Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• Cloud benefits: high availability, scalability, elasticity, reliability, predictability
• The shared responsibility model and how the line moves between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
• Cloud models — public, private, hybrid — and what drives the choice
• Consumption-based pricing, and capital versus operational expenditure

Know these cold:

• Regions, region pairs, availability zones and how they underpin resilience
• The management hierarchy: management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, resources
• Core compute and networking — VMs, App Service, containers, Azure Functions, virtual networks, VPN and ExpressRoute
• Storage and database services, including tiers, redundancy options and migration tooling

Know these cold:

• Cost management: the pricing and TCO calculators, budgets, tags and cost analysis
• Governance tooling — Azure Policy, resource locks, and the Microsoft Purview governance surface
• Identity and access: Microsoft Entra ID, authentication versus authorisation, conditional access, RBAC and Zero Trust
• Deployment and monitoring — ARM templates, Bicep, Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Service Health

Common mistakes

• ✕Memorising service names without the shared responsibility model — it is tested as judgment about where Microsoft's duty ends and yours begins, and that line moves between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
• ✕Confusing the cost tools: the Pricing Calculator estimates before you build, the TCO Calculator compares against on-premises, and Cost Management analyses spend that already happened.
• ✕Blurring regions, region pairs and availability zones, then losing every resilience question that follows.
• ✕Mixing up Azure Policy with RBAC. Policy governs what resources may exist and how they are configured; RBAC governs who may act on them.
• ✕Treating authentication and authorisation as one idea — Entra ID questions routinely turn on the distinction.
• ✕Over-studying deep technical detail. This exam rewards breadth, and management and governance is a third of the score.

Exam-day tips

• ✓There is no penalty for a wrong answer. Never leave a question blank.
• ✓Watch for absolute words. Options containing always or never are usually wrong on a fundamentals exam.
• ✓When two answers both look right, pick the more managed Azure-native service — that is generally the expected answer.
• ✓Case-style questions often reuse one scenario across several items. Read it once carefully rather than re-reading per question.
• ✓At 45 minutes you have well under a minute per question. Flag anything that stalls you and move on.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. The signal that holds up: consistently at or above the real pass mark (700 on a 1–1000 scaled score) across multiple full-length sets, with no single domain dragging far below the rest. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.