Azure Fundamentals AZ-900: What's On the Exam

AZ-900 is Microsoft's entry-level Azure exam. It does not ask you to build anything. It asks you to recognize things: which service does a given job, who is responsible for what, which redundancy option survives which failure, and which governance tool answers which problem. That makes it mostly a recall exam, and the first step in preparing for a recall exam is knowing exactly what is in scope.

This guide goes through the format, the three skill areas and what sits in each, and how the score works. It is based on the skills measured as of July 20, 2026. Microsoft revises these lists, so check the current study guide on Microsoft Learn before you book.

The format at a glance

• Exam time: 45 minutes.
• Passing score: 700 on a scale of 1 to 1,000.
• Prerequisites: none are listed. AZ-900 is the beginner starting point for the Azure path.
• Renewal: Fundamentals certifications do not expire, so Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals does not need to be renewed.

Question types are not announced in advance. Microsoft's exam sandbox shows the kinds that can appear, such as multiple choice, drag and drop, hot area and case studies, and Fundamentals exams do not give you access to Microsoft Learn during the test. For fees and scheduling, use the exam page rather than a blog post, because those details vary by country and change.

How the 700 works

A passing score of 700 is a scaled score. It does not mean you must answer 70 percent of the questions correctly, and the raw number you need can shift with the difficulty of your particular question set. Three details from Microsoft's scoring documentation are worth knowing:

• There is no penalty for guessing, so answer every question.
• Some questions are unscored and used to collect data. You cannot tell which ones, so treat all of them as scored.
• Multi-part questions can award a point for each correct component, so partial credit is possible.

Your score report shows an overall score, pass or fail, and a bar chart for each skill area. It does not give per-question feedback. If you want to turn your own practice results into a target, the exam pass score calculator works from a percentage you choose, which is the right use: a margin of safety on practice sets, not Microsoft's conversion.

The three skill areas

Those are ranges, not exact percentages, so no domain can be safely skipped. The architecture and services area is the largest, but the governance area is close behind it. In the free Azure Fundamentals course, the same three areas run across 12 content units, plus a thirteenth unit on exam day and look-alike services.

Describe cloud concepts (25-30%)

This area is the vocabulary of the cloud, and it is the gentlest part of the exam. It covers:

• What cloud computing is, the public, private and hybrid models, and the consumption-based model (pay for what you use, a move from capital to operational spending).
• The shared responsibility model: the provider always handles the physical datacenter, while data, identities and configuration always stay with the customer. How much of the middle you handle depends on whether the service is IaaS, PaaS or SaaS.
• IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, with use cases for each.
• The four benefit areas: high availability and scalability, reliability and predictability, security and governance, and manageability.

In the course this is units 1 to 3, 11 chapters in total. The shared responsibility table is worth drilling hard, because it produces many short, answerable questions.

Describe Azure architecture and services (35-40%)

This is the biggest area and the one with the most services to tell apart. It covers:

• Core architecture: regions, region pairs, sovereign clouds, availability zones, resources and resource groups, subscriptions and management groups.
• Compute and networking: virtual machines, containers, Azure Functions, app hosting, virtual networks, peering, DNS, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute and endpoints.
• Storage: storage account types, access tiers, the redundancy options, and the tools for moving data and migrating.
• Identity, access and security: Microsoft Entra ID, authentication methods, external identities, Conditional Access, role-based access control, Zero Trust, defense in depth and Defender for Cloud.

In the course that is units 4 to 8, 25 chapters. Azure redundancy options: LRS, ZRS, GRS and GZRS explained works through the storage part, and it ties directly to the region and availability zone material.

Describe Azure management and governance (30-35%)

This area covers how you keep Azure under control and what it costs:

• Cost management: the factors that affect cost, the pricing calculator, Cost Management and its budgets, and the purpose of tags.
• Governance and compliance: the purpose of Microsoft Purview, Azure Policy and resource locks.
• Managing and deploying resources: the Azure portal, Cloud Shell, the CLI and PowerShell, Azure Arc, infrastructure as code, and Azure Resource Manager with its templates.
• Monitoring: Azure Advisor, Azure Service Health and Azure Monitor.

In the course that is units 9 to 12, 15 chapters. The governance trio is a classic source of wrong answers; Azure RBAC vs Policy vs resource locks separates them.

What is not on the exam

Two things are worth stating plainly so you do not study the wrong material. First, the July 2026 skills measured do not include an AI domain, so you do not need to prepare for one. Second, the Total Cost of Ownership calculator that older AZ-900 prep material mentions has been retired according to Microsoft Learn, and the study guide only lists exploring the pricing calculator. If a study source tells you to compare on-premises and Azure cost with the TCO calculator, it is out of date.

This is a good moment for a general warning: old prep material for cloud exams ages quickly. Service names change (Azure Active Directory is now Microsoft Entra ID, for example), so prefer sources dated to the current skills measured.

What this means for your preparation

Because AZ-900 is a recall exam about services and rules, the efficient plan is spaced retrieval rather than rereading. Quiz yourself on service purposes, comparison pairs and the numbers, and let the schedule bring the weak items back. The testing effect explains why that works better than review, and How to study for AZ-900 turns the three skill areas into a weekly plan.

If you want to check your recall before booking, AZ-900 practice questions samples all three areas, weighted roughly like the exam.

If you are deciding between clouds, AWS vs Azure: which cloud cert first compares AZ-900 with the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam, and what is on the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam covers the other side.

One honest limit

Encodr's Azure course is unofficial and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft. It has 13 units, 53 chapters and 1,172 study cards, and the facts come from public Microsoft documentation as of November 2026. Flashcards are recall practice: they build the vocabulary and the comparisons, but they are not a substitute for time in the Azure portal. Open the portal and click through a resource group, a storage account and a policy assignment, and the cards will make more sense. When you are ready, open the Azure Fundamentals flashcards and start with Unit 1.