The AZ 305 syllabus has four domains: identity, governance, and monitoring solutions (28%); data storage solutions (22%); business continuity solutions (18%); and infrastructure solutions (32%). Each domain breaks down into objective statements that describe what Microsoft expects you to recommend when you design Azure infrastructure, covering logging, authentication, storage, recovery, compute, and migrations.
What the AZ 305 syllabus covers
Exam AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions is organized around four functional domains. Microsoft publishes an official weight for each domain, along with a list of objective statements that describe, at a granular level, what a candidate has to be able to recommend. This page lays out that structure in full, using Microsoft's own wording for every objective, so you can see exactly what the az 305 syllabus asks you to know before you plan a study schedule or attempt our AZ-305 practice test.
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions | 28% |
| Design data storage solutions | 22% |
| Design business continuity solutions | 18% |
| Design infrastructure solutions | 32% |
Design infrastructure solutions carries the largest share of the exam, followed closely by identity, governance, and monitoring. In practice, this means compute, application architecture, and migration decisions come up often, but you cannot skip the identity and governance material either, since it is nearly as heavily weighted. If you want the reasoning behind how to sequence study across these weights, see the AZ-305 study plan.
Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions (28%)
This domain covers logging, monitoring, authentication, authorization, and governance design decisions across an Azure estate. Microsoft's objective statements for this domain are:
- Design solutions for logging and monitoring - Recommend a logging solution
- Design solutions for logging and monitoring - Recommend a solution for routing logs
- Design solutions for logging and monitoring - Recommend a monitoring solution
- Design authentication and authorization solutions - Recommend an authentication solution
- Design authentication and authorization solutions - Recommend an identity management solution
- Design authentication and authorization solutions - Recommend a solution for authorizing access to Azure resources
- Design authentication and authorization solutions - Recommend a solution for authorizing access to on-premises resources
- Design authentication and authorization solutions - Recommend a solution to manage secrets, certificates, and keys
- Design governance - Recommend a structure for management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups, and a strategy for resource tagging
- Design governance - Recommend a solution for managing compliance
- Design governance - Recommend a solution for identity governance
In practice, this means you should be comfortable recommending where logs land, how they get routed to a SIEM or an archive, which identity provider and authorization model fits a scenario, and how a company structures management groups and subscriptions for governance and tagging.
Design data storage solutions (22%)
This domain covers relational, semi-structured, and unstructured data storage, plus how data moves between systems. The objective statements are:
- Design data storage solutions for relational data - Recommend a solution for storing relational data
- Design data storage solutions for relational data - Recommend a database service tier and compute tier
- Design data storage solutions for relational data - Recommend a solution for database scalability
- Design data storage solutions for relational data - Recommend a solution for data protection
- Design data storage solutions for semi-structured and unstructured data - Recommend a solution for storing semi-structured data
- Design data storage solutions for semi-structured and unstructured data - Recommend a solution for storing unstructured data
- Design data storage solutions for semi-structured and unstructured data - Recommend a data storage solution to balance features, performance, and costs
- Design data storage solutions for semi-structured and unstructured data - Recommend a data solution for protection and durability
- Design data integration - Recommend a solution for data integration
- Design data integration - Recommend a solution for data analysis
Expect scenarios that ask you to pick a database service tier, decide between relational and non-relational storage, protect data at rest, and connect storage to an integration or analysis pipeline.
Design business continuity solutions (18%)
This is the smallest domain by weight, but it is tested in depth. The objective statements are:
- Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery - Recommend a recovery solution for Azure and hybrid workloads that meets recovery objectives
- Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery - Recommend a backup and recovery solution for compute
- Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery - Recommend a backup and recovery solution for databases
- Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery - Recommend a backup and recovery solution for unstructured data
- Design for high availability - Recommend a high availability solution for compute
- Design for high availability - Recommend a high availability solution for relational data
- Design for high availability - Recommend a high availability solution for semi-structured and unstructured data
Questions here typically give a recovery objective and ask you to match it to a backup, replication, or availability design, so read each scenario for its stated constraint before you pick an option.
Design infrastructure solutions (32%)
The largest domain covers compute, application architecture, and migration design. The objective statements are:
- Design compute solutions - Specify components of a compute solution based on workload requirements
- Design compute solutions - Recommend a virtual machine-based solution
- Design compute solutions - Recommend a container-based solution
- Design compute solutions - Recommend a serverless-based solution
- Design compute solutions - Recommend a compute solution for batch processing
- Design an application architecture - Recommend a messaging architecture
- Design an application architecture - Recommend an event-driven architecture
- Design an application architecture - Recommend a solution for API integration
- Design an application architecture - Recommend a caching solution for applications
- Design an application architecture - Recommend an application configuration management solution
- Design an application architecture - Recommend an automated deployment solution for applications
- Design migrations - Evaluate a migration solution that leverages the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure
- Design migrations - Evaluate on-premises servers, data, and applications for migration
- Design migrations - Recommend a solution for migrating workloads to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS)
Because this domain is the biggest single share of the exam, it rewards broad coverage: virtual machines, containers, serverless, messaging, caching, and migration planning can all appear in the same sitting.
How to use this syllabus
Treat each bullet above as a study checkpoint rather than a topic to skim. For every objective, try to state out loud which Azure service you would recommend and why, given a specific constraint such as cost, availability, or compliance. That is the pattern the real exam and our mock both use: a scenario with a constraint, followed by a design decision. When you are ready to test yourself against this exact domain breakdown, our AZ-305 sample questions walk through worked examples, and the AZ-305 exam format page explains how Microsoft scores the exam overall. For eligibility questions, check AZ-305 prerequisites before you book.
Exam facts on this page come from Microsoft’s own pages (official exam page). Prices, versions and policies change — confirm there before you book.