AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design – Welcome to the AZ-304 AZ-305 course

1. Overview of the AZ-304 + AZ-305 Exam Requirements

So let’s look at the requirements for the AZ 304 and AZ 305 exams in more detail. You can go ahead and enter AZ Hyphen 304 into your favorite search engine and you will find this official Microsoft landing page for this exam on the Microsoft Learn website. You can see right here at the top. Again, the 304 is retired ring as of March 31. Like I said in the last video, this does not affect you if you take it past the exam before, then once you’ve passed it, you do have credit for passing it. And if you qualify for the Architect Expert Certification, that certification is good for one year from the time that you passed it. And renewing happens online and is in some ways an easier process. It’s free. So if you take this and pass this exam, you’ll never have to do it again. And retiring this exam doesn’t affect you. From time to time, Microsoft does update this exam, although now that it’s retiring, maybe it’s not going to happen. But some of these updates are trivial and some of these updates are substantial. And so you always want to come back and check this date to see that the exam you’re about to take is not going to be updated at some point in the future.

Now, Microsoft does list who the best candidates for this exam are. And you should have some subject matter expertise in Architecting Azure Solutions in order to take this test. This is not a beginner test and like I said in the last video as well, if you don’t have any experience with Azure, this might not be the best test for you to take first. Now there’s nothing stopping you from taking this test. There’s no prerequisite for this one. We’ll talk about the 305 in a second, but you should have some background in it. And so that’s just the fact of life there. So this is an architecture design exam. This happens to be about designing solutions, recommending solutions. We’re going to see this on the requirements page, all of the verbs that are used and they all have to do with the designing and recommending. This is the page that you go to to book the test. You can see the big yellow schedule exam button. The exam is available in multiple languages.

And even though it says Retirement Date none, that’s not exactly true. It is $165. Depending on the country that you live in, it’s going to have a different price. And so in Spain, it’s €165. I was recently talking to a friend of mine in Poland and you’ll see the prices are even lower, but it’s based on the country. Okay, down here is where the where we get into the details. This is the skills measured and we can see that there’s five major exam skills categories and they’re broken out into Design Monitoring at ten to 15%, design Identity and Security 25 to 30. Design data Storage 15 to 20, design Business Continuity ten to 15 and Design Infrastructure 25 to 30. The real details is hidden behind this link. Download Exam Skills Outline inside of this page is where we find out about this exam. Now, in a case like this, when the exam is going to be updated, this document is split into two sections. The first half of the documents are the current requirements and the second half of the document are the changes after the change date. We can see in this example that the change that is being pushed on November 24 changes the capitalized M to a lowercase M.

It’s more of a typographical change and there are no other additional requirements. So sometimes this happens a bit annoying to me, but if you’re taking the exam before or after November 23, there’s really no change to you.

Okay, that’s just the reality. Now, here’s where we find the actual details we can see under the monitoring skill. It’s broken between cost optimization and logging and monitoring. That is one 10th of the exam score. Then we get into security and identity authentication, authorization, governance and security for applications. And we see all of the exam skills that are required, including policy, Blueprints, Key Vault, managed Identities, which is now lowercase, and applications in Azure Ad. And so the rest of these requirements are just like this. The major requirements here we’re going to see there’s databases on this exam, data Integration and Data Migration, and choosing the storage account based on tiers and recommending management tools, et cetera. Continuity involves backup and recovery and high availability. These are the two skills to keep either a high uptime or to recover from disaster fairly quickly. Finally, we have the infrastructure skills which has to do with Compute, Networking, Applications and Migrations, which are sort of some of the top skills within Azure.

Now, some of these topics do appear on the 303 test, but you’ll find that if they also appear on the 303 test here they are going to appear in either the design section where it says Recommend, Determine appropriate Technologies. A lot of these words are Recommend or Determine or Assess. So this is sort of the selection skill as opposed to the implementation skill. Now, just really briefly talking about the 305 exam, I got a video coming up talking about the difference between 304 and 305. So we won’t get into that as much detail in this video, but it is in beta. I don’t necessarily recommend that people run out and take beta exams. You get a delay in getting your scores back. You don’t pass the certification right away. It’s the same price as a regular exam without the coupon. And the questions are lengthier. Some of the questions aren’t great. There are some downsides to taking the beta. If you want to be first, or if you want to take the 104 and take the 305, then you can probably do this, the requirements are fairly similar.

They’ve merged the monitoring and logging again with the identity and security. So just one merged requirement and they’ve messed with the percentages a little bit more on data storage, less on logging, monitoring, identity and security. So we’ll talk about that in that coming video. We can see that the same requirements are here. So that’s the details of this. Again, in this course, what I structure my courses is I will start from the first section. The first section talks about cost optimization. The next sections will talk about those and logging and monitoring and finally authentication and so on. So you should see in this course that I’ll follow this fairly straight section by section.

Luckily for us, the 305 exam does have pretty much the same order. There are a couple of things that have been switched around. Like a non relational data was merged with relational data and so I might have to record some stuff around that. But generally it’s going to be in the same order nine out of ten times. Or like this networking solutions used to be after compute. So we’ll generally follow the same order. Sometimes there’ll be some deviation for three or five. Hopefully that’s easy to follow for you. Anyways, let’s continue.

2. Comparison of AZ-304 + AZ-305 Exam Requirements

So hi there. Let’s talk about the brand new requirements for the Azure Architecture certification that are taking effect mostly in 2022. Though if you haven’t seen the news, microsoft is sort of retiring some of the existing exams and introducing a new exam to replace it. I’m calling this a simplification of the required. And so we should, as certification test takers, embrace this certification. But it does mean that it’s a bit of a change. The current requirements, as you know, are to take and pass two exams, the AZ Three and the AZ 304, in order to get this Architecture Expert certification. So that’s the way that it’s been for the last couple of years. Obviously there’s downsides to taking two exams. That means you have to pay for two and you have to study for two.

And oftentimes this is a multiple month process to decide to get Architect Expert certified to finally get that. Now, the reality is that the 303 exam is an Architecture Technologies exam, and there was a lot of overlap between that and the other technology exam, which is Azure Administrator. So if you had taken AZ 104, that gives you a lot of advanced study for the AZ 303, you would have had to study still a few more weeks on top of that. But the overlap was there in the beginning. It was more overlap. In fact, as I sat and took these exams in beta, I did see the same question, the same exact question appears on both tests. My luck of the draw, if you will.

So I think that’s come down a lot. The requirements of 4104 and 303 have changed over the last year or so, and some of this content is no longer overlap. But let’s say there’s still a 50% overlap. Okay, so it does make sense that perhaps we don’t need the 303 exam if you’ve taken and passed the 104 exam, and that’s what the new requirements are. New requirements say the 104 is now a prerequisite to getting the Expert Architect certification. So if your plan was to get the Azure Administrator exam anyways, then this makes your life easier. It’s one less thing to pay for, one less thing to study for, and all you got to do is take the 305 exam and that the 104 and the three or five together get you Azure Architect Expert.

And as we’re going to look through the requirements in just a second, we can see the overlap between the two. If you’ve already passed the architect, I should have said this at the beginning, actually, if you’ve already passed it, this doesn’t affect you. Once you’re certified, the change in the exams don’t affect you because the renewal process is completely different. If you’ve already passed 303, this doesn’t affect you either, pretty much. If you’ve already passed three or three and you’re going to go for three or four, you might as well go for it, because three or four doesn’t retire until the end of March. And so as I record this, you still have four months to take him past three or four, and then you get the Azure Architect Expert certification and then the change to the exam doesn’t affect you. If you’re going to need more time than past March, then you will have to go for the 305. It went into beta today. As I record this on November 16 today, somebody somewhere can take this exam right now.

So that’s why I’m recording this video, is to talk about the 305 exam. So the paths are 303 and 304 that is retiring at the end of March. Or if you’ve already passed 303, you can take the 305 and that’s in beta today. Or it’ll go live. Let’s say it goes live in January would be my estimation. Or you already have passed 104. You don’t have to take 303 and you can take the 305. So that is the future path. These are the transitionary paths. I’m not going to suggest that you go and take the beta exam, which is available as of today, because there are some downsides to it.

You can take it if you want to, but you don’t get the results right away. The beta exam actually costs the same as the real exam, so you’re not even taking cost savings. Unless you can grab that limited use coupon that’s available as of today, that’s not oftentimes goes within 24 or 48 hours, you don’t get the results right away. And the questions are sometimes more difficult, sometimes more poorly written, because they’re not been polished, they haven’t got the feedback on it yet. There’s less study materials available, less so for this, but for a new beta exam, you just don’t have the courses and the books and the study guides. So there’s some downsides to something and I wouldn’t necessarily suggest it. I’m going to update this course more with this new content, but for now, I’m going to record this video, which we’re watching right now, talking about the 305 exam. And there is just going to be this overlap between 305 and 304.

Because the exams don’t expire until March 31, you’re going to have to have both content around, so please forgive that. So let’s talk about the differences between 304 and 305. So three or four is on the left and we can see the five sets of skills measured in 304 and the 305 is on the right. You can see the four sets of skills measured in 305. Now, what they’ve done is they’ve smashed or merged the first two skills into a single skill. So instead of it being Design Monitoring for ten to 15% and Design Identity and Security 25 to 30, they put Identity, Governance and Monitoring into a single 25 to 30 bucket. So the overall percentage of the exam has gone down for those two skills. But now they’re merged together and we’ll look at that in detail in a second. Data storage has gone up from 15% to 20%, up to 25 to 30. So the 10% that we lost in here has been made up for in data storage. Business continuity still remains the same at ten to 15% and infrastructure remains the same at 25% to 30%.

Now if we dig into the PDFs here so if you click on the PDF download you can see that three or four is on the left, three or five is on the right. We can see that one thing that is not appearing on the 305 has to do with cost. So this cost optimization is a three or four only requirement at the current time. But we do have logging and monitoring. As being here you can see that it seems like this has been cut down a little bit. There’s only three topics on logging and monitoring as opposed to five. As we go into authentication, authentication is here. Again, a lot of topics have been cut down. Authentication and authorization only have three topics whereas over here you’ve got a lot more. So authorization is down here. Notice it doesn’t mention anything about just in time access or privileged identity management. So governance is here, governance is here as well. And then finally we’ve got this security for applications. This looks like it’s been removed. It’s talking about key vault, it’s talking about managed identities. Here you have identities and access for applications which is similar to security for applications. But as you can see, user consent, AAD passwords and secrets I guess is the Key Vault and applications, access to Azure resources. So there’s a lot more specific over here, a lot more vague over here. That’s unfortunate. So yeah, this is basically morphed into that. Go up to the data storage. You can see it’s 15 to 20 years now become 25 to 30. What they’ve done is they’ve broken out a generic databases category and becomes a relational data and non relational data separately. So I think this has gotten some extended coverage.

Data integration is still being covered here and storage account is being covered for relational, semi structured and non relational. Business continuity is pretty much the same. We’ve got the ten to 15% backup and recovery, backup and recovery. High availability, high availability and it looks like they just copied a lot of the topics so that’s nothing wrong with that. Design infrastructure 25 to 30 as well. Here as well we have compute, we have compute, we have network solutions. Network solutions. Application architecture. Application architecture. Migrations. Migrations. So as you can see there is very little that’s been added and or removed. We’ve identified a couple of small elements that have been taken away, specifically costs, but pretty much, pretty much it’s going to be a lot of the same coverage. Like I said, at least 85%, 90% the same coverage.

What I’m going to do then is I’m going to go through these objectives in more detail and as those, maybe the videos need to be refreshed or maybe some additional topics are being talked about here that were not on the original videos and in that case, I’ll record new content for that.

But basically, if you’ve been studying for 304, 305 has a lot of overlap and so that’s actually pretty good news. Anyways, I just wanted to talk more about the 305 exam we saw here in detail, side by side, the similarities between them. And as we go through this course, I’m going to try to highlight for you sections and videos that are specific to 305. So don’t worry, this course will be updated relating to 305. If you’re studying for it, this course is still a really good resource for the AZ 305 exam as well.

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