AZ-104 vs AZ-900: Choose Your Path to Pass Azure Admin

AZ-900 is a foundational Microsoft Azure exam, while AZ-104 validates the administrator skills required for the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification.

Last updated: 2026. The AZ-104 exam is aimed at administrators who implement, manage, and monitor Azure environments across identity, governance, storage, compute, networking, and backup. It is a practical exam in the sense that preparation should go beyond reading Microsoft Learn pages; candidates need to build, break, troubleshoot, and repeat common administrative tasks until the patterns become familiar.

Azure remains a major public cloud platform for infrastructure, application hosting, analytics, storage, networking, and security operations. Older market-share and cloud-adoption claims are often repeated without context, including figures from sources such as cloud computing statistics roundups and cloud market share reporting. For AZ-104 preparation, however, the more useful point is operational: employers need administrators who can control access, protect resources, manage cost, restore services, and diagnose issues in a live cloud environment.

What the AZ-104 exam expects

The official AZ-104 exam page is the starting point for any study plan because Microsoft periodically updates objectives and supporting guidance. Before buying practice tests or following a study schedule, candidates should compare those materials with the latest skills measured outline so that preparation reflects the current exam rather than an older version of Azure administration.

AZ-104 covers five broad domains: Azure identities and governance, storage, compute resources, virtual networking, and monitoring and backup. The original exam guidance lists virtual networking as the heaviest area, followed by compute, then identity, governance, storage, monitoring, and backup. That weighting matters because it should shape study time; candidates who spend most of their preparation clicking through storage accounts while giving networking only a light review often struggle with scenario questions.

The exam may include multiple-choice questions, multiple-response questions, drag-and-drop tasks, and case-study style scenarios. The case-study format is where shallow memorisation breaks down. A candidate may need to decide whether a problem belongs with RBAC, Azure Policy, a network security group, a route table, DNS, private endpoints, backup configuration, or monitoring signals.

Microsoft also expects Azure administrators to work across the Azure portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Azure Resource Manager templates. A common preparation mistake is becoming fluent in the portal while ignoring command-line and template-based workflows. In practice, administrators rarely rely on one interface only, and exam scenarios can test whether the candidate understands the operation rather than where a button sits in the portal.

Should AZ-900 come first, or should candidates go straight to AZ-104?

AZ-900 is useful for people who are new to cloud concepts, Azure terminology, shared responsibility, pricing models, and basic service categories. It is not a prerequisite for AZ-104, so experienced systems administrators, infrastructure engineers, and operations staff do not need to delay AZ-104 purely to collect a fundamentals credential. The better decision is based on background and timeline rather than on a fixed certification sequence.

A candidate with little exposure to public cloud should spend time on fundamentals first, especially if terms such as subscriptions, tenants, resource groups, availability zones, role-based access control, and platform-managed services are unfamiliar. In that case, an Azure Fundamentals course can create the vocabulary needed to make AZ-104 study less fragmented.

By contrast, a Windows Server administrator, network engineer, DevOps engineer, or support professional who already understands identity, IP addressing, monitoring, backup, and change control can usually start with AZ-104. That learner may still review AZ-900-level material briefly, but the main effort should move quickly into labs. The AZ-104 exam rewards operational judgement, and that judgement develops faster when the candidate is building and correcting real configurations.

A lab-first AZ-104 study plan

A strong AZ-104 plan starts with a small Azure environment and expands it week by week. The lab does not need to be large. A subscription, a resource group structure, Microsoft Entra users and groups, a virtual network, a few subnets, storage, a virtual machine or scale set, Azure Policy, Backup, Monitor, and Log Analytics are enough to practise most administrator tasks.

Candidates using the Azure free account or trial credits should still set budgets, alerts, and cleanup routines early. The Azure free account page is available at Microsoft Azure, but the habit is more important than the credit. Governance and cost control are hiring hot-buttons because real administrators are judged by whether environments stay secure, recoverable, and financially controlled.

The following four-week roadmap assumes part-time preparation alongside work. Candidates with less Azure experience may stretch it, while those already administering cloud environments may compress it. The important rule is to pair each portal task with at least one PowerShell or Azure CLI repetition so that knowledge is not tied to one interface.

1. Week 1, 8 to 10 hours: Build the foundation with subscriptions, resource groups, Microsoft Entra users and groups, RBAC assignments, tags, budgets, and Azure Policy. The checkpoint is being able to explain why a user can or cannot perform a task and how policy affects resource deployment.
2. Week 2, 10 to 12 hours: Add storage accounts, access controls, lifecycle management, Azure Files, blob containers, virtual machines, extensions, disks, availability options, and a basic VM scale set. The checkpoint is deploying and modifying compute resources without losing track of identity, storage, and cost implications.
3. Week 3, 12 to 14 hours: Concentrate on virtual networks, subnets, network security groups, application security groups, peering, routing, DNS, load balancing concepts, and private access patterns. The checkpoint is troubleshooting a connectivity failure by checking addressing, NSGs, routes, DNS, and endpoint configuration in a repeatable order.
4. Week 4, 8 to 12 hours: Practise Azure Monitor, alerts, Log Analytics, Backup, restore operations, and mock exams. The checkpoint is restoring a file or VM, interpreting monitoring signals, reviewing incorrect practice answers, and refreshing the latest Microsoft skills outline before booking the exam.

This plan deliberately places networking before the final mock-exam push because networking is often the pacing trap on AZ-104. Candidates can know individual features yet still lose time when a scenario combines subnets, peering, NSGs, DNS, route tables, and private access. A repeatable diagnostic routine is more useful than memorising isolated settings.

Recovery work also deserves more attention than many learners give it. Creating a backup policy is only part of the administrator’s responsibility. Candidates should practise restore paths, understand what can be recovered, test how alerts indicate failure or degradation, and recognise when Azure Site Recovery is relevant to a continuity requirement.

How to use Microsoft Learn without turning preparation into passive reading

Microsoft Learn modules are valuable because they reflect Microsoft’s terminology and expected service boundaries. They work best when used as lab prompts rather than as a reading assignment. After a module explains a feature, the candidate should reproduce the task in the portal, repeat the core operation in CLI or PowerShell, then write a short note explaining when the feature would be used in a production environment.

For identity and governance, that means creating users or groups, assigning RBAC at different scopes, applying tags, testing policy effects, and observing what happens when a deployment is denied. For storage, it means configuring secure access, redundancy choices, lifecycle rules, file shares, and blob operations while paying attention to how permissions differ across account, container, and identity layers.

For compute, candidates should deploy virtual machines, adjust disks, work with extensions, understand availability options, and recognise when a scale set fits better than a single VM. For networking, they should repeatedly test connectivity after changing NSGs, routes, DNS, peering, and subnet design. For monitoring and backup, they should configure alerts and recovery, then deliberately create small failures to see what Azure reports.

Practice tests have a place near the end of preparation, but they should not become the primary learning method. Mock exams often lag behind Microsoft objective updates, and some question banks encourage recognition rather than understanding. A better use of practice tests is to identify weak domains, return to the lab, and rebuild the missed concept from first principles.

Training, self-study, and when structure helps

Self-study can work well for disciplined candidates who already know infrastructure administration and can maintain a lab schedule. The risk is uneven coverage: it is easy to over-practise familiar compute tasks and postpone governance, monitoring, or networking topics that feel slower. A written schedule tied to the exam objectives helps reduce that bias.

Instructor-led training is more useful when a candidate needs compressed preparation, guided labs, or help connecting separate Azure services into administrator workflows. Readynez offers Microsoft Azure Administrator training for learners who prefer a structured environment, but the underlying principle is the same for any serious preparation route: the candidate should leave with repeatable administrative habits, not only exam notes.

The older source article linked to external guidance on becoming an Azure administrator, including general Azure administrator career advice. Career guides can provide useful orientation, but AZ-104 preparation should be anchored to Microsoft’s current exam page and the candidate’s own lab work.

Exam-day strategy for AZ-104

On exam day, candidates should expect a mixture of direct knowledge questions and longer operational scenarios. The scenario questions deserve careful reading because a single constraint can change the right answer. For example, a requirement to minimise administrative effort, preserve existing IP ranges, enforce a deny condition, or recover a specific resource type may eliminate answers that look technically plausible.

Time management is part of the skill being tested. Candidates should avoid spending too long on an early networking or case-study question before seeing the full exam. A sensible approach is to answer clear questions confidently, mark uncertain ones for review where the exam interface allows it, and return with the remaining time. Long questions should be reduced to the resource, the constraint, the required outcome, and the service boundary.

Before taking the exam, candidates should review Microsoft’s current information on registration, scoring, retake rules, exam policies, and renewal. The original article mentioned a registration fee and annual renewal, but exam fees and policies vary by region and can change. Microsoft’s official exam page should be treated as the source of record.

After certification, renewal is part of staying current because Azure services and exam objectives continue to change. The renewal process is handled through Microsoft, and candidates should check the certification dashboard rather than relying on older third-party summaries. Keeping a small lab alive for periodic practice makes renewal easier because the concepts remain operational rather than theoretical.

Building Azure administrator skill beyond the exam

AZ-104 is worth pursuing when the preparation builds real administrator capability. Passing the exam is valuable, but the more durable benefit is learning how Azure services interact under operational pressure: identity affects access, policy affects deployment, networking affects reachability, monitoring affects response, and backup affects recovery.

A practical next step is to choose one weak domain, rebuild it in the lab, and document the troubleshooting process. Readynez can support candidates who want guided AZ-104 preparation, and questions about training options can be directed through the contact page. The key takeaway is simple: study the blueprint, practise in Azure, use more than one management tool, and treat every mock-exam mistake as a lab exercise waiting to be repeated.