AZ-104 is about to get a minor update, just a minor clarification in one of the objectives. That’s good news for those of you already well into your exam preparation and concerned about upcoming changes introducing new topics.

The expectation of what an Azure Administrator should be familiar with constantly evolves, and while many admins maybe have been able to take their on-premises knowledge of virtual machines, operating systems, networking and storage across to Azure with little effort, there is now an expectation that some of those IaaS workloads are slowly but surely being moved across to PaaS offerings. Notice I’m not saying all workloads are expected to move, but some of them certainly are. If you have come from more of an IaaS background, this means you will need to focus on these areas.

This doesn’t mean that those focused on PaaS workloads don’t have to put in effort as well. Understanding networking technologies and and traditional compute models is still a major, though shrinking part of the exam, and one of the common issues I’ve seen with people who fail this exam is that it’s a lack of core networking skills that let them down. There have been some consolidations in the networking sections of the exam, but the reality is that nothing has been removed, with the assumption that an admin has a basic level of knowledge of networking concepts.

Regardless of where your skills are strongest, the important thing is to focus on your weakness with your exam preparation, rather than getting too carried away learning about the things you already work with. An example of this is that if you work mostly with SaaS via Microsoft 365, you may already have a strong enough set of skills to get through the identity questions without a challenge. Instead go through the resources listed below to make sure you aren’t missing anything before sitting for the exam.

Manage Azure identities and governance (15-20%)

Manage Azure AD objects

Manage access control

Manage Azure subscriptions and governance

Implement and manage storage (15-20%)

Secure storage

Manage data in Azure storage accounts

Configure Azure files and Azure blob storage

Deploy and manage Azure compute resources (20-25%)

Automate deployment and configuration of VMs by using Azure Resource Manager

Create and configure VMs

Create and configure containers

Create and configure Azure App Service

Configure and manage virtual networking (20-25%)

Configure virtual networks

Configure secure access to virtual networks

Configure load balancing

Monitor virtual networking

Monitor and maintain Azure resources (10-15%)

Monitor resources by using Azure Monitor