The AZ-204 exam, officially titled "Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam," validates your ability to design, build, and maintain cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure. This certification is intended for developers who want to demonstrate expertise as an Azure Developer Associate. This landing page provides a clear roadmap of exam topics, question formats, and actionable preparation strategies to help you succeed. Whether you're building your first Azure application or advancing your cloud development career, understanding the exam structure and content domains is essential for confident, focused studying.
Use this topic map to guide your study for Microsoft AZ-204 (Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam) within the Azure Developer Associate path.
The AZ-204 exam uses a variety of question types to assess both conceptual knowledge and practical problem-solving ability in real-world Azure development scenarios.
Questions progress in difficulty and emphasize practical application, so hands-on experience with Azure services strengthens both speed and accuracy on exam day.
An effective study plan breaks the five core domains into manageable weekly goals, combines theory with hands-on labs, and includes regular practice testing to identify weak areas before the exam. Dedicate time to each topic proportionally, prioritize areas where you have less experience, and simulate the exam environment to build confidence and pacing.
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All five domains are represented, but "Develop Azure compute solutions" and "Develop for Azure storage" typically account for a larger portion of the exam. This reflects the reality that most Azure development work involves building and managing compute resources and data storage. However, security and monitoring are equally critical in production environments, so balanced preparation across all domains is essential.
In practice, these domains overlap continuously. For example, you might develop an Azure Function (compute) that reads from Blob Storage (storage), authenticates using a managed identity (security), logs telemetry to Application Insights (monitoring), and calls an external API (connecting services). Understanding these connections helps you see the exam not as isolated topics but as an integrated development process.
Hands-on experience is invaluable because it builds muscle memory and reveals nuances that reading alone cannot teach. Prioritize labs on Azure Functions, containerized applications (AKS or ACI), Cosmos DB or Table Storage operations, and configuring managed identities and RBAC. These labs directly reinforce exam scenarios and boost both confidence and accuracy.
Frequent errors include misunderstanding the differences between similar services (e.g., App Service vs. Azure Functions vs. Containers), overlooking security best practices like using Key Vault for secrets, and failing to consider scalability and monitoring in solution design. Many candidates also rush through scenario questions without fully analyzing requirements, leading to suboptimal choices. Slow down, read carefully, and apply security and monitoring principles to every scenario.
In your final week, focus on weak areas identified in practice tests rather than re-reading all material. Take a full-length practice test early in the week, review mistakes in detail, then do targeted drills on those specific topics. In the last 2-3 days, review your notes on tricky concepts and do a quick scan of security and monitoring best practices. Avoid cramming new material; instead, consolidate and reinforce what you already know.
You manage an Azure Cosmos DB for a NoSQL API account named account1. The account contains a database named db1, which contains a container named container1. You configure account! with a session consistency level.
You plan to develop an application named Appl that will access container1. Individual instances of Appl must perform reads and writes. Appl must allow multiple nodes to participate in the same session.
You need to configure an object to share the session token between the nodes.
Which object should you use?
You are developing a web application that uses Azure Cache for Redis. You anticipate that the cache will frequently fill and that you will need to evict keys.
You must configure Azure Cache for Redis based on the following predicted usage pattern: A small subset of elements will be accessed much more often than the rest.
You need to configure the Azure Cache for Redis to optimize performance for the predicted usage pattern.
Which two eviction policies will achieve the goal?
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.
B: The allkeys-lru policy evict keys by trying to remove the less recently used (LRU) keys first, in order to make space for the new data added. Use the allkeys-lru policy when you expect a power-law distribution in the popularity of your requests, that is, you expect that a subset of elements will be accessed far more often than the rest.
C: volatile-lru: evict keys by trying to remove the less recently used (LRU) keys first, but only among keys that have an expire set, in order to make space for the new data added.
Note: The allkeys-lru policy is more memory efficient since there is no need to set an expire for the key to be evicted under memory pressure.
https://redis.io/topics/lru-cache
Note: This question is part of a series of questions that present the same scenario. Each question in the series contains a unique solution that might meet the stated goals. Some question sets might have more than one correct solution, while others might not have a correct solution.
After you answer a question in this section, you will NOT be able to return to it. As a result, these questions will not appear on the review screen.
You are implementing an application by using Azure Event Grid to push near-real-time in-formation to customers.
You have the following requirements:
* You must send events to thousands of customers that include hundreds of various event types.
* The events must be filtered by event type before processing.
* Authentication and authorization must be handled by using Microsoft Entra ID.
* The events must be published to a single endpoint.
You need to implement Azure Event Grid.
Solution; Publish events to an event domain. Create a custom topic for each customer.
Does the solution meet the goal?
Note: This question is part of a series of questions that present the same scenario. Each question in the series contains a unique solution that might meet the stated goals. Some question sets might have more than one correct solution, while others might not have a correct solution.
After you answer a question in this section, you will NOT be able to return to it. As a result, these questions will not appear in the review screen.
You are developing an Azure Service application that processes queue data when it receives a message from a mobile application. Messages may not be sent to the service consistently.
You have the following requirements:
Queue size must not grow larger than 80 gigabytes (GB).
Use first-in-first-out (FIFO) ordering of messages.
Minimize Azure costs.
You need to implement the messaging solution.
Solution: Use the .Net API to add a message to an Azure Storage Queue from the mobile application. Create an Azure Function App that uses an Azure Storage Queue trigger.
Does the solution meet the goal?
Create an Azure Function App that uses an Azure Service Bus Queue trigger.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-create-storage-queue-triggered-function
You are updating an application that stores data on Azure and uses Azure Cosmos DB for storage. The application stores data in multiple documents associated with a single username.
The application requires the ability to update multiple documents for a username in a single ACID operation.
You need to configure Azure Cosmos DB.
Which two actions should you perform? Each correct answer presents part of the solution.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.
