How long does it take to read the AZ-305 notes?

About 5 hours of reading in total (278 minutes across 12 lessons), spread over 4 exam domains. Most people spread that across a couple of weeks alongside practice questions rather than reading it in one sitting.

Do the notes cover the whole AZ-305 exam guide?

They are written against the official Microsoft Azure exam guide for the AZ-305: every domain and every topic in the blueprint has notes mapped to it, and the weightings shown on this page are the ones Microsoft Azure publishes.

Are revision notes enough to pass the AZ-305 on their own?

Reading alone rarely is. The notes give you the model of how the services fit together, but the AZ-305 tests whether you can apply it to a scenario under time pressure. Pair the notes with practice questions and at least one full-length timed mock before you book the real exam.

Do I need to read them in order?

No. Each lesson is self-contained and mapped to one topic in the blueprint, so you can jump straight to a weak area. If you have no cloud background, working down the domains in weight order is the safest default.

AZ-305 revision

AZ-305 study guide — free revision notes

The complete Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert study library — 12 lessons mapped to every domain and topic in the official exam guide. Free to read, no account needed.

Lessons: 12
across 4 domains
Reading time: 5 hrs
278 minutes in total
Exam: 50 Qs
100 min · pass 700 / 1000
Price: Free
no account required

Cheat sheet

Design solutions for logging and monitoring

AZ-305 Logging and Monitoring Design: Log Analytics Workspaces, Log Routing, Alerts and Azure Monitor19 min

Design authentication and authorization solutions

AZ-305 Authentication and Authorization Design: Hybrid Sign-in, Conditional Access, External Identities, RBAC, PIM and Key Vault27 min

Design governance

Azure Governance Design for AZ-305: Management Groups, Subscriptions, Tagging, Azure Policy and Identity Governance22 min

Create a free account to track completed lessons, bookmark topics and see your exam readiness. · Pro lessons unlock with a one-time upgrade.

The AZ-305 blueprint, domain by domain

Microsoft Azure publishes exactly what the AZ-305 tests and how much each part is worth. Here it is — every domain, its weight, the topics inside it, and the lessons that cover them.

Domain 1

Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions

28%

of the exam

Designing logging and monitoring (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, log routing), authentication, identity management and authorization for Azure and on-premises resources, secrets, certificates and keys, and governance: management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, tagging, compliance and identity governance. Official weighting 25–30%.

3 topics in this domain

Design solutions for logging and monitoring
Design authentication and authorization solutions
Design governance

3 lessons · 68 min of reading · 135 practice questionsStart this domain

Domain 2

Design data storage solutions

22%

of the exam

Choosing and sizing relational data stores (service and compute tiers, scalability, protection), semi-structured and unstructured storage that balances features, performance and cost, and data integration and analysis solutions. Official weighting 20–25%.

3 topics in this domain

Design data storage solutions for relational data
Design data storage solutions for semi-structured and unstructured data
Design data integration

3 lessons · 70 min of reading · 105 practice questionsStart this domain

Domain 3

Design business continuity solutions

17%

of the exam

Designing backup and disaster recovery that meet recovery objectives for Azure and hybrid workloads, compute, databases and unstructured data, and high availability for compute, relational data and semi-structured and unstructured data. Official weighting 15–20%.

2 topics in this domain

Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery
Design for high availability

2 lessons · 46 min of reading · 82 practice questionsStart this domain

Domain 4

Design infrastructure solutions

33%

of the exam

Designing compute (VMs, containers, serverless, batch), application architecture (messaging, events, APIs, caching, configuration, automated deployment), migrations with the Cloud Adoption Framework, and network connectivity, performance, security, load balancing and routing. Official weighting 30–35%.

4 topics in this domain

Design compute solutions
Design an application architecture
Design migrations
Design network solutions

4 lessons · 94 min of reading · 160 practice questionsStart this domain

How to revise for the AZ-305

Reading every note front to back is the slowest way to pass. The exam is weighted, so your revision should be too — the blueprint above tells you exactly where the marks are.

Read in weight order, not page order

Design infrastructure solutions carries the most marks on the AZ-305, so it earns the most of your attention. Work down the blueprint from the heaviest domain to the lightest rather than starting at domain 1 and grinding forward.

First pass for coverage, second pass for recall

Read each lesson once without stopping to memorise — you are building a map, not a memory. On the second pass, read only the "what's tested" and key-takeaway blocks. If a takeaway surprises you, that lesson goes back on the pile.

Turn takeaways into questions

Cover a lesson's key takeaways and try to say them out loud from the heading alone. Recall you can produce under your own steam is the only recall that survives a timed exam; recognition on a re-read is not the same thing.

Stop reading when practice, not the page count, says so

Finishing the notes is not the goal — scoring is. Move to AZ-305 practice questions early, then come back to the exact lessons your wrong answers point at. That loop is worth far more than a third read-through.

Beyond the AZ-305 notes

AZ-305 revision notes: your questions

Yes. All 12 AZ-305 lessons are readable in full without an account and without payment. Creating a free account adds progress tracking, bookmarks and a readiness score — it does not unlock extra reading.

Source

Exam structure, domain weights and scoring on this page come from the official AZ-305 exam guide.

Microsoft AZ-305 study guide — Microsoft Learn