How to use this guide
Give each domain study time in proportion to its official weighting. The percentages below are where your marks actually come from. Work through the domains in order, then let your per-domain practice scores show you what to go back to.
The fastest way to improve: read one domain’s focus areas, take a practice run, then read the explanation for every question you missed before moving on. The explanations are where the learning happens. Skipping them is the most common reason people stop improving.
1. Describe cloud concepts
28% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Name the cloud benefits: high availability, scalability, elasticity, reliability, predictability
- Explain the shared responsibility model, and how the line moves between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
- Compare the cloud models (public, private, hybrid) and what drives the choice
- Describe consumption-based pricing, and capital versus operational expenditure
2. Describe Azure architecture and services
39% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Explain regions, region pairs and availability zones, and how they underpin resilience
- Walk the management hierarchy: management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, resources
- Know the core compute and networking services: VMs, App Service, containers, Azure Functions, virtual networks, VPN, ExpressRoute
- Cover storage and database services, including tiers, redundancy options and migration tooling
3. Describe Azure management and governance
33% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Manage cost with the pricing and TCO calculators, budgets, tags and cost analysis
- Apply governance tooling: Azure Policy, resource locks, and the Microsoft Purview governance surface
- Handle identity and access: Microsoft Entra ID, authentication versus authorisation, conditional access, RBAC, Zero Trust
- Know the deployment and monitoring tools: 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
- Never leave a question blank. There is no penalty for a wrong answer.
- Watch for absolute words. Options containing always or never are usually wrong on a fundamentals exam.
- Pick the more managed Azure-native service when two answers both look right. That is generally the expected answer.
- Read a shared scenario once, carefully. Case-style questions reuse it across several items, so re-reading per question wastes time.
- Move on fast. At 45 minutes you have well under a minute per question, so flag anything that stalls you.
How to know you’re ready
One good practice score can be luck. What counts is scoring at or above the real pass mark (700 on a 1 to 1000 scaled score) across several full-length sets in a row, with no single domain trailing far behind the others. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.
Free, full-length, and weighted to the official blueprint. Every answer is explained.
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