Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305) — Questions and Answers

Question 1: Your analytics pipeline requires transactional consistency for writes but also needs to run OLAP queries over the same data without impacting OLTP performance. Which Azure Cosmos DB feature enables this?

Cosmos DB change feed
Cosmos DB Analytical Store (HTAP with Azure Synapse Link) (Correct answer)
Cosmos DB automatic indexing
Cosmos DB multi-region writes

Correct answer: Cosmos DB Analytical Store (HTAP with Azure Synapse Link)

Azure Synapse Link with the Cosmos DB Analytical Store provides a fully isolated columnar store updated in near real-time from the transactional store for HTAP scenarios.

Question 2: You need to ensure that diagnostic settings are automatically configured on all newly created Azure resources to forward logs to a Log Analytics workspace. Which approach should you implement?

Azure Monitor alert with auto-remediation
Azure Policy with deployIfNotExists effect (Correct answer)
Azure Logic Apps triggered by Activity Log
Azure Automation runbook on a schedule

Correct answer: Azure Policy with deployIfNotExists effect

Azure Policy with the deployIfNotExists effect automatically deploys diagnostic settings to compliant resources, including newly created ones, without manual intervention.

Question 3: You are migrating a monolithic application to Azure VMs. To achieve high availability within a single region against datacenter failure, how should you deploy the VMs?

Deploy VMs across Availability Zones in the same region (Correct answer)
Deploy VMs in a Virtual Machine Scale Set with single zone
Deploy VMs in separate regions with Traffic Manager
Deploy all VMs in the same Availability Set

Correct answer: Deploy VMs across Availability Zones in the same region

Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within a region; deploying across zones protects against full datacenter outages with a 99.99% SLA.

Question 4: A hybrid organization needs users to sign in to on-premises and cloud applications with the same password without syncing password hashes to Azure AD. Which sync method should you choose?

Azure AD Connect cloud sync
Password Hash Synchronization (PHS)
Pass-through Authentication (PTA) (Correct answer)
Federation with AD FS

Correct answer: Pass-through Authentication (PTA)

Pass-through Authentication validates passwords directly against on-premises AD in real time without storing any credential data in Azure AD.

Question 5: You are designing storage for an IoT application that ingests millions of small messages per second and needs a hot path for immediate analytics. Which combination is recommended?

Azure Blob Storage + Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Service Bus + Azure Databricks + Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Queue Storage + Azure Functions + Azure SQL Database
Azure Event Hubs + Azure Stream Analytics + Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Azure Event Hubs + Azure Stream Analytics + Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Event Hubs captures the high-throughput stream, Stream Analytics processes data in real time, and ADLS Gen2 stores the cold path for batch analytics.

Question 6: You need a database solution for storing session state for millions of concurrent users with sub-millisecond read latency and automatic expiry of old sessions. Which service is best?

Azure Cosmos DB with TTL enabled
Azure Table Storage
Azure Cache for Redis with key expiration (Correct answer)
Azure SQL Database

Correct answer: Azure Cache for Redis with key expiration

Azure Cache for Redis supports sub-millisecond latency, automatic key expiration (TTL), and millions of concurrent operations, making it ideal for session state storage.

Question 7: A company needs to allow users from a partner organization to access Azure resources without creating new accounts. Which Azure AD feature should you recommend?

Azure AD B2C
Azure AD Connect
Azure AD B2B collaboration (Correct answer)
Azure AD Domain Services

Correct answer: Azure AD B2B collaboration

Azure AD B2B collaboration lets you invite external users from partner organizations to access your Azure resources using their existing identities.

Question 8: Which Azure Backup feature ensures that backups cannot be deleted for a specified retention period, protecting against ransomware or malicious administrators?

Resource lock on the Recovery Services vault
Soft delete for Azure Backup
Azure Backup geo-redundancy
Immutable vault with locked policy (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Immutable vault with locked policy

Immutable vault with a locked policy prevents any modification or deletion of backup data and policies for the configured retention window, even by subscription administrators.

Question 9: An Azure SQL Managed Instance needs to meet an RPO of 1 hour and an RTO of 4 hours for cross-region disaster recovery. Which feature should you configure?

Automated backups with geo-restore only
Auto-failover groups with a secondary in a paired region (Correct answer)
Point-in-time restore within 35 days
Geo-redundant backups only

Correct answer: Auto-failover groups with a secondary in a paired region

Auto-failover groups for SQL Managed Instance continuously replicate data to a secondary region and support automated or manual failover to meet RTO/RPO requirements.

Question 10: Your team needs to ensure that new VMs deployed in production always use a hardened OS image with the latest security patches applied. Which approach enforces this?

Use Azure Automation DSC
Enable Microsoft Defender for Cloud recommendations
Use Azure Shared Image Gallery with versioned, patched custom images and Azure Policy (Correct answer)
Manually patch VMs after deployment using Update Management

Correct answer: Use Azure Shared Image Gallery with versioned, patched custom images and Azure Policy

Shared Image Gallery stores versioned custom images and Azure Policy can enforce that VM deployments only use approved gallery images.

Question 11: Your organization's RPO for a critical application is zero — no data can be lost. Which Azure SQL Database deployment option meets this requirement?

Hyperscale tier with geo-replication
General Purpose tier with GRS backup
Active geo-replication with async replication to secondary
Azure SQL Database Business Critical tier with zone-redundant configuration (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Azure SQL Database Business Critical tier with zone-redundant configuration

SQL Database Business Critical uses synchronous replication across Availability Zones so all committed transactions are written to multiple nodes before acknowledgment, ensuring RPO=0.

Question 12: To create a monthly report of all new Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resource deployments in your Azure subscription, you must suggest a solution. What should you include in the recommendation?

Azure Analysis Services
Azure Activity Log (Correct answer)
Azure Advisor
Azure Monitor action groups

Correct answer: Azure Activity Log

The Azure Activity Log records all subscription-level events, including the creation, update, and deletion of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resources. To generate a monthly report of all new ARM resource deployments, the Activity Log is the definitive source as it captures these management plane operations. You can query and export data from the Activity Log to compile the required report, making it the ideal solution for auditing resource deployment activities.

Question 13: Your organization needs automated, policy-driven backup for all Azure VMs across 20 subscriptions from a single interface. Which Azure service provides this centralized management?

Individual Recovery Services vaults per subscription
Azure Site Recovery centralized console
Azure Backup Center with a Backup policy at management group scope (Correct answer)
Azure Policy with DeployIfNotExists for backup

Correct answer: Azure Backup Center with a Backup policy at management group scope

Azure Backup Center provides a unified view and governance console to monitor, manage, and enforce backup policies across multiple vaults and subscriptions.

Question 14: A global application needs to route users to the nearest healthy Azure region and perform SSL offloading. Which Azure service is best suited?

Azure Load Balancer
Azure Front Door (Correct answer)
Azure Traffic Manager
Azure Application Gateway

Correct answer: Azure Front Door

Azure Front Door is a global anycast CDN and load balancer that provides SSL offloading, WAF, and latency-based routing to the nearest healthy origin.

Question 15: Your application requires a globally distributed NoSQL database with multi-region writes, single-digit millisecond reads, and five consistency levels to choose from. Which Azure service fits?

Azure Cosmos DB (Correct answer)
Azure Cache for Redis
Azure SQL Database with geo-replication
Azure Table Storage

Correct answer: Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model database with multi-region write capability and tunable consistency levels.

Question 16: You have an Azure SQL database called SQL l and a multi-tier app called Appl. Users read data from SQL 1 using the Appl client once the backend service of the application has written data to them. During periods of high utilization the users experience delays retrieving the data You need to minimize how long it takes for data requests What should you include in the solution?

Azure Content Delivery Network (CON)
Azure Data Factory
Azure Cache for Redis (Correct answer)
Azure Synapse Analytics

Correct answer: Azure Cache for Redis

Azure Cache for Redis is an in-memory data store that significantly improves application performance by caching frequently accessed data. When users experience delays retrieving data from an Azure SQL database during high utilization, implementing a cache like Redis can store copies of this data closer to the application. This reduces the number of direct requests to the database, minimizes latency, and speeds up data retrieval for users, thereby alleviating performance bottlenecks.

Question 17: Your data warehouse needs to query petabytes of data with massively parallel processing (MPP). Which Azure service is designed for this workload?

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure Cosmos DB analytical store
Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pool (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pool

Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pool uses MPP architecture to distribute query processing across compute nodes for petabyte-scale analytical queries.

Question 18: You need to design a backup strategy for Azure Blob Storage where accidental deletions can be recovered within 30 days. Which feature provides this at no additional storage cost for the retention period?

Azure Backup for Blob Storage
Blob Storage versioning
Azure Blob soft delete (Correct answer)
Object replication to a secondary account

Correct answer: Azure Blob soft delete

Blob soft delete retains deleted blobs for a configurable retention period and is built into Azure Blob Storage without requiring a separate backup vault.

Question 19: Which Azure AD feature allows you to require users to re-authenticate or meet additional controls when accessing highly sensitive applications even if they already have an active session?

Azure AD Token Lifetime policies
Conditional Access authentication context (Correct answer)
Azure AD SSPR
Azure AD Seamless SSO

Correct answer: Conditional Access authentication context

Authentication context in Conditional Access lets apps trigger step-up authentication requirements for sensitive operations mid-session.

Question 20: You need to run a large-scale parallel simulation workload that requires thousands of VMs to run for a few hours. Which Azure service is designed for this HPC scenario?

Azure Batch (Correct answer)
Azure App Service Premium
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Azure Kubernetes Service with node auto-provisioner

Correct answer: Azure Batch

Azure Batch manages pools of VMs specifically for large-scale parallel and HPC workloads, handling job scheduling, VM provisioning, and automatic scaling.

Question 21: You need to create interactive, shareable visual reports that combine Azure Monitor metrics, logs, and Azure Resource Graph data in a single view. Which feature should you use?

Power BI Embedded reports
Azure Monitor dashboards
Azure Monitor workbooks (Correct answer)
Azure Metrics Explorer

Correct answer: Azure Monitor workbooks

Azure Monitor workbooks provide a flexible, interactive canvas that can combine data from multiple sources—metrics, logs, Azure Resource Graph—into parameterized reports for sharing.

Question 22: Your organization needs a cloud-native SIEM solution with built-in SOAR capabilities to detect threats, investigate incidents, and automate responses across Azure and hybrid environments. Which Microsoft service should you deploy?

Microsoft Sentinel (Correct answer)
Azure Security Center (legacy)
Azure Monitor with workbooks
Microsoft Defender for Cloud (Defender plans)

Correct answer: Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel is Microsoft's cloud-native SIEM and SOAR platform, providing AI-driven threat detection, investigation with hunting queries, and automated playbook-based response across hybrid environments.

Question 23: You need to design connectivity between 10 Azure virtual networks so that any VNet can communicate with any other VNet with minimal management overhead. Which design is recommended?

Deploy VPN gateways in each VNet
Use Azure ExpressRoute for all VNet connections
Use a hub-and-spoke topology with Azure Virtual WAN (Correct answer)
Peer every VNet to every other VNet in a full mesh

Correct answer: Use a hub-and-spoke topology with Azure Virtual WAN

Azure Virtual WAN provides a hub-and-spoke managed network that supports any-to-any connectivity without requiring full-mesh VNet peering.

Question 24: You need to design an auto-scaling solution for Azure VMs that scales out based on custom application metrics from Azure Monitor. Which service enables this?

Azure App Service autoscale
Azure Automation runbooks on a schedule
Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Azure Monitor autoscale rules (Correct answer)
Azure Load Balancer health probes

Correct answer: Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Azure Monitor autoscale rules

VMSS autoscale rules integrate with Azure Monitor custom metrics to trigger scale-out or scale-in events based on any metric you instrument.

Question 25: A storage account will be accessed by thousands of clients concurrently. You need to minimize latency for reads of the same data across multiple Azure regions. Which feature should you enable?

Object replication between storage accounts
Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS)
Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS)
Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS)

RA-GRS replicates data to a secondary region and provides a read-only endpoint in that region, enabling lower-latency reads closer to geographically dispersed clients.

Question 26: You need to grant a third-party application temporary read access to specific blobs in a private storage container without exposing the account key. Which mechanism should you use?

Shared Access Signature (SAS) token with limited permissions and expiry (Correct answer)
Azure Storage account key
Storage account public access level
Azure AD managed identity

Correct answer: Shared Access Signature (SAS) token with limited permissions and expiry

A SAS token can be scoped to specific containers or blobs, limited to read permissions, and set to expire at a specific time, providing secure temporary access.

Question 27: Which Azure Cosmos DB feature provides continuous backup and allows you to restore your database to any point in the past 30 days?

Manual backup export to Storage Account
Continuous backup mode with point-in-time restore (PITR) (Correct answer)
Multi-region writes with regional failover
Geo-redundant backup with 4-hour snapshot intervals

Correct answer: Continuous backup mode with point-in-time restore (PITR)

Cosmos DB Continuous backup mode captures changes continuously allowing point-in-time restore to any second within the past 30 days.

Question 28: You need an alert that fires when CPU utilization on a VM exceeds 80% for five consecutive minutes. Which Azure Monitor alert type should you use?

Smart detection alert
Activity log alert
Metric alert (Correct answer)
Log search alert

Correct answer: Metric alert

Metric alerts evaluate numeric resource metrics at regular intervals and trigger when a threshold is crossed, making them ideal for CPU utilization monitoring.

Question 29: You are creating a sales application that will manage many transactional components and include several Azure cloud services. The processing of customer orders, billing, payments, inventory, and shipping will be handled by various cloud services. You must suggest a solution that will allow the cloud services to asynchronously exchange transactional data using XML messages. What should the recommendation contain?

Azure Service Bus (Correct answer)
Azure Data Lake
Azure Traffic Manager
Azure Service Fabric

Correct answer: Azure Service Bus

Azure Service Bus is a robust enterprise message broker designed for asynchronous communication between decoupled applications and services. It provides reliable message queuing and publish/subscribe capabilities, making it ideal for exchanging transactional data like XML messages between various cloud services. This ensures that customer orders, billing, and other components can communicate efficiently and reliably without direct dependencies, even during peak loads.

Question 30: You need to deploy an application to Azure that requires low-latency GPU processing for AI inference workloads. Which VM series should you select?

NCv3 or NDv2-series (GPU compute) (Correct answer)
Lsv3-series (storage optimized)
Mv2-series (memory optimized)
Dv5-series (general purpose)

Correct answer: NCv3 or NDv2-series (GPU compute)

NC and ND-series VMs are equipped with NVIDIA GPUs (V100, A100) specifically designed for AI/ML training and inference workloads.

Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305)

The AZ-305 exam validates expertise in designing cloud and hybrid Azure solutions, covering identity and governance, data storage, business continuity, and infrastructure design. It is required for the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification.

Questions

100 min

Time Limit

70%

To Pass

Checking for saved progress...

Exam Rules

You can skip questions and return to them later
Flag questions for review before submitting
No feedback shown until you submit the entire exam
Unanswered questions count as wrong — answer everything
10 pretest questions are mixed in and don't affect your score
Timer auto-submits when time runs out
Your progress is auto-saved every 30 seconds