Microsoft Azure Administrator Study Guide

This is the written companion to the AZ-104 practice exams: a complete walk through everything the exam covers, gathered in one place so you can read the whole picture and then drill into whatever you want to firm up. Wherever a practice question leaves you unsure, the explanation lives here in full.

AZ-104 is an associate administrator exam. It measures hands-on operational judgment for running Azure day to day, not designing architecture from a blank page. The questions span identity and governance (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure RBAC, Azure Policy, management groups), storage (accounts, redundancy from LRS to ZRS to GRS, blobs and files), compute (virtual machines, scale sets, containers across AKS, ACI and Container Apps, App Service, ARM and Bicep), virtual networking (VNets, NSGs, peering, load balancing, DNS), and monitoring and maintenance (Azure Monitor, backup, recovery). What it rewards is knowing the exact behavior of each service and the right tool for the task in front of you. Most questions come down to a precise choice between look-alikes: LRS versus ZRS versus GRS when you weigh datacenter, zone, and region failure against cost, or an availability set versus availability zones when an outage must not take the workload down.

The guide follows the official domains at the real exam weighting, so your time tracks where the points are. Each chapter builds the mental model in plain language, then pulls apart the options that look interchangeable using comparison tables and decision trees, and closes with a cheat sheet you can review the night before. Start at the top for the full path, or pick a domain from the list beside this page and go straight to it.