Azure AZ-104 Storage Design Guide

AZ-104 treats storage-account design as an administrative decision with direct resilience and cost consequences. If you choose the wrong redundancy or account configuration, every later access or recovery decision gets harder.

What the study guide points to

Microsoft explicitly calls out creating and configuring storage accounts, configuring redundancy, configuring object replication, configuring storage-account encryption, and managing data with Azure Storage Explorer and AzCopy. That means you need both design awareness and basic operational tooling awareness.

The design questions behind the objective list

The first question is usually resilience: LRS, ZRS, GRS, GZRS, and read-access variants are not interchangeable. The second is performance and workload fit: standard versus premium, blob versus file needs, and whether the region and application pattern support the option you want. Encryption is another common exam angle. Understand when Microsoft-managed encryption is enough and when customer-managed control becomes part of the design conversation.

Common traps

Replication is not backup. Object replication is not the same thing as a restore strategy. Another common miss is choosing a higher-end redundancy option because it sounds safer even when the scenario does not justify the cost or cross-region behavior.

Lab moves worth practicing

• create storage accounts with different replication choices and compare their properties
• inspect encryption settings and understand what is enabled by default
• move data with Storage Explorer or AzCopy so the tools are not unfamiliar on exam day

Redundancy chooser

Azure CLI example: create a hardened storage account

This example shows the kind of design move AZ-104 expects you to interpret quickly.

1az storage account create \
2  --name stgexamdemo01 \
3  --resource-group app-rg \
4  --location eastus \
5  --sku Standard_ZRS \
6  --kind StorageV2 \
7  --https-only true \
8  --min-tls-version TLS1_2 \
9  --allow-blob-public-access false

What to notice:

• Standard_ZRS signals a zone-resilient design decision
• StorageV2 is the general-purpose modern account type most scenarios expect
• https-only, minimum TLS, and disabled public blob access show that account design includes security defaults, not just replication choice

Object replication is not the same as account redundancy

AZ-104 includes both storage-account redundancy and object replication, and they solve different problems.

If the question is about copying selected object data across storage accounts for application behavior, think object replication. If the question is about the account’s built-in durability model, think LRS, ZRS, GRS, or GZRS choices.

Decision order that usually wins

1. First ask whether the design needs single-region durability, zone resilience, or paired-region resilience with optional readable secondary.
2. If the requirement is resilience to a zone failure within one region, think ZRS.
3. If the requirement adds a secondary region, move into GRS/GZRS territory.
4. If the app must read from the secondary during disruption, think RA- variants.
5. Replication posture and recovery posture are related but not interchangeable on AZ-104.

Quiz

Next, move to Storage Access, SAS & Private Connectivity so the account-design decisions connect to real delegated-access and network-path choices.