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Microsoft · AZ-900 · Fundamentals

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Cloud concepts, Azure architecture and core services, and Azure management and governance.

Free practice: 206 questions written to the official exam guide, with the diagnostic, practice papers, timed mocks, a study plan and an explanation on every answer.

Official exam page

Find out where you stand on AZ-900

20 questions drawn in the exam’s own domain weights. You get a report straight away: your score against the pass mark, where the points went, and what to study first.

Questions
20
Time
about 20 minutes
Cost
free

Your email

Your answers save as you go, and the report stays in your record. A new email needs no code.

· your answers stay on this device and you can save the report at the end.

The course

The diagnostic shows where you stand. Then you learn the syllabus chapter by chapter, answer that chapter’s questions, and move on. When every chapter is mastered, you sit full timed mocks in the real exam’s shape.

12 chapters, about 9 hours in all. Each is a 45-minute study session with quick checks, then a 10-question quiz on that chapter.

Describe cloud concepts28% of the exam

  1. What cloud computing is, and who is responsible for what45 min
  2. Why use the cloud: availability, scale, reliability, security, manageability45 min
  3. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS45 min

Describe Azure architecture and services37% of the exam

  1. Regions, zones and the resource hierarchy45 min
  2. Compute and application hosting45 min
  3. Azure networking45 min
  4. Azure storage, data movement and migration45 min
  5. Identity, access and security45 min

Describe Azure management and governance35% of the exam

  1. Costs in Azure45 min
  2. Governance and compliance45 min
  3. Managing and deploying resources45 min
  4. Monitoring tools45 min

About the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) exam

AZ-900 is Microsoft's entry certification for Azure and one of the most taken IT exams anywhere. It is for people who need to understand cloud services and how Azure delivers them, with no technical background assumed: sales, procurement, project and product managers, students, and technical people starting on Azure.

The exam has three domains: cloud concepts (what the cloud is, the service and deployment models, the benefits and the economics), Azure architecture and services (regions, resource groups, compute, storage, networking, identity), and Azure management and governance (cost management, policy, locks, tags, the portal and the tools).

It is broad, shallow and fair. It does not expire, and Microsoft provides a free learning path and a free practice assessment that together cover it.

The exam at a glance

Questions
40 to 60 questions, multiple choice, multiple response, drag and drop, and hot area
Time
45 minutes
Pass mark
700 out of 1,000
Exam fee
About US$99
Valid for
Does not expire
Where you sit it
Pearson VUE test centre or online proctored; free Microsoft practice assessment available
Prerequisites
None

As published in the vendor’s exam guide at the time of writing. Fees vary by country and change; the vendor’s page is the source of truth.

The fee and how to sit it in your country: Sri Lanka · India · Pakistan · Bangladesh · Nepal · Australia · New Zealand · Philippines · Indonesia · Vietnam

What is on the exam, domain by domain

  1. Describe cloud concepts

    IaaS, PaaS and SaaS; public, private and hybrid; high availability, scalability, elasticity, reliability; the shared responsibility model; capital versus operating expenditure and the consumption model.

    28% of the paper

  2. Describe Azure architecture and services

    The largest domain. Regions, availability zones and region pairs; subscriptions, management groups and resource groups; virtual machines, App Service, containers, Functions; storage accounts and tiers; virtual networks, DNS, VPN and ExpressRoute; Microsoft Entra ID, RBAC, Zero Trust and Defender for Cloud.

    37% of the paper

  3. Describe Azure management and governance

    What drives cost, the pricing calculator, Microsoft Cost Management and tags; Microsoft Purview, Azure Policy and resource locks; the portal, Cloud Shell, the CLI and PowerShell, Azure Arc, Resource Manager and ARM templates; Azure Advisor, Service Health, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, alerts and Application Insights.

    35% of the paper

How to prepare

  1. Complete the free Microsoft Learn path for AZ-900. The exam is written against it and it takes under ten hours.
  2. Do the free official practice assessment before you study and again after. The gap between the two attempts is your study plan.
  3. Create a free Azure account and build one small thing: a resource group with a storage account and a virtual machine, then look at the cost analysis for it. The governance questions make sense once you have seen a subscription.
  4. Learn the hierarchy cold: management groups contain subscriptions, which contain resource groups, which contain resources. Policy and RBAC questions depend on it.
  5. Fifteen to twenty-five hours of study is typical. Book the exam when practice papers are consistently above 80%.

Sample questions

Three questions in the exam’s style, written by Square 1 against the published domains. They are ours, not the vendor's. The answer and the reasoning are under each one; the practice papers on this page draw from a bank written the same way, with an explanation on every question.

  1. Question 1 · Describe cloud concepts

    A company wants to run its own application code but does not want to manage operating systems, patching or the runtime. Which cloud service model fits?

    1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
    2. Platform as a service (PaaS)
    3. Software as a service (SaaS)
    4. On-premises hosting

    Answer: B. PaaS provides the runtime and the operating system as a managed platform; the customer supplies only the application and data. IaaS leaves the OS to the customer; SaaS supplies the whole application.

  2. Question 2 · Describe Azure architecture and services

    Which Azure feature lets you deploy resources across physically separate locations within the same region so that a data centre failure does not take your application down?

    1. Region pairs
    2. Availability zones
    3. Resource groups
    4. Management groups

    Answer: B. Availability zones are physically separate data centres within a region with independent power, cooling and networking. Region pairs are two regions in the same geography; resource groups and management groups are organisational containers, not physical placement.

  3. Question 3 · Describe Azure management and governance

    An administrator wants to prevent anyone from accidentally deleting a production virtual machine, without changing who can otherwise manage it. What should they apply?

    1. A tag named 'production'
    2. A resource lock of type Delete
    3. A budget alert
    4. An availability set

    Answer: B. A Delete lock blocks deletion of the resource regardless of the user's permissions until the lock is removed. Tags are metadata, budgets alert on spend, and availability sets are about resilience.

Questions people ask before they book

How hard is AZ-900?
It is one of the easier certification exams, but broad: it asks about many services at a shallow depth. Most people pass on a first attempt after ten to twenty-five hours of study.
Does it need coding or hands-on skills?
No. Some hands-on exposure helps the concepts stick, but the exam does not test it.
Does AZ-900 expire?
No, Fundamentals certifications do not need renewing.
What comes after AZ-900?
AZ-104 (Administrator) for operations, AZ-204 (Developer) for building, or AI-901 and DP-900 if you want the other fundamentals first.
Can I take it at home?
Yes, through online proctoring with Pearson VUE, or at a test centre.