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Infrastructure management

Core

Azure Resource Manager

Control plane, scopes, deployments, dependencies, and resource organization.

Key points

  • Azure control plane for resource deployment, organization, access, Policy, tags, and locks.
  • Exposes management scopes from tenant and management group through subscription and resource group.
  • Processes declarative deployments and invokes resource providers.

Best-known use cases

  • Deploy a repeatable resource group environment.
  • Apply access or governance at a management scope.

What candidates often confuse it with

  • Resource Manager vs resource provider: common control plane vs service-specific implementation API.
  • Management plane vs data plane: configure a service resource vs operate the data it contains.

Key takeaway

Use Azure Resource Manager to manage Azure resource state and scope while recognizing separate service data planes.

Related services

  • ARM templates
  • Bicep

Relevant exam tasks

  • D3.1.S1 — Interpret an Azure Resource Manager template or a Bicep file
  • D3.1.S2 — Modify an existing Azure Resource Manager template
  • D3.1.S3 — Modify an existing Bicep file
  • D3.1.S4 — Deploy resources by using an Azure Resource Manager template or a Bicep file
  • D3.1.S5 — Export a deployment as an Azure Resource Manager template or convert an Azure Resource Manager template to a Bicep file

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Free Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate prep

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Exam Weights

Exam snapshot

AZ-104 at a glance

Level
Intermediate
Duration
100 minutes
Questions
No fixed live question count published
Formats
No guaranteed question-type mix
Scoring
1–1,000 scaled score; 700 minimum passing score

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Exam fidelity: Microsoft does not publish a fixed live question count or guarantee a question-type mix for AZ-104. This lane counts multiple-choice and multiple-response items as exam-style practice. Ordering, matching, and case-study items are supplemental site exercises and do not count toward exam-style accuracy. Practice percentages do not reproduce Microsoft's scaled scoring, and difficulty labels describe this site's Intermediate-level scenario complexity rather than a Microsoft-published question rating.

Reference

AZ-104 topics and reference map

Study links

AZ-104 resources