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, though I'm looking for guided exercises similar to the older Azure sandboxes or another affordable way to practice.
I'm currently studying role-based access control and using Microsoft Learn, YouTube, and the Microsoft Exam Ref books for Azure Fundamentals and Azure Administrator. What resources did you use to prepare for AZ-104? I'd especially appreciate recommendations for hands-on labs, exam-style questions, or platforms that give you specific tasks such as deploying a virtual machine or configuring an Azure resource.
3 Answers
There are also community-built AZ-104 practice applications, such as CloudForge104 Academy, that organize exercises and study material into a more guided format. They can be useful alongside the official Microsoft labs, but I’d still use Microsoft’s documentation and hands-on environment as the primary source.
If you’re a student, check out Azure for Students. It includes free Azure credits without requiring a credit card, which should give you room to build and test resources. For structured exercises, the official AZ-104 Microsoft Learning GitHub labs are excellent and closely resemble the tasks used in instructor-led training. Remember to delete resource groups and unused resources when you finish so the credits don’t disappear too quickly.
You probably don’t need dozens of different study tools. Microsoft Learn, the official AZ-104 lab exercises, and a few solid practice exams can cover most of the preparation. Focus on actually performing the tasks instead of only reading about them, especially identity, RBAC, networking, storage, virtual machines, and monitoring.

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