Compute Architecture Design
Infrastructure questions test virtual machines, VM scale sets, containers, AKS, Container Apps, App Service, Functions, batch, and workload placement.
How to study for AZ-305
Treat each AZ-305 item as an architecture decision: identify the workload requirement, governance boundary, data shape, recovery objective, and infrastructure tradeoff before choosing.
Core concepts
Concept 1
Compute Architecture Design questions test Azure architecture tradeoff decisions rather than isolated service-name recall.
Exam cue: Identify the requirement, workload type, data shape, access boundary, recovery target, and operational ownership model.
Concept 2
The best answer maps business requirements to identity, governance, data, resilience, compute, network, security, cost, and operations constraints.
Exam cue: Choose the Azure design that satisfies the constraint with the least unnecessary operational burden.
Concept 3
Eliminate answers that ignore governance scope, recovery objectives, data durability, private connectivity, security boundaries, or workload fit.
Exam cue: Prefer Well-Architected choices: secure, reliable, cost-aware, observable, governed, and scalable.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Choosing a service before identifying the business driver and nonfunctional requirement.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that pick services without checking governance scope, data model, recovery target, migration dependency, or network boundary.
Solving availability while ignoring identity, data protection, compliance, or cost constraints.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that pick services without checking governance scope, data model, recovery target, migration dependency, or network boundary.
Assuming a migration, networking, or storage pattern is correct without checking workload dependencies.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that pick services without checking governance scope, data model, recovery target, migration dependency, or network boundary.
Memory anchors
Virtual Machine
An Azure virtual machine provides infrastructure control for workloads that need OS-level customization.
VM Scale Set
A VM scale set supports autoscaled groups of similar VMs behind load balancing.
AKS
Azure Kubernetes Service manages Kubernetes control plane operations for containerized workloads.
Container Apps
Azure Container Apps runs containerized applications with serverless scaling and event-driven options.
App Service
Azure App Service hosts web apps and APIs with managed platform features.
Azure Functions
Azure Functions runs event-driven code with serverless execution options.
Batch
Azure Batch runs large-scale parallel and high-performance computing jobs.
Compute Fit
Compute fit balances control, scaling, portability, operations, and deployment requirements.
Autoscale
Autoscale adjusts compute capacity based on metrics, schedules, or rules.
Hosting Plan
A hosting plan determines capacity, isolation, scaling, and cost characteristics for app workloads.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
You must run a stateless web API with automatic scaling and zero infrastructure management, paying only per execution. Which compute option fits?
Your design must host a containerized microservice with HTTP scaling, revisions, and scale-to-zero without managing Kubernetes. Which service fits?
Answer all questions to submit.
Next step personalized recommendations
Continue learning
Move forward only after this module is stable.
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