Microsoft · AZ-900

AZ-900 Exam: Complete Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Guide

Current AZ-900 exam guide covering the $99 USD price, 45-minute limit, skills measured, preparation priorities, practice options, and exam value.

Last verified September 6, 2026

AZ-900 exam at a glance

Facts last verified September 6, 2026

Domain breakdown

Who should take the AZ-900 exam?

AZ-900 is designed for technology professionals who want to demonstrate foundational knowledge of cloud computing and Microsoft Azure. It is a common first certification for students, career changers, support staff, developers, database professionals, project managers, sales engineers, and business stakeholders who need a shared Azure vocabulary.

You do not need an Azure certification, professional cloud experience, or coding ability before taking the exam. Microsoft suggests some familiarity with an IT area such as infrastructure, databases, or software development, but this is audience guidance rather than a formal prerequisite. A complete beginner can prepare successfully by spending extra time on networking, identity, compute, and storage basics.

The exam is also useful for professionals who work alongside Azure teams without operating the platform daily. Understanding subscriptions, resource groups, regions, availability, cost controls, governance, and shared responsibility makes architecture and purchasing discussions easier. However, AZ-900 does not prove that you can deploy or administer a production Azure environment.

Skills measured on AZ-900

Microsoft's official AZ-900 study guide lists three domains as of July 20, 2026. The ranges total more than 100% at their upper bounds because Microsoft publishes a possible percentage range for each domain, not a fixed distribution for every exam form.

Describe cloud concepts (25–30%)

Begin with the meaning of cloud computing and the shared responsibility model. Know how a provider's responsibilities and a customer's responsibilities shift across on-premises, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. The exam can describe a responsibility such as physical security, operating-system patching, application configuration, identities, or data and ask who owns it under a particular service model.

Compare public, private, and hybrid clouds and recognize a reasonable use case for each. Public cloud emphasizes provider-operated, shared infrastructure; private cloud provides a dedicated environment; hybrid designs connect private or on-premises resources with public cloud services. Avoid treating one model as universally better—the correct choice follows the scenario's compliance, control, scalability, latency, and cost requirements.

Cloud economics include consumption-based pricing and the difference between capital and operational expenditure. Understand why elasticity, measured usage, and economies of scale change purchasing decisions. You should also recognize serverless computing as a model in which the provider manages infrastructure and resources scale around execution, without assuming that “serverless” means servers do not exist.

Microsoft expects you to describe benefits such as availability, scalability, reliability, predictability, security, governance, and manageability. Learn each term through a concrete example. Finally, compare IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS by the level of control and management the customer retains and identify which model fits a stated workload.

Describe Azure architecture and services (35–40%)

This is the largest current domain. Learn Azure's physical and logical structure: datacenters, regions, region pairs, sovereign regions, and availability zones, followed by resources, resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups. Be able to order the management hierarchy and explain where access or policy can be applied.

For compute, compare virtual machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, availability sets, Azure Virtual Desktop, containers, functions, and web apps. AZ-900 does not require deep configuration knowledge, but you should know the operating model and typical use case for each. A useful question is whether the workload needs operating-system control, packaged containers, managed application hosting, or event-driven serverless execution.

Networking objectives cover virtual networks, subnets, peering, Azure DNS, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, and public versus private endpoints. Focus on the purpose of each component. For example, VPN Gateway uses encrypted connectivity over the public internet, while ExpressRoute provides private connectivity through a provider.

Storage preparation should compare blob, file, queue, and table services; access tiers; redundancy options; storage account types; and migration or file-transfer tools. Know the roles of AzCopy, Storage Explorer, Azure File Sync, Azure Migrate, and Azure Data Box. You do not need to memorize every limit, but you must distinguish online synchronization, command-line transfer, migration assessment, and offline bulk data movement.

Identity, access, and security include Microsoft Entra ID, Entra Domain Services, SSO, MFA, passwordless authentication, external identities, Conditional Access, Azure RBAC, Zero Trust, defense in depth, and Defender for Cloud. Keep authentication—proving identity—separate from authorization—deciding permitted actions. Also distinguish identity controls from resource security posture and workload-protection services.

Describe Azure management and governance (30–35%)

Cost management starts with the variables that affect an Azure bill: service type, resource size, usage, region, data transfer, licensing, and purchasing options. Learn the purpose of the Azure pricing calculator for estimates and Cost Management for analyzing and controlling real usage. Tags add searchable business metadata but do not automatically enforce policy or provide a security boundary.

Governance and compliance objectives cover Microsoft Purview, Azure Policy, and resource locks. Purview helps govern and understand data; Policy evaluates or enforces resource standards; locks help prevent accidental deletion or modification. Questions often present these tools together, so study the problem each one solves.

Management and deployment tools include the Azure portal, Cloud Shell, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, Azure Arc, infrastructure as code, Azure Resource Manager, and ARM templates. Understand interface versus control-plane concepts: CLI and PowerShell are management interfaces, ARM is Azure's deployment and management service, and templates define desired infrastructure declaratively. Azure Arc extends Azure management and governance to resources outside Azure.

Monitoring objectives distinguish Azure Advisor, Service Health, and Azure Monitor. Advisor provides recommendations, Service Health reports issues and planned maintenance affecting your services, and Monitor collects and analyzes telemetry. Within Monitor, know the broad roles of Log Analytics, alerts, and Application Insights.

How to prepare for AZ-900

Start with Microsoft's three free learning paths: cloud concepts, Azure architecture and services, and Azure management and governance. The full sequence is short enough to finish in a week, but retention improves when you pause after each module and explain its main service comparisons from memory.

Create a small Azure environment if you can. Explore the portal, create a resource group, review a storage account and virtual network, inspect Microsoft Entra ID, view Cost Management, and then remove resources you no longer need. Hands-on practice is not required, but seeing the hierarchy and management tools makes the terminology less abstract. Set a budget before deploying anything chargeable.

Build comparison notes rather than a list of definitions. Useful pairs include scalability versus elasticity, availability zones versus region pairs, VPN Gateway versus ExpressRoute, public versus private endpoints, RBAC versus Policy, and Advisor versus Service Health versus Monitor. The exam often tests the boundary between two plausible services.

A realistic beginner schedule is one week for cloud and architecture fundamentals, one week for services and security, and a final week for governance, practice assessment review, and weak areas. Experienced IT professionals can compress this, but everyone should complete at least one timed practice session because the 45-minute assessment rewards quick recognition.

AZ-900 practice questions

Use the free Practice Assessment linked from the official AZ-900 certification page. It demonstrates the style and helps locate gaps, but it does not reproduce live questions or guarantee the exact number and type of items on your exam.

Review every answer, including correct guesses. Explain why the selected service matches the requirement and why the alternatives do not. Avoid brain dumps and sites claiming to provide “real exam questions”; use objective-aligned practice material and current Microsoft documentation instead.

AZ-900 compared with role-based Azure exams

AZ-900 validates broad awareness, while exams such as AZ-104 or AZ-204 validate job-role skills. Azure Administrator candidates must implement and operate identity, governance, storage, compute, and networking. Azure developer exams expect application development and deployment depth. Passing AZ-900 is not a prerequisite for those paths.

Use AZ-900 when you need cloud foundations or a low-risk first Microsoft exam. If you already administer, develop, secure, or architect Azure solutions daily, review the AZ-900 blueprint briefly and consider moving directly to the certification aligned with your role.

Is the Azure Fundamentals certification worth it?

AZ-900 is valuable when it closes a real knowledge gap, supports an entry-level application, or creates a shared cloud vocabulary for your team. Because the certification does not expire, there is no annual renewal burden. The $99 USD list price can vary by the country or region where the exam is proctored.

Its limitation is depth. Employers should not interpret Azure Fundamentals as proof that a candidate can build secure networks, operate production workloads, or automate deployments. Pair the credential with a small project, relevant work examples, or a role-based certification if you need to demonstrate implementation ability.

Exam-day notes

• You have 45 minutes for the assessment; check-in and instructions make the total appointment longer.
• The exam is proctored and can be scheduled through Pearson VUE, with a Certiport option for eligible students and educators.
• Microsoft does not publish a fixed question count or guarantee specific question types. Most Microsoft certification exams typically contain 40–60 questions.
• Fundamentals exams do not provide access to Microsoft Learn during the assessment.
• A scaled score of 700 or higher passes. It does not mean exactly 70% correct.
• If you fail the first attempt, Microsoft's standard policy requires a 24-hour wait before the next attempt; later failures require longer waits.

Prep resources

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