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13/01/2019
This has been updated with a lot of links to Pluralsight.

You can sign up with them here

Below you will find a list of what is going to be tested in the new AZ-301 Microsoft Azure Architect Design exam and a link to a resource that I think will help you learn and pass the exam. It is a work in progress at the moment and I will keep updating it. If you do find a link that is not working, or I have linked to the wrong resource. Please let me know. Also if you would like to help fill in the blanks please leave a comment below.

At Microsoft Ignite, they had a session on this Exam. It is worth the watch.

Skills measured from AZ-301: Microsoft Azure Architect Design exam

Determine Workload Requirements (10-15%)

Gather Information and Requirements

Identify compliance requirements, identity and access management infrastructure, and service-oriented architectures (e.g., integration patterns, service design, service discoverability)
Identify accessibility (e.g. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), availability (e.g. Service Level Agreement), capacity planning and scalability, deploy-ability (e.g., repositories, failback, slot-based deployment), configurability, governance, maintainability (e.g. logging, debugging, troubleshooting, recovery, training), security (e.g. authentication, authorization, attacks), and sizing (e.g. support costs, optimization) requirements
Recommend changes during project execution (ongoing)
Evaluate products and services to align with solution
Create testing scenarios


https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/microsoft-azure-enterprise-architecture-information-gathering

Optimize Consumption Strategy

Optimize app service, compute, identity, network, and storage costshttp://bit.ly/2FvYsKH

Design an Auditing and Monitoring Strategy

Define logical groupings (tags) for resources to be monitoredhttp://bit.ly/2PhpJSV
Determine levels and storage locations for logshttp://bit.ly/2Pk0IXc
Plan for integration with monitoring toolshttp://bit.ly/2Pe3Nbo
Recommend appropriate monitoring tool(s) for a solution
Specify mechanism for event routing and escalation
Design auditing for compliance requirementshttp://bit.ly/2PhpZ4l
Design auditing policies and traceability requirements

http://bit.ly/2FvdgsL

Design for Identity and Security (20-25%)

Design Identity Management

Choose an identity management approach
Design an identity delegation strategy, identity repository (including directory, application, systems, etc.)
Design self-service identity management and user and persona provisioning
Define personas and roles
Recommend appropriate access control strategy (e.g., attribute-based, discretionary access, history-based, identity-based, mandatory, organization-based, role-based, rule-based, responsibility-based)

http://bit.ly/2FtS0Uk

Design Authentication

Choose an authentication approach
Design a single-sign on approach
Design for IPSec, logon, multi-factor, network access, and remote authentication

http://bit.ly/2FvvFpy

Design Authorization

Choose an authorization approach
Define access permissions and privileges
Design secure delegated access (e.g., oAuth, OpenID, etc.)
Recommend when and how to use API Keys

http://bit.ly/2Fsim9k

Design for Risk Prevention for Identity

Design a risk assessment strategy (e.g., access reviews, RBAC policies, physical access)
Evaluate agreements involving services or products from vendors and contractors
Update solution design to address and mitigate changes to existing security policies, standards, guidelines and procedures

http://bit.ly/2Fu7zLL

Design a Monitoring Strategy for Identity and Security

Design for alert notifications
Design an alert and metrics strategy
Recommend authentication monitors

http://bit.ly/2FyZ0PE

Design a Data Platform Solution (15-20%)

Design a Data Management Strategy

Choose between managed and unmanaged data store
Choose between relational and non-relational databases
Design data auditing and caching strategies
Identify data attributes (e.g., relevancy, structure, frequency, size, durability, etc.)
Recommend Database Transaction Unit (DTU) sizing
Design a data retention policy
Design for data availability, consistency, and durability
Design a data warehouse strategy

http://bit.ly/2FveB2L


Design a Data Protection Strategy

Recommend geographic data storage
Design an encryption strategy for data at rest, for data in transmission, and for data in use
Design a scalability strategy for data
Design secure access to data
Design a data loss prevention (DLP) policy

http://bit.ly/2Fsq7Mi


Design and Document Data Flows

Identify data flow requirements
Create a data flow diagram
Design a data flow to meet business requirements
Design a data import and export strategy

http://bit.ly/2Fvouh5

Design a Monitoring Strategy for the Data Platform

Design for alert notifications
Design an alert and metrics strategy

http://bit.ly/2FzD8nF

Design a Business Continuity Strategy (15-20%)

Design a Site Recovery Strategy

Design a recovery solution
Design a site recovery replication policy
Design for site recovery capacity and for storage replication
Design site failover and failback (planned/unplanned)
Design the site recovery network
Recommend recovery objectives (e.g., Azure, on-prem, hybrid, Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Level Objective (RLO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO))
Identify resources that require site recovery
Identify supported and unsupported workloads
Recommend a geographical distribution strategy

http://bit.ly/2FwxItl

Design for High Availability

Design for application redundancy, autoscaling, data center and fault domain redundancy, and network redundancy
Identify resources that require high availability
Identify storage types for high availability

http://bit.ly/2Fvv1Za

Design a disaster recovery strategy for individual workloads

Design failover/failback scenario(s)
Document recovery requirements
Identify resources that require backup
ecommend a geographic availability strategy

http://bit.ly/2FsQgL7

Design a Data Archiving Strategy

Recommend storage types and methodology for data archiving
Identify requirements for data archiving and business compliance requirements for data archiving
Identify SLA(s) for data archiving

http://bit.ly/2FszQ5w

Design for Deployment, Migration, and Integration (10-15%)

Design Deployments

Design a compute, container, data platform, messaging solution, storage, and web app and service deployment strategy

http://bit.ly/2FukCga

Design Migrations

Recommend a migration strategy
Design data import/export strategies during migration
Determine the appropriate application migration, data transfer, and network connectivity method
Determine migration scope, including redundant, related, trivial, and outdated data
Determine application and data compatibility

http://bit.ly/2FukGMW

Design an API Integration Strategy

Design an API gateway strategy
Determine policies for internal and external consumption of APIs
Recommend a hosting structure for API management

http://bit.ly/2FvG3xs

Design an Infrastructure Strategy (15-20%)

Design a Storage Strategy

Design a storage provisioning strategy
Design storage access strategy
Identify storage requirements
Recommend a storage solution and storage management tools

http://bit.ly/2FvwE9e

Design a Compute Strategy

Design compute provisioning and secure compute strategies
Determine appropriate compute technologies (e.g., virtual machines, functions, service fabric, container instances, etc.)
Design an Azure HPC environment
Identify compute requirements
ecommend management tools for compute

http://bit.ly/2FvfOXR

Design a Networking Strategy

Design network provisioning and network security strategies
Determine appropriate network connectivity technologies
Identify networking requirements
Recommend network management tools

http://bit.ly/2FsewwZ

Design a Monitoring Strategy for Infrastructure

Design for alert notifications
Design an alert and metrics strategy

http://bit.ly/2Fsr3Ai

I hope you found this helpful and Good Luck in your exams!


Pixel Robots.

I’m Richard Hooper aka Pixel Robots. I started this blog in 2016 for a couple reasons. The first reason was basically just a place for me to store my step by step guides, troubleshooting guides and just plain ideas about being a sysadmin. The second reason was to share what I have learned and found out with other people like me. Hopefully, you can find something useful on the site.

8 Comments

Palas Roychowdhury · October 16, 2018 at 1:55 pm

Hi,
This is great information. Are you still updating the content ?

    Pixel Robots. · October 17, 2018 at 9:01 am

    Hello, yes I am still updating. If you have any links I can add, please let me know.

    Thanks

Ali · January 2, 2019 at 4:10 am

Great work by Pixel Robots, I will also send some link.

Deivasigamani Duraisamy · January 9, 2019 at 9:23 am

Hi Richard, When will you update the relevant links? I could use it to start my preparation for Architect exam.

    Pixel Robots. · January 13, 2019 at 7:45 pm

    I have just gone through and updated all links. Hopefully, it should be good now. If anyone finds some links that need updating etc. Please let me know.

Brett · March 4, 2019 at 6:47 pm

Thanks for this. I pretty much exclusively used your links (again) and passed AZ-301. You’ve done us all a huge favor.

Paul Bendall · March 26, 2019 at 10:47 am

Thank you for taking the time to share this approach. It is good to know that you can pass the exams using the Microsoft documentation rather than having to take a course and plough through the course handbook. Microsoft has certainly improved their documentation from the early days of Azure and Office 365 when the primary way to find information was from the various developer team blogs (although this is still an excellent resource for keeping up to date

Paul

а · April 9, 2019 at 2:15 pm

Gather requirements links are wrong, should be something from these videos https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/certificate/microsoft-azure-architect-design-az-301

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