1. What is Azure?
- Azure is a cloud computing platform and service provided by Microsoft, offering a wide range of services such as computing, analytics, storage and networking. It enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications and services through Microsoft's global network of data centers.
2. What are the core services offered by Azure?
- The core services offered by Azure include compute services (such as Virtual Machines and App Services), networking services, storage services, databases, analytics, and AI services, as well as developer tools and management solutions.
3. Explain the concept of Azure Resource Manager (ARM).
- Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the deployment and management service for Azure resources. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure account. It also allows you to manage the resources during their entire lifecycle.
4. What is Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)?
- Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are on-demand, scalable computing resources provided by Azure. They allow users to create and use virtualized computing instances in the cloud, enabling a wide range of computing solutions, including development and testing environments, application hosting, and data processing.
5. What are Azure App Services?
- Azure App Services is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering for building, deploying, and scaling web apps and APIs. It provides built-in features for tasks such as authentication, authorization, and deployment, allowing developers to focus on building the core functionality of their applications.
6. Describe Azure Blob storage.
- Azure Blob storage is a scalable object storage service for large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. It is highly durable and can be used to store and serve documents, images, videos, and other types of files.
7. Explain the purpose of Azure SQL Database.
- Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service provided by Microsoft. It is built on the SQL Server database engine and is designed for scalable, secure, and highly available relational data storage in the cloud.
8. What is Azure Active Directory?
- Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service. It provides features such as single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, and integration with thousands of SaaS applications.
9. What is Azure Functions?
- Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables users to run event-triggered code without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure. It is used for building applications with an event-driven architecture.
10. Describe Azure Virtual Networks.
- Azure Virtual Networks allow users to create isolated and secure network environments in the cloud. This enables users to define their own IP address space, control traffic flow, and connect Azure resources, on-premises resources, and the internet.
11. What is Azure Cosmos DB?
- Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed multi-model database service provided by Microsoft. It is designed to provide low-latency, high-availability, and global distribution of data, with support for multiple data models including document, key-value, graph, and column-family.
12. Explain Azure Identity and Access Management (IAM).
- Azure Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the service used to manage access to resources in Azure. It allows organizations to grant specific permissions to users, groups, or applications, and control who has access to resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to.
13. What are Azure Cognitive Services?
- Azure Cognitive Services are a set of APIs, SDKs, and services available in Azure that enable developers to build intelligent applications by leveraging capabilities such as vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search.
14. Describe Azure Key Vault.
- Azure Key Vault is a service that provides secure storage of keys, secrets, certificates, and other sensitive information. It allows for the centralized management of application secrets and keys, and helps to control their distribution.
15. What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service provided by Microsoft. It simplifies deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications using Kubernetes, and provides integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities.
16. What is Azure DevOps?
- Azure DevOps is a set of modern development services offered by Microsoft. It provides tools for planning, developing, testing, and deploying applications, including features such as version control, build and release management, and agile planning tools.
17. Explain the concept of Azure Logic Apps.
- Azure Logic Apps is a cloud-based service that enables users to automate and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows across different applications and services without requiring extensive coding.
18. What is Azure Storage Queues?
- Azure Storage Queues is a message queuing service in Azure that helps to decouple application components for improved scalability and reliability. It enables asynchronous communication between application components and services.
19. Describe Azure Event Grid.
- Azure Event Grid is a fully-managed event routing service that simplifies the development of event-driven applications. It allows for the consumption of events from any source and routing them to any destination, including Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and more.
20. What are Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs?
- Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise integration message broker. It provides reliable message queuing and durable publish-subscribe capabilities that connect applications, services, and devices.
- Azure Event Hubs is a big data streaming platform and event ingestion service provided by Azure that can receive and process millions of events per second.
21. Explain the purpose of Azure Cognitive Search.
- Azure Cognitive Search is a fully-managed search-as-a-service cloud solution. It allows developers to easily add a sophisticated search experience over their content, including websites, databases, and documents, using features such as full-text search, filtering, scoring, and faceted navigation.
22. What is Azure API Management?
- Azure API Management is a platform provided by Microsoft to manage APIs. It enables organizations to publish, secure, transform, maintain, and monitor API traffic. It also provides developer portals for API discovery and consumption.
23. Describe Azure Redis Cache.
- Azure Redis Cache is a distributed, in-memory key-value store that provides high-performance data storage. It is based on the popular open-source Redis cache and can be used to build highly responsive applications by caching frequently accessed data.
24. What are Azure HDInsight and Azure Databricks?
- Azure HDInsight is a fully managed cloud service that makes it easy to process big data using popular open-source frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive, HBase, and more.
- Azure Databricks is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform optimized for Azure. It allows for the creation of fully managed Spark clusters and collaborative workspaces to simplify data engineering, data science, and machine learning tasks.
25. Explain the purpose of Azure Virtual Desktop.
- Azure Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive desktop and app virtualization service provided by Azure. It allows users to deploy and scale Windows desktops and apps on Azure, providing remote access to desktop environments and applications from various devices.
26. Describe Azure Load Balancer and Application Gateway.
- Azure Load Balancer is a layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple VMs within a computing service, providing high availability and network performance.
- Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables users to manage traffic to web applications by performing layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) routing, URL-based routing, SSL termination, and more.
27. What is the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
- Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a global content delivery network service provided by Microsoft. It accelerates the delivery of web content to users through a network of edge servers located around the world, ensuring better performance, scalability, and availability.
28. What are Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Data Factory?
- Azure Data Lake Storage is a scalable and secure data lake storage solution for big data analytics. It can store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data of any size.
- Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that enables the creation of data-driven workflows for orchestrating and automating data movement and data transformation.
29. Explain Azure Site Recovery.
- Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provided by Azure. It enables the replication of VMs and physical servers to Azure, allowing for the failover and failback of workloads to and from Azure in the event of a disaster.
30. What are Azure IoT Hub and Azure Sphere?
- Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed service that enables secure and scalable bi-directional communication between IoT devices and the cloud. It allows users to establish reliable and secure communication streams with their IoT devices.
- Azure Sphere is a secured, high-level application platform with built-in communication and security features for internet-connected devices. It comprises a custom Linux-based OS, secure connectivity, and a cloud-based security service, ensuring the security of IoT devices.
31. Describe Azure Stream Analytics.
- Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time event processing engine that enables the development of event-driven applications. It can process and analyze streaming data from devices, sensors, applications, and infrastructure, allowing for real-time insights and actions.
32. What is Azure Firewall?
- Azure Firewall is a cloud-based network security service that protects Azure Virtual Network resources. It provides stateful and network traffic filtering to control and monitor traffic flow to and from resources, helping to secure applications and data.
33. Explain the concept of Azure CDN and Azure Traffic Manager.
- Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) was previously covered. I'll describe Azure Traffic Manager here:
- Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables the distribution of incoming traffic across multiple endpoints. It helps to improve application responsiveness, availability, and resilience by directing users to the closest or best-performing endpoint.
34. What are Azure Managed Disks?
- Azure Managed Disks are a type of virtual hard disk storage for Azure VMs that simplifies disk management. They abstract the management of storage accounts and provide features such as data redundancy, security, and ease of scale, enabling the creation of virtual machines without managing storage accounts.
35. Describe Azure Data Box and Azure Data Box Edge.
- Azure Data Box is a family of secure, ruggedized, and tamper-resistant appliances provided by Azure for offline data transfer to and from Azure. These appliances are designed to simplify and speed up large data transfer to the cloud.
- Azure Data Box Edge is an on-premises server that integrates the compute, storage, and network capabilities of Azure. It allows for data processing, analysis, and machine learning on the edge, as well as efficient data transfer to Azure.
36. What is Azure Backup?
- Azure Backup is a scalable backup service provided by Azure that protects data in the cloud and on-premises. It centralizes backup management and enables data backup and recovery for virtual machines, file shares, SQL databases, and more, ensuring data resilience and business continuity.
37. Explain the purpose of Azure Front Door.
- Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry-point service that helps improve the performance, reliability, and security of web applications. It provides intelligent traffic routing, SSL offload, and web application acceleration for seamless user experiences.
38. What is Azure Virtual WAN and Azure VPN Gateway?
- Azure Virtual WAN is a networking service that provides optimized and automated branch-to-branch connectivity through globally distributed hubs. It simplifies large-scale branch connectivity and enables secure and reliable network connectivity across Azure and the internet.
- Azure VPN Gateway provides secure cross-premises connectivity, connecting on-premises networks to Azure through site-to-site VPNs and secure point-to-site VPN connections.
39. Describe Azure ExpressRoute.
- Azure ExpressRoute is a service that enables private connectivity between on-premises infrastructure and Azure data centers. It provides dedicated, higher-throughput, and more reliable connections compared to typical internet-based connections, allowing for extended control over network performance and latency.
40. What are Azure API for FHIR and Azure Health Bot?
- Azure API for FHIR is a fully managed, standards-based API for health data interoperability provided by Azure. It enables the exchange of healthcare data using the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, facilitating healthcare app development and data integration.
- Azure Health Bot is a cloud-based AI-powered conversational bot service that provides virtual health assistants for healthcare organizations. It offers customizable pre-built healthcare bot templates for a variety of scenarios, enabling efficient and automated patient engagement and support.
41. Explain the concept of Azure Database for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MariaDB.
- Azure Database for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MariaDB are fully managed database services provided by Azure that offer support for these popular open-source database platforms. They provide features such as high availability, automatic backups, scalability, security, and compatibility with the respective database engines, enabling developers to focus on application development without managing the underlying infrastructure.
42. What is Azure Search?
- Azure Search is a fully managed search-as-a-service offered by Azure. It enables users to build powerful search capabilities into applications, websites, and other content sources. Azure Search provides features such as full-text search, filtering, faceted navigation, and powerful indexing to deliver relevant search results to end-users.
43. What are Azure Batch and Azure Service Fabric?
- Azure Batch is a cloud-based job scheduling service that allows users to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. It provides management and scheduling of batch computing jobs and enables the efficient execution of compute-intensive tasks.
- Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that simplifies the development, deployment, and management of scalable and reliable microservices and containerized applications. It provides features for stateful and stateless microservices, reliable scaling, and health monitoring.
44. Describe Azure Container Instances and Azure Container Registry.
- Azure Container Instances is a serverless containerized application service provided by Azure. It allows users to easily run containers without managing the infrastructure, providing fast and efficient deployment of applications.
- Azure Container Registry is a private, secure, and scalable Docker container registry provided by Azure. It enables the storage and management of container images, allowing for containerized application deployment and management.
45. What is Azure Quantum?
- Azure Quantum is a full-stack, open cloud ecosystem that unites quantum software, solutions, and hardware provided by Microsoft and its partners. It aims to enable quantum computing impact on real-world problems by providing cloud access to quantum hardware and software, coupled with a growing quantum ecosystem.
46. Explain the purpose of Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel.
- Azure Security Center is a unified security management system that provides advanced threat protection across cloud workloads, hybrid environments, and IoT systems. It offers security posture management, threat protection, and security recommendations to help users prevent, detect, and respond to security threats.
- Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) service provided by Azure. It allows users to collect, detect, investigate, and respond to security threats using advanced AI and threat intelligence, providing a central platform for security operations and incident management.
47. What are Azure Information Protection and Azure Multi-Factor Authentication?
- Azure Information Protection is a cloud-based solution that helps organizations classify, label, and protect sensitive information, ensuring that data is protected across on-premises, cloud, and mobile environments.
- Azure Multi-Factor Authentication is a method of verifying user identity by requiring multiple forms of verification. It provides an additional layer of security by requiring users to present two or more forms of authentication, such as a password and a phone call or SMS verification code.
48. Describe Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints.
- Azure Policy is a service that allows organizations to create, assign, and manage policies to enforce compliance with corporate standards and regulatory requirements. It helps ensure that resources in Azure adhere to organizational standards and service level agreements.
- Azure Blueprints is a service that enables the creation of reusable governance definitions for cloud environments. It allows organizations to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that adhere to standards, patterns, and requirements, streamlining the deployment and management of compliant environments.
49. What is Azure Arc?
- Azure Arc is a set of technologies that extends Azure's management and services to any infrastructure. It enables the management of resources running on-premises, at the edge, or in multi-cloud environments using Azure management tools and services, providing a consistent and unified management experience.
50. Explain the purpose of Azure Cost Management and Billing.
- Azure Cost Management and Billing is a set of tools and services that help organizations monitor, manage, and optimize cloud spending in Azure. It provides cost analysis, budgeting, and optimization recommendations, enabling users to understand and control cloud costs effectively.