I'm preparing for the AZ-104 Azure Administrator exam and want more practical experience. My school provides Azure virtual machines for specific labs, but I don't have a personal Azure environment where I can freely deploy and manage different resources. Microsoft Learn has been helpful, but I'm looking for guided exercises similar to the older Azure sandboxes, preferably at little or no cost.
I'm currently studying RBAC with Microsoft Learn and video tutorials, and I also have the Microsoft Exam Ref books for Azure Fundamentals and Azure Administrator. What resources helped you prepare for AZ-104? I'm especially interested in hands-on labs, exam-style questions, and task-based exercises such as deploying a VM or configuring Azure resources.
3 Answers
You probably don’t need dozens of different resources. The official AZ-104 labs, Microsoft Learn modules, and a solid set of practice questions cover most of the exam objectives. Focus on actually performing each task instead of only reading about it, especially identity, networking, storage, compute, and governance.
If you’re enrolled at a school, check out Azure for Students. It typically includes $100 in Azure credit without requiring a credit card, which is enough to build a small practice environment. For guided tasks, the official AZ-104 lab repository and Microsoft’s browser-based lab pages are excellent. Just delete resource groups and shut down anything you create when you’re finished so the credits last.
The official AZ-104 training labs are a good match for what you described because they give you specific objectives and walk you through deploying and configuring resources. A small student-credit subscription combined with those labs can provide plenty of practical experience. Community-built practice apps can also help, but verify their content against the current exam skills outline.

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