Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

About the AZ-900 exam

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals is the entry point to Azure certification. It is meant for anyone who needs to talk sensibly about the cloud and about Azure in particular: people starting an IT career, developers and administrators coming from on-premises work, and non-technical staff in sales, finance or project roles who work alongside cloud teams. It doesn't require hands-on experience, though some background in an area of IT helps.

The exam tests whether you know what things are and when you'd use them, not how to configure them. A typical question gives you a short need, such as enforcing that resources are only created in certain regions, and asks which Azure feature meets it. The hard part is usually telling similar tools apart: Azure Policy versus RBAC versus resource locks, or Azure Advisor versus Service Health versus Azure Monitor.

Exam format

• Questions: Microsoft doesn't publish an exact count for AZ-900; it says most of its exams have between 40 and 60 questions. Besides multiple choice, it can include formats such as yes/no statement series, drag-and-drop and hot-area items.
• Time: 45 minutes to answer the questions.
• Passing score: 700 on a scaled score out of 1,000.
• Cost: set by the country or region where you take the exam. Delivery is through Pearson VUE, and students and educators can also book through Certiport.
• Validity: Fundamentals certifications don't expire, so there is nothing to renew.

What the exam covers

The skills outline, updated on July 20, 2026, has three areas:

• Describe cloud concepts (25-30%). The shared responsibility model; public, private and hybrid clouds; consumption-based pricing and serverless; the benefits of high availability, scalability, reliability and manageability; and how IaaS, PaaS and SaaS differ.
• Describe Azure architecture and services (35-40%). Regions, region pairs, sovereign regions and availability zones; the hierarchy of management groups, subscriptions and resource groups; virtual machines, scale sets, containers, Functions and App Service; virtual networks, peering, VPN Gateway and ExpressRoute; storage tiers and redundancy; moving data with AzCopy, Storage Explorer, Azure Migrate and Data Box; and identity and security with Microsoft Entra ID, MFA, Conditional Access, RBAC, Zero Trust and Defender for Cloud.
• Describe Azure management and governance (30-35%). What drives cost, the pricing calculator, Cost Management and tags; Microsoft Purview, Azure Policy and resource locks; the portal, Cloud Shell, CLI, PowerShell, Azure Arc and ARM templates; and monitoring with Advisor, Service Health and Azure Monitor, including Log Analytics and Application Insights.

How the practice questions here are organised

There are 10 practice tests of 10 questions each. Every test mixes cloud concepts, Azure architecture, identity and security, and management and governance, so each one samples the whole outline instead of drilling a single chapter. Each explanation covers why the correct answer fits and why the other options don't, with a link to Microsoft's documentation, so the wrong options teach you the differences between look-alike services.

The full practice exam has 50 questions in 45 minutes, weighted to match the three skill areas, with answers hidden until you submit. Microsoft doesn't publish how its scaled score maps to correct answers, so it passes you at 70%. Questions that would be drag-and-drop or yes/no series on the real exam are asked here as multiple choice or "choose two".

A study plan that works

• Take Test 1 before you study. If you already work in IT, you may find much of the cloud concepts area familiar and can spend your time on Azure-specific services.
• Make a small table of the governance tools: what Azure Policy, RBAC, resource locks, tags and management groups each control. A large share of the questions turn on these differences.
• Learn storage redundancy (LRS, ZRS, GRS, GZRS) and access tiers by the problem each one solves, not as a list of acronyms.
• Do a few tests a day and reread every explanation, including those for questions you got right by guessing.
• Sit the full practice exam timed. Forty-five minutes goes quickly; aim to finish with time to review flagged questions.

These questions are original, written from the public Microsoft Learn documentation and the official study guide. They are not real exam questions, and this site is not affiliated with Microsoft.