Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions: AZ-305

Who should take the AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam?

• The AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Certification exam is suitable for individuals with advanced experience in IT, particularly in areas such as networking, virtualization, identity, security, and business continuity, who possess both extensive knowledge and practical experience.
• This examination is ideal for professionals who design cloud and hybrid solutions on Azure, advise stakeholders, and transform business needs into Azure solutions.
• More precisely, it is targeted at candidates aiming to achieve a Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert.

What are the prerequisites for the AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions certification?

To earn this certification you need to meet the following prerequisites:
1. Azure Administrator Associate Certification: It is better to focus first on obtaining the Azure Administrator Associate Certification. This validates your understanding of core Azure Administration concepts.

2. Relevant Experience: You should have advanced experience in IT operations, including:

   - Networking

   - Virtualization technologies

   - Security and identity management

   - Business continuity and disaster recovery strategies

   - Data management and governance

   - Understanding how decisions in each of these areas impact the overall solution design.

3. Azure Administration: Practical knowledge of Azure administration, along with experience in DevOps processes, is necessary.

4. Azure Development: A familiarity with Azure development practices is also useful.

These requirements ensure that candidates have the skills to effectively design and implement advanced Azure solutions.

What skills will be measured in the AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions certification exam?

The exam will test your knowledge and understanding in four areas. The domains along with their weightage follow:

Designing identity, governance, and monitoring solutions: It includes designing identity and access for applications, solutions for logging and monitoring, authentication and authorization solutions, and governance. This comprises designing a log routing solution, recommending monitoring tools for a solution, suitable level of logging, solution for securing resources and identities, identity management solution, hierarchical and organizational structure for Azure resources, solution for auditing and enforcing compliance, user consent solution for applications, solution for securely storing secrets and passwords, solutions for allowing access to Azure resources, and integrating applications into Microsoft Entra.

Designing of Business Continuity Solutions:  This will include designing a solution for backup and disaster recovery, and high availability. This comprises understanding the recovery solutions for containers, identifying the availability requirements of Azure Resources, recommending a backup and recovery solution for compute, databases, and unstructured data, high availability solution for compute, relational and non-relational data storage, and recovery solution for hybrid, Azure, and on-premises workloads that meets the recovery objectives such as Recovery Level Objective, Recovery Point Objective, and Recovery Time Objective.

Designing of Data Storage Solutions: This includes designing and recommending a Data Storage Solution for Relational and Non-Relational Data, and Data Integration. This comprises designing a data solution for durability and protection, recommending a solution for database scalability, data encryption at rest, in transmission, and in use, data analysis and data integration, storing relational, non-relational, and semi-structured data, balance features, cost, and performance, and access control solutions to data storage.

Designing of Infrastructure Solutions: It includes designing an application architecture, a compute solution, migrations, and network solutions. This will comprise optimizing network performance for applications, assessing and interpreting data, applications, and on-premises servers for migration, evaluating a migration solution, and recommending container-based, compute based, virtual machine-based compute solution, and a suitably sized compute solution on the basis of workload requirements, message architecture, event-driven architecture, automated deployment solution, application configuration management solution, API integration solution, caching solution, solution for migrating applications, virtual machines, unstructured data, and databases, and more.