Passed AZ-305 yesterday with an 847. I'm a solutions architect with about 4 years of Azure experience, but I still put in a serious 8 weeks of prep. Don't let the Azure background fool you into thinking you can coast — the exam tests design decisions in ways that go beyond just knowing what services exist.
My breakdown: weeks 1-2 were compute and networking architecture, weeks 3-4 were storage, databases, and identity, weeks 5-6 were monitoring, business continuity, and migration, weeks 7-8 were full practice exams and targeted review. I did 4 full 60-question practice exams in the final two weeks and averaged 78% going in. The real exam felt slightly harder than the practice material, which is pretty typical for Microsoft certs.
The case study sections at the beginning caught a few people in my study group off guard — they're not individual questions, they're scenario blocks where you answer 6-8 questions about a single architecture. You can't go back once you move on from the section. Read the requirements carefully and identify the constraints before even looking at the questions.
Landing zones, Azure Policy, and cost optimization came up more than I expected. The networking sections — hub-and-spoke, Azure Virtual WAN, ExpressRoute vs. VPN tradeoffs — were heavy. Make sure you can articulate when you'd choose one over the other and why, not just what they are.
The ExpressRoute vs VPN distinction showed up 3-4 times in my exam across different scenario contexts. It's not enough to memorize the difference — you need to understand the cost, latency, and redundancy tradeoffs for each specific scenario type.
847 is a great score. I passed last month with a 782 and the case studies are exactly what I'd warn people about too. The time management on those sections is completely different from the regular question format.
How did you find the practice exam difficulty compared to the real thing? I've been using one platform and finding it significantly easier than what others describe on the actual exam. Worried I'm not getting accurate signal on my readiness.
The landing zone questions were a gap for me even though I work with them daily. The exam asks about them in a very framework-specific way. Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework docs are worth reading through if you haven't already.
Congrats on the score! I'm a working dad with two kids and a full-time dev job, so I know how hard it is to carve out study time. I didn't have long stretches available, just 45-60 minutes most weekday mornings before anyone else was up, and then a longer session on Sunday afternoons when things were quiet. It wasn't glamorous but it added up. The hardest part wasn't the material, it was staying consistent when work got crazy and I hadn't touched a practice question in three days.
Honestly the biggest thing that helped me was treating the exam like a design review, not a knowledge test. I'd read a scenario and force myself to think about why one option was better, not just which one to pick. That shift in mindset took a few weeks to click. If you're studying part-time, don't stress about covering everything every week. Some weeks you'll barely touch it and that's fine. Just don't quit entirely and you'll get there.