Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Validates advanced expertise in designing cloud and hybrid solutions on Azure, including compute, network, storage, monitoring, and security. This expert-level certification covers designing identity, governance, and monitoring solutions, data storage solutions for relational and unstructured data, business continuity solutions including backup and disaster recovery, and infrastructure solutions covering compute, networking, migrations, and application architecture. Requires AZ-104 (Azure Administrator Associate) as a prerequisite and aligns with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and Cloud Adoption Framework.
Exam domains
- Design infrastructure solutions33%
Specify compute components for VMs, containers, serverless, and batch workloads; design messaging, event-driven, and API-integration architectures; plan migrations using the Cloud Adoption Framework; and design connectivity, performance, security, and load-balancing for Azure networking.
- Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions28%
Recommend logging and monitoring architectures, authentication and authorization solutions including secrets, certificate, and key management, and a governance hierarchy of management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups with tagging and identity governance.
- Design data storage solutions23%
Recommend solutions for relational, semi-structured, and unstructured data; balance database service tiers, scalability, durability, and protection; and design data integration and analysis pipelines.
- Design business continuity solutions18%
Recommend backup and disaster recovery for Azure and hybrid compute, databases, and unstructured data, and design high availability for compute, relational data, and semi-structured/unstructured data.
Sources
Questions are grounded in 150 references from official and authoritative materials.
- Overview of Azure Policy - Azure Policy | Microsoft Learn
- Managed identities for Azure resources - Managed identities for Azure resources | Microsoft Learn
- Architecture strategies for identity and access management - Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework | Microsoft Learn
- Management groups - Cloud Adoption Framework | Microsoft Learn