AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure
Design, build, test, and maintain cloud-native applications and services on Microsoft Azure, covering compute solutions, Azure Cosmos DB, Blob storage, security, caching, message-based architectures, and API management.
Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts
Question Difficulty Breakdown
Recommended Study Guides & Exam Preparation Blueprints
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Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The AZ-204 exam contains 40-60 scenario, case study, drag-and-drop, and code-based questions within a 120-minute limit. The registration fee is $165 USD with a passing standard of 700/1000 (70%).
The syllabus evaluates: (1) Develop Azure compute solutions (~25-30%), (2) Develop for Azure storage (~15-20%), (3) Implement Azure security (~20-25%), (4) Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions (~15-20%), and (5) Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services (~15-20%).
Azure App Service is a PaaS platform for hosting full web applications and REST APIs with continuous execution. Azure Functions is an event-driven serverless FaaS platform that executes lightweight code triggers on-demand and scales to zero.
Azure Cosmos DB automatically indexes every property for all items in a container upon ingestion by default without requiring explicit schema or secondary index definitions.
Azure App Configuration centralizes application settings and feature flags, allowing developers to dynamically toggle feature releases in real time without redeploying code.
Managed Identities provide an automatically managed identity in Entra ID for cloud applications, allowing code to obtain OAuth 2.0 tokens to connect to Key Vault, SQL, and Storage without storing credentials in code or configuration files.
Service Bus is a high-value enterprise messaging broker with transactional queues, duplicate detection, and sessions. Event Grid is a reactive event router (pub/sub). Event Hubs is a big data event streaming platform optimized for millions of events per second.
Deployment slots allow staging new code on separate URLs. Once tested, a slot swap warm-up swaps production and staging virtual IP addresses seamlessly without dropping incoming HTTP traffic.
APIM acts as an enterprise API gateway that decouples client applications from backend services, providing rate limiting (throttling), token validation, request/response transformation, and developer portal documentation.
Azure Cache for Redis provides an in-memory data store that caches frequently queried data from relational databases, drastically reducing backend latency and database query loads.
The AZ-204 credential is valid for one year and must be renewed annually through a free assessment on Microsoft Learn prior to expiration.
AZ-204 certifies Cloud Software Engineers, Backend Developers, and Full-Stack Architects, with average US salaries ranging between $125,000 and $165,000.