AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Exam Resource Guide (July 2023 Update)

AZ-104 is about to get a major update, with section score weighting changes, new topics being added, and some topics being removed. Let’s start by taking a look at some of the items that have been removed, along with some potential reasons for their removal.

On the Azure AD front, Administrative Units and device settings and device identity have been removed. Both of these are usually better suited to a Microsoft 365 exam, and device settings in particular is one that I always thought of as a bit of a weird inclusion due to it being much more desktop management oriented, rather than something that an Azure administrator really needed to know much about.

Some of the non-AAD removals include custom Azure roles, virtual machine extensions, Azure Compute Gallery, AKS, and the Import/Export service. As to why these were removed, I would still expect to see them referenced in some places in the exam, even if they aren’t a focus area any longer.

The major addition was Bicep being added alongside ARM templates. This was something that was inevitable, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise. The storage section got a restructure, with three items jumping out as new additions – storage account encryption, snapshots and soft delete for Azure Files and blob versioning.

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.