AZ-104 is about to get its first update in a year and a half, and it’s a minor one, which is good news for those of you who are currently in preparation for this exam. A single addition to the storage section, Configure soft delete for blobs and containers, otherwise it’s business as usual.

What does it mean that the exam has changed so little in a year and a half? The first thing is that the exam had a major overhaul in 2023. While the exam objectives hadn’t changed since then. it’s important to understand that the exam questions continued to evolve, within the scope of the existing objectives, to take into account new and evolving changes in Azure.

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 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 lets 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 (20-25%)

Manage Microsoft Entra users and groups

Manage access to Azure Resources

Manage Azure subscriptions and governance

Implement and manage storage (15-20%)

Configure access to storage

Configure and manage 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 (ARM) templates or Bicep files

Create and configure virtual machines

Provision and manage containers in the Azure portal

Create and configure Azure App Service

Configure and manage virtual networking (15-20%)

Configure and manage virtual networks in Azure

Configure secure access to virtual networks

Configure name resolution and load balancing

Monitor and maintain Azure resources (10-15%)

Monitor resources in Azure

Implement backup and recovery