AZ-900 Overview — Format, What’s Tested & How to Prepare
Everything to know before taking Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900): format and scoring, who it’s for, skills measured by domain, and a compact study plan mapped to our syllabus and practice.
On this page
Exam snapshot
- Certification: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
- Audience: Students, beginners, business/technical stakeholders, career-switchers
- Experience target: 0–6 months with cloud/Azure concepts; light labs recommended
- Format: Multiple choice/response, short concept items, matching/drag-and-drop
- Timing: ~60–90 minutes appointment (varies by form)
- Passing: Scaled score 700 (0–1000)
Study funnel: Read this Overview → work the Syllabus objective-by-objective → keep the Cheatsheet open for last-mile recall → validate with Practice.
What AZ-900 measures (by domain)
1) Cloud concepts
- IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS; CapEx vs OpEx; elasticity, scalability, availability
- Shared responsibility model; reliability vs fault tolerance vs disaster recovery
2) Azure architecture & core services
- Global infrastructure: regions, availability zones, region pairs
- Compute (VMs, App Service, Functions, containers), storage (Blob/Files/Disks), networking (VNet, VPN, ExpressRoute, Load Balancer)
- Data services at a fundamentals level (Azure SQL, Cosmos DB)
3) Security, identity & governance
- Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) basics; authentication vs authorization; RBAC
- Defender for Cloud, Key Vault, Network Security Groups, Private Endpoints
- Governance: management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, tags, Azure Policy
4) Cost management & SLAs
- Pricing calculator, TCO basics, budgets & alerts
- Service-level agreements and how redundancy affects availability
Who should take AZ-900?
- New to cloud or Azure and want a recognized foundation
- Non-engineering stakeholders who need to speak Azure fluently
- Engineers planning a role path (e.g., AZ-104, AZ-204, AZ-305) and wanting a fast on-ramp
Readiness checklist
- I can explain IaaS/PaaS/SaaS and pick the right model for a scenario.
- I know regions vs availability zones vs region pairs.
- I can choose a fit-for-purpose service (e.g., App Service vs VM).
- I understand RBAC vs Policy vs Locks at a conceptual level.
- I can estimate cost with the pricing calculator and interpret an SLA.
Compact 1–2 week plan
Days 1–2: Cloud concepts + shared responsibility + global infrastructure.
Days 3–5: Core services by category (compute, storage, networking, data).
Days 6–7: Identity/security/governance + cost/SLA.
Final days: Cheatsheet + Practice — two mixed sets and one full mock.
Exam-day tactics
- First pass fast; flag longer scenario items for review.
- Prefer managed, secure-by-default answers (least privilege, private endpoints where appropriate).
- If two answers seem right, choose the one that is simpler, resilient, and operationally sound.
- Watch for intent words: cost, resiliency, security, global reach, management overhead.