Exam Strategy and Time Management

The AZ-900 exam consists of 40–60 questions and you have 60 minutes to complete it (plus a 5–10 minute admin review at the start). The passing score is 700 out of 1000. Question types include: multiple choice (single answer), multiple select (two or more correct answers), drag-and-drop (match items to categories), ordering (arrange steps in sequence), and hot area (click on a diagram to identify a component). There are no case studies with multiple related questions in AZ-900 (those appear in higher-level exams).

With 60 minutes and up to 60 questions, you have approximately 1 minute per question. Budget your time this way: 40 seconds for straightforward recall questions, 90 seconds for scenario-based questions requiring elimination, and flag and return for any question where you spend more than 90 seconds without confidence. Never leave a question blank — there is no penalty for wrong answers, so always make your best guess. Aim to complete the exam in 45 minutes and use the remaining 15 minutes to review flagged questions.

For scenario questions, use the elimination technique: first, remove any obviously wrong answer (usually one answer is a completely different service category). Then remove any answer that partially matches but has a critical flaw (wrong tier, wrong region scope, wrong direction). You are typically left with two plausible answers — the decision between them usually hinges on one keyword in the question. Keywords to watch: managed service (PaaS not IaaS), no code changes (Rehost), cheapest (often Spot or Basic tier), private (internal ingress or private endpoint).

Multiple-select questions state Select two or Select all that apply. Read each option independently and mark it true or false before looking at the combination. Do not assume a specific number of correct answers unless the question tells you — AZ-900 multiple-select questions always specify. The scoring for multiple-select is all-or-nothing — you must select all correct options and no incorrect ones to receive the mark. When unsure, favour options that use Microsoft's own terminology from the exam objectives.

AZ-900 questions use specific keywords that signal the correct answer domain:

• 'Most appropriate' — find the best fit, not just any valid option
• 'Least expensive' — look for reserved instances, Basic tiers, or scale-to-zero
• 'Without managing servers' — points to PaaS or serverless, not IaaS VMs
• 'Automatically' — points to autoscaling, Azure Policy DeployIfNotExists, or managed services
• 'Compliance requirement' — points to Azure Policy, Management Groups, or Blueprints
• 'Prevent accidental' — always Resource Locks

Memorise these SLA facts for exam day:

• Single VM with Premium SSD: 99.9%
• VMs in Availability Set (2+ VMs): 99.95%
• VMs across Availability Zones (2+ zones): 99.99%
• Azure SQL Database (General Purpose): 99.99%
• Azure App Service (Standard tier+): 99.95%
• Azure Blob Storage (GRS): 99.9% read, 99.99% read if read-access GRS
• A free tier resource has no SLA

Watch for these common AZ-900 traps:

• Azure Active Directory ≠ Active Directory — Entra ID is cloud-only identity; AD DS is on-premises domain controller
• Availability Zones ≠ Region Pairs — Zones protect within a region; Pairs protect across regions
• NSG ≠ Azure Firewall — NSGs are IP/port rules; Azure Firewall is a managed, full-featured stateful firewall
• Azure Monitor ≠ Microsoft Sentinel — Monitor collects metrics/logs; Sentinel is a SIEM for threat detection
• Resource tags are not inherited — unlike RBAC and Policy assignments, tags do not flow down to child resources

AZ-900 is divided into three domains. Allocate revision time proportionally:

• Cloud Concepts (25–30%) — benefits, service models, deployment models, consumption pricing. Quick to revise; high yield.
• Azure Architecture and Services (35–40%) — compute, storage, networking, databases, AI, DevOps. Broadest domain; focus on use-case scenarios.
• Azure Management and Governance (30–35%) — cost tools, governance, Entra ID, Defender. Many definitional questions; learn the product names and their purposes.

Microsoft Learn (learn.microsoft.com) is the official free study platform for AZ-900. The Microsoft Azure Fundamentals learning path (about 12 hours) covers all exam objectives and includes knowledge checks at the end of each module. Microsoft also provides free practice assessments through the official exam page on Microsoft's website — these use real exam-style questions and give explanations for each answer. Completing two to three full practice assessments and reviewing all explanations is the highest-ROI study activity in the final week before the exam.

Cost facts commonly tested:

• Azure Pricing Calculator — estimates monthly cost for a proposed architecture before deployment
• TCO Calculator — estimates cost of moving from on-premises to Azure (business case tool)
• Azure Cost Management — monitors actual spending and sets budget alerts after resources are deployed
• Reserved Instances — 1 or 3-year commitment, up to 72% savings over pay-as-you-go
• Spot VMs — up to 90% discount, can be evicted at any time
• Azure Hybrid Benefit — reuse existing Windows Server / SQL Server licences on Azure

Practical exam day advice: Read each question twice — the first read identifies the question topic, the second read catches the constraining keywords. Do not overthink — AZ-900 tests foundational knowledge, not edge cases. If your first instinct points to an answer, trust it. Flag and move on — do not spend more than 2 minutes on any single question. Check your answers — if you finish early, review flagged questions first, then re-read questions where you felt less confident. Focus on the question as asked, not hypothetical scenarios you imagine.

Test your understanding of Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) concepts from this lesson.

In this lesson you learned: the AZ-900 exam is 40–60 questions in 60 minutes with a 700/1000 passing score, the elimination technique reduces four options to the most likely answer using keyword analysis, and domain weighting (Architecture and Services ~38%, Governance ~32%, Cloud Concepts ~28%) should guide your study time allocation. Next up: the mock exam begins!