Top 30+ Azure Interview Questions & Answers

 

1. What is cloud computing?

It is the "storage," "management," and "processing" of data using servers connected to the internet. The difference is that we use someone else's servers to complete our assignment rather than our own, and we pay them for the time we use them.

2. What are the various cloud deployment models?

The three cloud deployment models are as follows:

• Public Cloud: Our cloud provider owns the infrastructure, and the server we are utilizing can be a multi-tenant system.
• Private cloud: We own the infrastructure, or our cloud provider only provides that service. For instance, hosting our website on our servers or using a dedicated server from the cloud provider.
• Hybrid Cloud: This type of cloud computing refers to using both public and private clouds simultaneously. For instance, you may host your company's website for the general public on the public cloud yet store confidential data on your own internal servers. A hybrid cloud would be this kind of configuration.

3. In Azure, define role instance.

A role instance is a virtual computer where application code is run in conjunction with running role specifications. In accordance with the specification in the cloud service configuration files, a role may have more than one instance.

4. What are various cloud service roles provided by Azure?

A collection of application and configuration files make up cloud service roles. Azure offers two different categories of roles:

• Web role: This offers an Internet Information Services (IIS) dedicated web server for hosting and automatically deploying front-end websites.
• Employee role: These roles often don't require IIS and assist the applications hosted within them in the running asynchronously for longer periods of time while remaining independent of user interactions. They are also perfect for running background operations. The programs are administered independently of one another.

5. What is Azure Resource Manager?

A service offered by Azure for administration and application deployment in Azure is called Azure Resource Manager.

The resource manager offers the management layer that aids in the creation, modification, or deletion of resources in the Azure subscription account by the developer. When we need to manage access restrictions, and locks, ensure the security of the resources after deployment, and organize those resources, this function is quite helpful.

6. What is Azure Diagnostics API?

We may gather diagnostic information from apps operating on Azure, such as performance monitoring, system event logs, etc., with the use of the Azure Diagnostics API.

The cloud service roles must have Azure Diagnostics enabled in order to observe the data verbosely. The diagnostics data can create performance metric warnings and enhanced visual chart representations for monitoring.

7. Explain the features of Windows Azure?

Some features of Windows Azure are:

• Scalability: Allows easy scaling of resources to meet demand
   
• Global Reach: Wide network of data centers for low-latency access global
   
• Hybrid Capabilities: Integrates with on-premises environments for hybrid solutions
   
• Security and Compliance: Strong security measures, encryption, and compliance with industry standards
   
• Diverse Service Offerings: Comprehensive range of services from compute to AI and IoT
   
• DevOps Integration: Tools for streamlined development, testing, and deployment
   
• AI and Machine Learning: Robust services for data-driven insights and automation

8. Differentiate between Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Microsoft Azure and AWS are top cloud providers. Azure seamlessly integrates with Microsoft products, preferred by organizations in the Microsoft ecosystem. AWS, market leader, offers a broader third-party ecosystem and a larger global presence. Choice depends on existing tech stacks and specific organizational needs.
 

9. Define Azure SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

The Azure SLA is a contract that ensures or guarantees that access to a cloud service is guaranteed for at least 99.95% of the time when two or more role instances of a role are installed on Azure.

Additionally, it adds that 99.9% of the time, such processes will be detected, and corrective action will be performed for them if the role instance process is not operating. Depending on the pricing structure of the relevant Azure services, Azure credits us a portion of our monthly expenses if the assurances mentioned above are not met at any time.

10. What is NSG?

Network Security Group, or NSG, is a collection of ACL (Access Control List) rules that either permit or prohibit network traffic from reaching subnets, network interface cards (NICs) connected to a subnet or both. The ACL rules are applied to all the Virtual Machines in the subnet when NSG is attached to it. By directly linking NSG to a certain NIC, one can restrict traffic to that NIC.

11. Azure Resource Manager allows for the construction of VMs in Virtual Networks that were established using the traditional deployment method. False or True?

False. 

Azure Resource Manager does not allow for the construction of VMs in Virtual Networks that were established using the traditional deployment method.

Intermediate Azure Interview Questions

12. What is Azure Redis Cache?

High-performance caching service Azure Redis Cache offers an in-memory data store for quicker data retrieval. It is based on the open-source Redis cache implementation. Throughput is increased, and latency is decreased since fewer sluggish I/O operations are required. Additionally, it offers security, scalability, and high availability.

13. What are VM (virtual machine) scale sets in Azure?

Azure compute resources called virtual machine scale sets can be used to deploy and manage a collection of identical VMs. Scale sets are made to provide real autoscale with uniform VM configurations, so pre-provisioning VMs is unnecessary. Large-scale services aimed at big computing, big data, and containerized workloads are so simpler to develop.

14. Are data disks supported within scale sets?

Yes. Every VM in a scale set can have a defined associated data disc configuration. Other possibilities for data storage include:

• Cloud files (SMB shared drives)
• Temp drive (local, not backed by Azure Storage)
• OS drive 
• Data service Azure (for example, Azure tables, Azure blobs)
• An outside data service (for example, a remote database)

15. What are Availability Sets?

A logical collection of VMs called an availability set gives Azure insight into how your application is designed to offer redundancy and availability. To support a highly available application and adhere to the 99.95% Azure SLA, it is advised that two or more VMs be established within an availability set. For unplanned maintenance events when a single VM is used with Azure Premium Storage, the Azure SLA is in effect. 

16. What is a Fault Domain?

A fault domain is a logical collection of the underlying hardware that, like a rack in an on-premise data centre, shares a single power source and network switch. The Azure platform automatically distributes our VMs among various fault domains as we construct them inside an availability set. This strategy reduces the effects of potential hardware malfunctions, network failures, or power outages. 

17. What is an Update Domain?

An update domain is a logical collection of the underlying hardware that can reboot or go through maintenance simultaneously. The Azure platform automatically distributes your virtual machines among these update domains when you construct them within an availability set. With this strategy, you can be sure that while the Azure platform is undergoing routine maintenance, at least one instance of your application will always be active. During planned maintenance, the restart order of the update domains may not be sequential, but only one update domain is rebooted at once. 

18. Do Azure availability sets work with scale sets?

Yes. An implicit availability set with five fault domains and five update domains is known as a scale set. More than 100 VMs in a scale set will typically span numerous placement groups, which are analogous to multiple availability sets. The same virtual network may house both a scale set and an availability set of virtual machines. The placement of control node VMs, which frequently require special configuration, in an availability set and data nodes in the scale set is typical. 

19. What are break-fix issues?

An industry phrase for technical issues is "break-fix issue," which refers to the effort needed to support a technology when it usually malfunctions and needs assistance from a support group to get back in working order. 

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20. What is Azure Active Directory?

Azure Active Directory is a mechanism for managing identities and access. It is employed to give our employees access to particular goods and services within your network. For instance, Twitter, Salesforce.com, etc. There is some built-in support for applications in the gallery of Azure AD that can be added immediately. 

21. What happens when we exhaust the failed attempts limit for authenticating ourselves via Azure AD?

To lock accounts, we employ a more advanced technique. The request's IP address determines this and the passwords submitted. The duration of the lockout is also affected by the likelihood of an assault. 

22. What is Azure Databricks?

A unified analytics platform called Azure Databricks is offered by Microsoft in association with Databricks. It is a potent tool for big data and machine learning applications because it blends data engineering and data science capabilities, providing a collaborative environment for data professionals to handle, analyze, and visualize enormous datasets.

23. What is Azure Data Lake?

Microsoft's Azure Data Lake is a scalable and safe cloud-based storage option. It enables businesses to store and analyze enormous amounts of data of different forms. It offers excellent performance and integration with analytics services like Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics and is tailored for large data applications.

24. What is Azure Data Factory?

Microsoft's Azure Data Factory is an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and data integration service that runs in the cloud. It makes it possible to build, plan, and manage data pipelines for transferring and transforming data between different sources and destinations, both locally and in the cloud. It supports a variety of data processing tasks.

25. Where can we find a list of various pre-integrated applications with the Azure AD and their capabilities?

Around 2600 pre-integrated applications are available in Azure AD. Single sign-on is supported by all pre-integrated applications (SSO). SSO allows us to access our apps using our organizational credentials. Some apps additionally allow for automated provisioning and de-provisioning. 

26. How can we use applications with Azure AD that we’re using on-premises?

Azure AD provides a simple and secure way to connect to the web applications of our choice. There is no requirement for a VPN or to update our network infrastructure to access these applications; in the same manner, we access our SaaS apps in Azure AD.

Advanced Azure Interview Questions

27. How can the Windows Azure platform be divided into its three principal segments?

The three primary sections of the Windows Azure platform are as follows:

• Compute Services: This category offers a variety of virtualization alternatives for executing applications, including Virtual Machines, Azure Functions, and Azure Kubernetes Service.
   
• Storage Services: It includes a range of data storage options to meet various data requirements, including Blob Storage, Table Storage, File Storage, and Disk Storage.
   
• App Services: This market category consists of Platform as a Service (PaaS) products like Logic Apps, Azure App Service, and API Management that make it easier to create, integrate, and deploy applications.
   

28. What are Azure Service Fabrics?

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems framework for packaging, deploying, and managing scalable and dependable microservices. Service Fabric also solves the significant issues associated with the development and management of cloud applications. Developers and administrators may avoid difficult infrastructure issues and concentrate on building mission-critical, demanding workloads that are scalable, reliable, and managed. Service Fabric is the next-generation middleware platform for developing and maintaining this tier-1, cloud-scale enterprise applications.

29. What is a VNet?

In the cloud, a VNet is a representation of our own network. It logically separates our cloud-based instances from the rest of our resources.

30. What are the differences between Directory Administrator and Subscription Administrator?

• When registering for Azure, one is automatically given the Subscription Administrator role. An Azure subscription administrator can log in with either a Microsoft account or a work or school account from that directory. The management of services in the Azure portal is permitted for this role. You can add people as co-admins if they need to log in and use the same subscription to access services.
• In order to administer the directory- and identity-related functionalities, Azure AD offers a diverse set of admin roles. The Azure portal or the Azure classic portal's numerous capabilities will be accessible to these administrators. What an admin can do, such as create or update users, delegate administrative rights to others, reset user passwords, manage user licences, or administer domains, depends on their job.

31. What are the limitations for customers for using managed disks?

The restrictions connected to storage accounts are eliminated by Managed Disks. However, there is a default cap of 2000 managed discs per subscription.

32. What is the difference between Storage Queues and Service Bus Queues?

• The Azure Storage Queue is easy to use, and developers report positive results. The Azure Storage Emulator is used locally, and debugging is simple. We can quickly view the top 32 messages in Azure Storage Queues thanks to the tooling, and if the messages are in XML or JSON, we can view their contents right from Visual Studio. Additionally, these queues can be cleaned of their contents, which is particularly helpful for QA and development tasks.
• The Azure Service Bus Queues are sophisticated and supported by numerous practical methods, making them enterprise-worthy. They can forward messages to other Queues and Topics because they are a part of the Service Bus. Because they include a built-in dead-letter queue and a time limit that we set, mails are not immediately deleted after seven days.
• Additionally, Azure Service Bus Queues have the option to automatically delete themselves after a defined period of inactivity. When we build Queues for each user, this function is incredibly useful because it automatically cleans up Queues for users who haven't engaged with them in the last month. It's also a fantastic strategy to reduce expenditures. Paying for storage that we don't need shouldn't be necessary. The maximum size of these queues is 80 GB. Once we've hit this cap, exceptions will start coming into our application.

33. What is the Redis database?

Just a logical division of data within the same Redis instance constitutes a Redis database. All databases use the shared cache memory, and the amount of memory actually used by a particular database depends on the keys and values that are kept there. A C6 cache, for instance, contains 53 GB of memory. We have the option of distributing the 53 GB across different databases or putting it all in one database. 

34. Can we add an existing VM to any availability set?

No. We must build the VM inside the set if we want it to be a part of the availability set. After a VM is constructed, there is currently no way to add it to an availability set. 

35. How much storage can we use with a virtual machine?

Up to 1 TB can fit on each data disc. Depending on the size of the virtual machine, you can use a certain number of data discs.

The new and highly recommended disc storage option for use with Azure Virtual Machines is called Azure Managed Disks. Each Virtual Machine can use a different Managed Disk. The two distinct categories of managed discs that provide persistent storage are premium and standard managed discs. 

36. What is Azure Search?

Azure Search is a cloud search-as-a-service option that transfers server and infrastructure administration to Microsoft, leaving you with an up-and-running service that you can use to add search to your online or mobile application after populating it with your data. Using a straightforward REST API or.NET SDK, Azure Search enables you to quickly add a powerful search experience to your applications without maintaining search infrastructure or becoming an expert in search.