Microsoft Azure certifications

Microsoft's Azure certifications split into fundamentals and role-based tiers, and the two behave differently. Fundamentals exams — AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals and AI-901 for AI — are short, conceptual, aimed at anyone who needs to understand cloud and AI services rather than operate them, and the certification does not expire. Role-based associate exams such as AZ-104 Azure Administrator test hands-on skills across functional groups — identities and governance, storage, compute, networking, monitoring — and the certification expires yearly, renewing free through an online assessment on Microsoft Learn.

Both tiers are scheduled through Pearson VUE, at a test centre or online, and reported on a scale with a published passing score. Pricing is set per country or region of proctoring. Microsoft offers many languages and adds time when the exam is not available in your preferred language; retake rules impose a short wait after a first failure and cap attempts within a year.

The skills outlines are the study plan: each lists the measured skills with percentage ranges, and the exam pages here map practice sets to them.

Microsoft's exams share a delivery and scoring model across the tiers. Questions come in several formats — multiple choice, drag-and-drop ordering, case studies with several questions on one scenario — and the exam reports a scaled score against a fixed pass mark with no penalty for wrong answers, so nothing should be left blank. Accommodations for language and disability are requested at registration, and an exam taken in a language other than your preferred one grants extra time on request.

How to use this family page: decide whether you need concepts or operations, open the exam guide for the skills outline and its weight ranges, and work the practice sets by skill area. Fundamentals credentials never expire; role-based ones expire yearly and renew free online, so the administrator credential is a recurring commitment, not a one-time pass.