AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator

The Microsoft AZ-104: Azure Administrator certification is designed for IT professionals who want to build practical skills in managing Microsoft Azure environments. It is particularly relevant for system administrators, network engineers, cloud support professionals, students, and anyone planning to develop a career in Azure infrastructure and cloud operations.

AZ-104 focuses on the day-to-day responsibilities of an Azure administrator. Rather than covering only basic cloud concepts, the exam requires candidates to understand how Azure services work together in real-world environments, including identity, storage, compute, networking, governance, monitoring, backup, and recovery.

What Does the AZ-104 Exam Cover?

According to Microsoft’s current AZ-104 skills outline, candidates should be prepared to work with several core areas of Azure administration:

• Manage Azure identities and governance — Microsoft Entra ID, Azure RBAC, subscriptions, resource groups, Azure Policy, resource locks, tags, and cost management.
• Implement and manage storage — Azure Storage accounts, Blob Storage, Azure Files, access control, SAS, redundancy, security, and lifecycle management.
• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources — Azure Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, App Service, containers, ARM templates, and Bicep.
• Implement and manage virtual networking — VNets, subnets, NSGs, routing, VNet peering, private endpoints, Azure Bastion, DNS, and load balancing.
• Monitor and maintain Azure resources — Azure Monitor, alerts, logs, Network Watcher, Azure Backup, and Azure Site Recovery.

Who Should Prepare for AZ-104?

This certification is a strong fit for candidates who already have some familiarity with networking, operating systems, servers, virtualization, or cloud computing and want to move toward a more practical Azure administrator role.

You do not need to be a software developer, but you should become comfortable using administrative and automation tools such as the Azure Portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, ARM templates, and Bicep.