The books in this post
Ultra Transcenders AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
Choose the right design, and explain why.
The October review of Microsoft's announcements found two changes that affect the AZ-305 guide. The retirement date for Application Insights URL ping tests has moved, and Azure IoT Central is being retired.
By Tony Rough
Once a month we check what Microsoft has announced against everything in the series: the books, the series glossary, the study notes and this blog. This month’s review covered announcements from 1 September to 1 October 2026. Two of them change what the AZ-305 guide says, so we’ve corrected it.
Application Insights URL ping tests now retire on 30 September 2028. Chapter 4, “Monitoring and observability”, gave the retirement date for URL ping tests as 30 September 2026. Following customer feedback, Microsoft has extended that date by 24 months, to 30 September 2028. Standard tests are still the replacement, and the advice is the same: move to them. We’ve corrected the date in the chapter and in the glossary entry Availability tests.
Azure IoT Central is being retired. Chapter 8, “Data integration and analytics”, described IoT Central as a SaaS IoT application rather than a building block for custom pipelines. That’s still the point for the exam, but you should also know that the service is going away. You can’t create new IoT Central applications from 23 September 2026, and existing applications stop on 20 September 2029. Microsoft recommends IoT Hub with the Device Provisioning Service for device connectivity, and Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence for dashboards and analytics. We’ve added this to the chapter and to the glossary entry IoT Central.
Both corrections are in version 1.1 of the Kindle and paperback editions, out now. Every change is listed on the book’s What’s changed page.
We found nothing that needed correcting in the AZ-104, AZ-700 or SC-500 guides this month, and none of the exam outlines (the “skills measured” lists) has changed.
For the week-by-week news, see the weekly round-up, What changed in Azure, security and AI.
Tony Rough
Choose the right design, and explain why.
Both lock an Azure service down to your virtual network, but they work in completely different ways. How each one works, the on-premises trap, DNS, data exfiltration, and a five-second way to choose.
Four Azure services balance traffic, and two questions tell them apart: is it web traffic that needs layer 7, and is it regional or global? Each service on a 2x2 grid, plus three exam traps.
Six redundancy options, four acronyms and one trap that catches almost everyone. The two questions that pick the right Azure Storage option every time, plus the read-access trap and three more.
Azure has two separate role systems. Azure roles control resources; Microsoft Entra roles control the directory. Scopes and inheritance, Owner vs Contributor vs User Access Administrator, elevate access, and three traps.
Microsoft has pushed the retirement of Application Insights URL ping tests back to September 2028 and announced that Azure IoT Central retires in September 2029. Automatic zone placement for scale sets, and Microsoft Entra Kerberos for Azure NetApp Files, are now in preview.