Microsoft retired AZ-204 and its renewal assessment on 31 July 2026, and AI-200 is what replaced it. Search interest shows people noticed: the exam code went from around 100 searches a month at the start of the year to 880 in July and August. The exam is called Developing AI Cloud Solutions on Azure and passing it earns Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate. It is 120 minutes, proctored, 700 to pass, with the usual free annual renewal on Microsoft Learn. The skills outline has four parts.
Containerized solutions (20 to 25%) covers Azure Container Registry and ACR Tasks, App Service containers, Container Apps with revisions and KEDA autoscaling, and AKS deployments from manifests. Data (25 to 30%) is where the AI label comes from: Cosmos DB for NoSQL including embeddings, vector similarity search and change feed processors; Azure Database for PostgreSQL with pgvector, index tuning and RAG patterns using metadata filters; and Azure Managed Redis for caching and vector indexing. Connecting services (20 to 25%) is Service Bus with dead-letter handling, Event Grid and Azure Functions. Security and monitoring (20 to 25%) covers Key Vault rotation, App Configuration, OpenTelemetry tracing and KQL. My honest take is that the name oversells the AI part and undersells the rest.
There is nothing about calling a model, choosing one, prompting it or evaluating its output. What you get is the plumbing around a retrieval system: where the vectors live, how much it costs in request units, how to keep the index fresh when data changes, how to queue slow work and how to trace a request through it all. Having watched plenty of RAG prototypes fall over in production for exactly these reasons, I think that is the more valuable half to certify. The pgvector objectives on reducing compute overhead and sizing memory for vector workloads are the kind of thing people usually learn the hard way. The weak spots are breadth and timing.
The exam assumes hands-on use of a lot of services, and the Learn paths were still being filled in when it went live. There was no practice assessment at the time of writing. If you already hold AZ-204 it stays valid until it expires, but you cannot renew it, so you will be sitting this eventually. If you want the model and agent side, the matching exam is AI-103 (Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer). For most Azure back-end developers I would take AI-200 first, since it is closer to the work you already do.