Yes, AZ-104 is a genuinely hard exam, mostly because it tests whether you can do the work, not whether you've read about it. Candidates who have spent time in the Azure portal and CLI tend to find it fair. Candidates who prepared from videos alone are the ones who come away saying it was brutal.
Why it has a reputation
- It's an associate-level, role-based exam. The questions assume you administer Azure, so they describe a task and ask exactly how you'd do it.
- Case studies. Several questions hang off one long scenario with requirements spread across pages. They take time, and missing one constraint changes the answer.
- Precise details matter. Which redundancy option survives a zone outage, what scope a role assignment applies at, whether peering is transitive. Near-misses are the main distractors.
- Breadth across five domains, from identity to networking to backup.
The domains that catch people out
- Virtual networking: peering, NSGs vs ASGs, private DNS zones, load balancer choices. People who don't do networking day to day lose the most marks here.
- Identities and governance: RBAC scope inheritance, Azure Policy vs RBAC, management groups. It's the largest domain (about 25%).
- Storage: redundancy options, access tiers and shared access signatures are easy to mix up.
How much hands-on time you need
More than for any foundational exam. A free or pay-as-you-go Azure subscription and a few weeks of real tasks (deploy VMs and scale sets from templates, configure peering, set up backup and restore, assign roles at different scopes) does more than any amount of re-watching. If you already administer Azure at work, a focused review of the skills outline may be enough.
How long people prepare
Typical ranges, depending on background: four to six weeks with Azure experience at work; eight to twelve weeks coming from another cloud or from on-premises administration; longer if both cloud and administration are new. As with every exam, readiness is better measured by steady practice-exam scores of around 80% than by weeks.
Should you take AZ-900 first?
It isn't required. If cloud concepts are new to you, AZ-900 is a gentle, cheap warm-up; if you already work in IT, most people go straight to AZ-104. See AZ-104 vs AZ-900.
Free practice: AZ-104 diagnostic, 15 questions with answers, and the AZ-104 cheat sheet. Related: the AZ-104 passing score explained.
Frequently asked questions
Is AZ-104 harder than AZ-900?
Much harder. AZ-900 tests cloud concepts and what Azure services do; AZ-104 tests how to configure and administer them, with case studies and scenario questions.
Can I pass AZ-104 without hands-on experience?
It's possible but difficult. The exam assumes you've performed the tasks. A few weeks of practice in a real Azure subscription makes a large difference.
What is the hardest part of AZ-104?
For most candidates, virtual networking and the identity and governance domain, followed by the case studies, which take time and hide key constraints in the scenario.