% · Infrastructure 30–35% |
The architect's habit: requirement → constraint → option → trade-off → decision
Every DCT design answer is written in this shape:
Requirement: Patient files must survive a regional outage with read access. Constraint: Budget-sensitive, nonprofit. Options: GRS, RA-GRS, RA-GZRS, object replication. Trade-off: RA-GZRS adds zone resilience at higher cost. Decision: RA-GRS for documents; revisit if a zone outage is unacceptable.
Dope Translation: An admin is the contractor who builds the house to the blueprint. The architect is the one who asks how many kids you have, whether grandma's moving in, what the flood zone is, and what you can afford — then draws the blueprint. And when the inspector asks "why'd you do it like that?", the architect has an answer.
The Well-Architected pillars (your design checklist)
| Pillar | Ask |
|---|---|
| Reliability | What fails, and how do we keep going or recover? |
| Security | Who can get in, and how do we limit the blast radius? |
| Cost Optimization | Are we paying only for value? |
| Operational Excellence | Can we deploy, observe and fix it repeatably? |
| Performance Efficiency | Does it scale to demand at acceptable latency? |
Syllabus
| # | Lesson | Domain |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Logging and monitoring design | Identity, governance & monitoring |
| 2 | Authentication, authorization, secrets | Identity, governance & monitoring |
| 3 | Governance design and landing zones | Identity, governance & monitoring |
| 4 | Relational, semi-structured and unstructured data | Data storage |
| 5 | Data integration and analysis | Data storage |
| 6 | Backup, DR and high availability | Business continuity |
| 7 | Compute and application architecture | Infrastructure |
| 8 | Migrations and network design | Infrastructure |
Assessment
Design studio submissions (8) 40% · Capstone architecture + defense 35% · Knowledge checks 10% · Practice exam 15%.
Lesson 1 — Design logging and monitoring
Objectives: recommend a logging solution; a solution for routing logs; a monitoring solution.
Decision guide
| Need | Recommend |
|---|---|
| Central query of logs across subscriptions | Log Analytics workspace(s) — design count by data residency, access control and cost (one central workspace is common; split for sovereignty or chargeback) |
| Route platform/resource logs | Diagnostic settings → Log Analytics (query/alert), Storage (cheap archive/compliance), Event Hubs (stream to SIEM/third parties) |
| Guest OS + VM performance | Azure Monitor Agent with data collection rules |
| App performance, distributed tracing | Application Insights (workspace-based), OpenTelemetry |
| Security analytics / SIEM | Microsoft Sentinel on the workspace |
| Cost control for logs | Table plans (Analytics vs. Basic vs. Auxiliary), retention tiers, commitment tiers, DCR transformations to drop noise |
| Dashboards | Azure Workbooks, Azure Managed Grafana |
| At-scale governance of diagnostics | Azure Policy DeployIfNotExists for diagnostic settings |
Real Talk: A county IT office must keep audit logs for 7 years but only query the last 90 days. Design: diagnostic settings to a workspace with 90-day interactive retention and long-term retention up to 7 years (or archive to immutable storage), Sentinel for security events, Policy to enforce diagnostics on every new resource.
Design studio 1
Design the observability for a 3-tier web app in two regions used by a state agency: what goes where, retention, who can query what (resource-context RBAC vs. workspace RBAC), and the monthly cost levers.
Try it first. Move forward with confidence.
Contact DCT for cohort pricing · Microsoft exam fee separate ($165 US)
Choose a class or cohort that fits your starting point.
Live virtual design studio with peer reviews, or self-paced with recorded critiques
Ask about enrollmentAlready enrolled? Check your course accessThis page includes the course overview, one sample lesson and up to three practice questions. Remaining lessons, labs, capstone and the full practice bank are reserved for enrolled learners. Microsoft exam fees are separate where shown. Cohort dates and included support are confirmed before enrollment.