Azure Solutions Architect Expert Readiness (AZ-305)
Signature Course No. 506 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
For experienced Azure administrators — your coach starts at design judgment, not at the basics.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Azure Solutions Architect Expert Readiness (AZ-305) course, in the Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Requirement first, constraint second, service last. AZ-305 assumes you can operate Azure. It tests whether you can architect on it: given a business requirement written the way businesses actually write requirements — incomplete, conflicting, and priced — can you select the architecture that honors the requirement, names its trade-offs honestly, and survives the follow-up question? Administration rewards knowing the correct setting. Architecture rewards knowing what the setting costs — in money, in resilience, in operational burden, in risk — and being able to show your working.
It starts with the governed ground. Every enterprise estate answers three questions, whether anyone designed the answers or not: where may a workload live, who owns the bill for it, and what happens to everything near it when it fails or is breached? In an estate of hundreds of subscriptions you cannot answer resource by resource. You answer once, structurally — with the management group hierarchy and the landing zone — so every new workload inherits correct answers instead of negotiating its own.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Control and Data at Enterprise Scale — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Governed Landing Zone; then, Module 2 — Survival, Movement, and Value — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Architecture That Survives Challenge.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a governed landing-zone design for a regulated financial group consolidating 340 subscriptions: the hierarchy and subscription pattern, the identity and authorization model, the policy initiative and observability topology, and the three data estates housed by access pattern; and a complete architecture for that group's payments platform: recovery and availability with the composite computed, hosts and conversations chosen by shape, private paths and a layered defense, a migration inside a four-hour cutover, a priced cost model, and a trade-off ledger defended to the board.
The honesty standard is part of the course. This course prepares judgment for the AZ-305 examination. It does not guarantee a pass, it does not reproduce actual examination items, and it does not claim to. Every scenario in the course was invented for teaching against Microsoft's published skills outline, and every version-specific detail that could churn — service names under preview, current limits, current prices — is fenced in the book's Appendix, where version specifics belong. The teaching is the durable judgment underneath: the trade-offs that remain true when the portal changes its labels.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 45 minutes per concept, about 13.5 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already design an area well can test out concept by concept — the bar does not drop; the route just gets shorter.
Azure Solutions Architect Expert Readiness (AZ-305) is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning delivers.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
Already enrolled? Enter the course →
Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the estate you already run. If a regulator demanded one line of business be isolated and audited separately tomorrow, could your current structure do it — or would you be untangling shared subscriptions for weeks? Where do production and test share a subscription, a billing boundary, or an administrator group — and what is the worst thing that sharing permits? Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Governed Landing Zone for Module 1 and The Architecture That Survives Challenge for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Requirement first, constraint second, service last — in that order, every time. Every expert answer in this course is a priced exchange among resilience, security, performance, and cost. The expert is the person who can name the exchange, state what was given up, and say what would make them reverse the decision. That discipline — not a catalog of services — is what the examination samples, and it is what this course builds, decision by decision.
Module 1 teaches control and data at enterprise scale. Landing Zones and the Management Group Hierarchy; Identity Architecture; Role-Based Access at Scale; Policy as Architecture; Observability Architecture; Choosing the Store by Access Pattern; Relational Data at Scale; Events, Messages, and Pipelines; and Data Protection.
Module 2 teaches survival, movement, and value. Backup, Recovery, and the Honest RTO and RPO; Availability Across Zones and Regions; Choosing the Host; APIs, Messaging, and Decoupling; Network Architecture; Security in Layers; Migration Architecture; Cost Architecture; and The Trade-Off Ledger.
And it holds its boundary throughout. This course teaches the expert syllabus only. It does not teach Azure from the beginning: how to create a resource, configure a virtual network, or assign a role belongs to the administrator rung, and those facts are assumed here — appearing only as brief retrieval checks before an expert decision stands on them. If you cannot yet operate Azure confidently at administrator level, the honest path is the lower seat first.
What you will learn
- Design the governed ground first: management groups, subscriptions, and landing zones aligned to governance, billing, and blast radius
- Design identity and authorization for the day the credential leaks — least privilege in fact, with elevation that is eligible-only, time-boxed, and logged
- Choose and protect data by access pattern: stores, relational shapes, messaging and pipelines, key custody, and residency matched to the grade
- Engineer survival honestly: RPO and RTO as business numbers, and availability promised only as the composite you computed
- Host, connect, and secure workloads by shape — compute, APIs, private network paths, and layered security with no single control carrying the risk
- Move and price the estate as design work: migration in waves from evidence, a cost model on every diagram, and a trade-off ledger behind every decision
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Azure Solutions Architect Expert Readiness (AZ-305), in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Governed Landing Zone and The Architecture That Survives Challenge
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for administrators who must become architects
Azure administrators who hold, or could pass, the administrator rung — who can operate the platform and need to learn to design on it and to answer at expert altitude; and cloud architects and senior engineers who design Azure estates in their work and want their design judgment examined, structured, and made defensible — in the examination and in the boardroom alike.
Platform and governance leads — responsible for landing zones, identity, and policy across many subscriptions, who need the enterprise-scale patterns stated as decisions with trade-offs, not as product tours.
Technical leads preparing a team for enterprise Azure adoption or migration — who must be able to explain, to finance, to risk, and to auditors, why the estate is shaped as it is. This course assumes administrator-level Azure fluency throughout; it teaches how to decide whether you should build, at what scale, under what guardrails, and at what price.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with Landing Zones and the Management Group Hierarchy
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Azure Solutions Architect Expert Readiness (AZ-305) is Signature Course No. 506. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.