Microsoft AZ-103 vs AZ-104: What Changed for Azure Administrators?

AZ-103 and AZ-104 are not two alternative ways to earn a new Azure Administrator certification today. They belong to successive periods of Microsoft’s role-based certification program. Microsoft introduced AZ-103 as a single administrator exam in 2019, released AZ-104 in 2020, and retired AZ-103 on August 31, 2020. The distinction matters because old exam books and course titles can still surface in search even though the previous assessment can no longer be scheduled.

For current candidates, the AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator exam is the relevant assessment for Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate. Microsoft’s English AZ-104 skill objectives were updated on April 17, 2026. The old-to-new comparison is still useful for understanding why an administrator’s duties evolve, but preparation should follow the current blueprint rather than assumptions inherited from 2020.

How the Azure Administrator exam pathway changed

In 2019 Microsoft simplified the Azure Administrator certification path around AZ-103. Earlier exam arrangements had included AZ-100 and AZ-101 as well as a transition route, but AZ-103 became the direct route to the Associate credential. In April 2020 Microsoft announced AZ-104 as the replacement and specified that AZ-103 would remain available until August 31 of that year. This was a change in exam identity within the same professional role, not the introduction of an entirely different job family.

Someone who passed AZ-103 while it was active earned the Azure Administrator Associate certification under the rules applying at that time. They were not required to take AZ-104 immediately simply because the exam code changed. Certification validity and renewal policy have also changed since then: the current Azure Administrator Associate credential has a 12-month renewal frequency with an online renewal assessment, rather than the two-year period described in some Microsoft announcements from 2020.

That distinction is easy to miss when reading an old tutorial. The content may accurately describe how a feature worked at the time, but its registration advice, exam weights, certification validity, and product screenshots are historical. Treat archived AZ-103 material as a record of the older administrator pathway, not as a current scheduling resource.

What stayed the same across the transition

Both exams addressed the practical work of operating an Azure environment. Virtual machines, storage, networking, resource management, identity and monitoring were not invented with AZ-104. Administrators still had to deploy resources, secure access, reason about network connections and keep services running. It would be misleading to characterize AZ-103 as purely theoretical or as a certification without operational responsibility.

Many underlying skills therefore transfer. Understanding IP addressing, authentication, backup objectives, virtual machine dependencies, command-line administration and resource lifecycle is useful regardless of which exam version originally prompted the learning. Even a retired exam resource may help a practitioner understand a technical concept when the underlying service is still supported. What it cannot establish is that a particular item remains on today’s assessment or that a former Azure feature still behaves exactly as an outdated screenshot suggests.

Separate durable principles from changing implementation. Least privilege remains a useful security principle, but identity product names and role capabilities can change. Network troubleshooting still requires understanding DNS, routing and security rules, but new private-access features and management interfaces may require current study. Infrastructure as code is still about expressing a desired state repeatably, even though modern Bicep tooling is different from what older Azure courses demonstrated.

The current AZ-104 scope is defined by five domains

As of Microsoft’s April 17, 2026 study guide, the exam groups skills as follows. The stated ranges show the approximate balance of the assessment; they do not promise a fixed percentage of questions in an individual sitting.

Do not use this table as a score prediction or assume five independent task lists. A practical problem may span several domains. A VM application that cannot reach a storage account might have a DNS problem, private network restriction, missing role assignment or application failure. Choosing a remedy requires distinguishing the failure layer rather than recognizing one Azure product name.

Identity and governance: avoid outdated terminology

Many archived lessons refer to Azure Active Directory, now named Microsoft Entra ID. Renaming does not mean every identity feature changed, but old vocabulary can hide the distinction between tenant identity administration and permission to manage Azure resources. Managing an Entra group is different from assigning that group an Azure RBAC role at a subscription, resource group or resource scope.

The current exam also makes Azure Policy, management groups, cost alerts, budgets and resource locks relevant administrative controls. A resource lock can protect against particular accidental management operations; it is not the same thing as permission to act. Azure Policy can restrict or audit resource configurations but should not be substituted for user authorization. A modern administrator must reason about how these controls interact. For that distinction, Azure RBAC, Policy and governance is a more relevant current subject than an unqualified old access-control screenshot.

In a lab, create a test group, give it a minimal role on one resource group, and inspect inherited access. Then try a policy restriction and a resource lock against a disposable resource. Explain which mechanism changes a principal’s access and which limits the configuration or modification of a resource. If you cannot explain that difference, reading the old and new exam-code comparison will not resolve the knowledge gap.

Compute, networking and storage require current service knowledge

The AZ-104 blueprint expects administrators to interpret and deploy ARM templates or Bicep files, configure VMs and VM Scale Sets, work with Container Registry, Container Instances and Container Apps, and configure App Service. Those are current responsibilities to evaluate directly against the published objectives. An older AZ-103 tutorial may not cover the present platform choices with the same depth or terminology, so do not assume its compute coverage is sufficient.

Virtual networking requires an equally current approach. Study VNet peering and IP addressing, but also effective NSG rules, private endpoints, service endpoints, Azure Bastion, DNS, routes and load-balancer troubleshooting. The important skill is being able to describe the actual packet path and the service’s name-resolution behavior. The DNS, peering and routing treatment focuses on decisions an administrator can observe and test.

For storage, practice identity-based access versus account keys and shared access signatures, storage network restrictions, redundancy, blob versioning and soft delete, storage tiers, Azure Files, and management with AzCopy or Storage Explorer. Redundancy is not a general solution to accidental deletion, and network reachability is not equivalent to authorization. Older resource names can remain recognizable while operational controls and recommended practices have changed. Verify technical details against current Azure documentation rather than assuming a historical certification guide is still an authoritative service manual.

How to reuse AZ-103 learning material safely

Start by labeling old content. Identify which sections teach stable fundamentals, which depend on a product interface or feature version, and which make explicit claims about exams, prices, question counts or renewal periods. The first category may remain useful. The second requires checking contemporary documentation and hands-on tests. The third should normally be discarded in favor of today’s official certification and study-guide pages.

For example, a subnetting exercise from an archived book can still be an effective way to practice address planning. A screenshot showing a particular Azure menu may no longer match the current portal. An AZ-103 domain-weight table should never be used to decide how much of the current AZ-104 exam is devoted to a topic. The historical exam is retired; updated Azure Administrator Associate requirements belong to the current published AZ-104 blueprint.

A sensible practice method is to take one old lesson and rebuild the task with current tooling. Deploy a test VM using a modern template, inspect its permissions, then configure monitoring or backup. Note where the source terminology differs from what the portal or current CLI exposes. If an operation cannot be reproduced, investigate whether the service changed, your permissions are inadequate, the region is unsupported, or the task itself is obsolete before you conclude that the technology is defective.

What a current AZ-104 candidate should do next

Download or open the current Microsoft Learn study guide, check its effective date and compare every domain to practical experience. You need not discard sound historical explanations of foundational Azure services, but you should replace old exam logistics, outdated product statements and exam-version assumptions with current first-party information. Microsoft’s practice assessment and exam sandbox provide additional preparation context, but neither replaces real configuration and troubleshooting.

The existing AZ-104 practical study plan covers lab work across the five current skill domains. Work from those domains when deciding which gaps to close. If you have previously passed AZ-103, check your actual certification and renewal status in Microsoft Learn rather than assuming the retired exam must be retaken; if you are starting now, treat AZ-104 as the exam to prepare for.

The durable lesson of the AZ-103-to-AZ-104 transition is not that one generation of administrators was inferior to another. It is that role-based certification changes as cloud administration changes. Keeping a cloud environment secure and available requires the habit of validating current controls, watching for revised capabilities and adapting practical skills beyond the date printed on an old exam guide.