Certification guideAZ-204

Microsoft Azure Developer Associate: the honest guide

Everything Microsoft Azure publishes about AZ-204, in one place: what the exam asks, how the domains are weighted, and what it takes to be ready.

This guide page is built from the registry, not written yet.

Everything below comes from Azure Developer’s published exam data, and every figure links to the vendor page it came from. The researched version, with study plans and the parts nobody publishes, is still being written. This page is not submitted to search engines until it is.

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What the exam actually asks you to do

Multiple choice and multiple response, plus drag-and-drop ordering, hot area items where you click a region of a screenshot, and case studies that hold one scenario across several linked questions.

  • Multiple choice
  • Multiple response
  • Drag and drop
  • Hot area
  • Case study

The highlighted formats are the ones you cannot answer from memory alone. Microsoft Learn, exam duration and question types

Domain breakdown and official weightings

From the official Microsoft Learn study guides. Develop Azure compute solutions is the heaviest domain at 30 percent, followed by Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services at 24 percent.

  • Develop Azure compute solutions30%
  • Develop for Azure storage19%
  • Implement Azure security19%
  • Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions8%
  • Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services24%

Microsoft Azure: Microsoft Learn study guides

What comes after passing

Role-based certifications last one year and renew free through an online assessment on Microsoft Learn. The only cost is the hour it takes.

Costs across the full renewal cycle are on the Azure Developer cost page.

Frequently asked questions

How much code reading is on AZ-204?

A lot. Questions show C# or Python snippets against the Azure SDKs, ARM templates and CLI commands, and ask what they do or why they fail. You choose and complete code rather than authoring it from nothing.

Which services carry the exam?

Functions, App Service, Container Apps, Blob Storage, Cosmos DB, Entra ID authentication, Key Vault, API Management, Event Grid and Service Bus. Compute plus the integration services cover more than half the scored content.

Note on domain weightings

Microsoft publishes weightings as ranges (for example 25 to 30 percent). The single figures shown here use midpoints of the official ranges from the current AZ-204 study guide.

Keep reading

Every guide and cost breakdown, by vendor

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