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Azure Services Overview: AZ-104 & AZ-305 Guide

Everything in Azure runs on its services. Compute, networking, storage, identity — these aren’t just exam topics. They’re the building blocks you’ll work with every day in production. This hub breaks down each major Azure capability with enough depth to help you design real environments and pass your certifications.

Who this is for:

  • AZ-104 (Azure Administrator) candidates
  • AZ-305 (Azure Solutions Architect) candidates
  • Working cloud engineers and enterprise network architects

Core Azure Service Categories
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Azure organizes its services into broad architectural domains. The exams test your knowledge of individual services, sure — but what really matters is understanding how these domains fit together. That’s true on the test and doubly true in production.

  • Compute
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Virtual machines, containers on AKS, serverless functions. Pick the right hosting model for the workload. Each has trade-offs around cost, control, and operational overhead.

  • Networking
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Explore Azure Networking — this covers connectivity, traffic routing, load balancing, and Private Endpoints for locking down access to PaaS services. Networking is where most architecture decisions get made, or broken.

  • Storage
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Blob, File, Disk — Azure gives you scalable, highly available storage options for different workload patterns. Knowing which type to reach for (and when) saves you headaches later.

  • Databases
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Fully managed relational databases (Azure SQL, PostgreSQL) and non-relational options (Cosmos DB). You get the database engine without babysitting the infrastructure underneath it.

  • Security
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Threat protection, secrets management through Key Vault, and Zero Trust governance. Security isn’t a bolt-on — it needs to be woven into every layer of your design.

  • Identity
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Authentication, authorization, and role-based access control (RBAC) via Microsoft Entra ID. In practice, identity is the new perimeter. Get this wrong and nothing else matters.

  • AI & Machine Learning
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Azure’s managed AI platform lets you plug cognitive services and ML models into your applications without building the infrastructure from scratch.

  • Analytics
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Big data processing and real-time analytics through tools like Azure Synapse and Databricks. This is where raw data turns into something useful.

  • Hybrid Cloud
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Connect on-premises infrastructure to Azure with Azure Arc and ExpressRoute. One management plane across both environments — which is easier said than done, but Azure gives you the tools.

  • Integration & Management
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Event-driven messaging with Service Bus and Event Grid, plus observability through Azure Monitor. These are the services that glue everything else together.

Azure Certification Learning Paths
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AZ-104: Azure Administrator Focus
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👉🏻 Start AZ-104 Prep

  • Resource deployment and governance
  • Virtual networking configuration and peering
  • Storage account and compute administration
  • System monitoring, backups, and troubleshooting

AZ-305: Azure Solutions Architect Focus
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👉🏻 Start AZ-305 Prep

  • Enterprise cloud architecture design
  • Security and network topology decisions
  • High availability and scalability patterns
  • Hybrid cloud integration and migration strategies

Featured Deep Dives #

The Cloud Architecture Perspective
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Here’s something the exams test heavily that also happens to be true in the real world: Azure services don’t exist in isolation. They form layers, and those layers depend on each other.

  • Compute can’t function without Networking handling routing and access control.
  • Databases rely on Security and Identity to keep data protected — at rest and in transit.
  • Storage pairs with Networking (through Private Link) to guard against data exfiltration.
  • Integration services are the connective tissue holding all of these distributed pieces together.

When you start seeing these relationships instead of just memorizing individual services, the architecture clicks into place.

Summary
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This is your starting point for working through Azure’s service landscape. If you’re preparing for the AZ-104, the focus here maps to the operational skills you’ll need day one on the job. Studying for the AZ-305? The same categories apply, but you’ll be thinking about them from a design and trade-off perspective. Either way, what’s covered here reflects the patterns you’ll actually use in enterprise cloud environments.