Azure Interview Questions and Answers

• IAAS– Infrastructure as a service
• PAAS – Platform as a Service
• SAAS– Software as a service

The IaaS service computes capacity, storage, networking, or any combination thereof that enables customers to run their applications. The user has complete power over physical resources allocated by the software. IaaS offerings include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine, Rackspace Cloud Servers, Windows Azure, etc.

PaaS refers to providing a platform for developing, deploying, hosting, managing, and running applications online using a virtual machine. It allows developers to focus on building applications instead of worrying about infrastructure management. PaaS offerings include Google App Engine, Heroku, OpenShift, etc.

It is a software delivery model where companies provide applications on-demand to end-users rather than owning all the computing resources needed to operate them. SAAS offerings may be provided as part of traditional IT infrastructures or delivered as stand-alone services. Some common examples include Salesforce, Workday, Zendesk, etc.

Cloud Computing is the practice of outsourcing data center workloads through virtualization and utility computing platforms. In general, it involves provisioning computational resources dynamically at a reduced cost.

Azure Cloud Service is one type of cloud computing offered by Microsoft Azure, which provides a collection of preconfigured virtual machines intended to make it easier for organizations to create, deploy, manage, and scale web apps.

By Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is a declarative configuration management tool that helps administrators configure, automate, and change resource configurations without manually updating them.

Virtual networks are an abstract logical representation of the topology of the hardware. A virtual network is a collection of isolated networks within one physical network. In this way, there’s no need to be concerned regarding IP addresses conflicting between two subnets.

• Public Cloud
• Private Cloud
• Hybrid cloud

You can use the same tools and technologies you’re already familiar with to build your applications in public clouds. Pay only for the amount you consume, which means you don’t need to think about the cost of capital like purchasing servers or installing the operating system. With this option, you retain your private data centers’ ownership and administration rights.

You host your server assets in private clouds and maintain complete control over them. Your organization owns and administers its environment, including security measures, backup solutions, disaster recovery procedures, etc.

In hybrid clouds, you combine both public and private cloud environments. You take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud while still maintaining complete control over your private data center. The public cloud acts like a giant storage system, helping you store large amounts of data. For instance, if you need to save many video files, you can put them in the cloud and retrieve them from any location.

• General Purpose
• Compute Optimized
• Memory-Optimized
• Storage Optimized
• GPU
• High-Performance Compute

General-purpose instances are designed to run various application workloads such as database, analytics, and batch processing. They provide standard I/O performance and memory capacity at lower prices than Compute Optimized instances.

Compute-optimized instances are designed to meet specific computing requirements. These instances typically offer higher burst rates than other instance types.

Memory-optimized instances are designed to maximize performance on memory-intensive tasks. They support high memory allocation but provide low CPU utilization.

Storage optimized instances are designed to optimize disk throughput to improve the availability and reliability of an application running on these instances.

Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are specialized processors that accelerate certain graphics operations. GPUs were originally made for computer games, but they’ve become increasingly important for business intelligence, machine learning, artificial intelligence, simulation, financial services, geospatial analysis, and scientific computing.

High-performance compute instances are designed to perform computationally intensive tasks, such as deep neural network training, virtual desktop infrastructure, or gaming. They also support high memory allocation with limited CPU utilization.

The GPU accelerator instance type provides accelerated hardware acceleration for Microsoft SQL Server 2016+ databases. Use the GPU accelerator when deploying databases that require fast query response time. It can be used to increase the performance of any app using Microsoft SQL Server.

Roles are groups of components within an Azure subscription. A role can include multiple virtual machines, websites, databases, storage accounts, load balancers, etc. When you provision resources across different roles, you assign permissions to those resources.

There are three main types of roles: Web Roles, Worker Roles, and Data Roles.

A web role is a group of worker roles that make up a website. Each web role has its own set of worker roles. You can use a single web role with multiple worker roles. For example, you could have a single web role that hosts websites for several customers. Or you could have multiple web roles that host websites for your organization’s internal users.

A worker role consists of a set of functions that execute a specific task. You can run many worker roles inside a web role. A single website might consist of hundreds of worker roles.

Data roles enable you to create tables, views, stored procedures, triggers, and other database objects in Azure. There are two types of data roles: standard and premium. Standard data roles are free to use. Premium data roles offer more features and higher resource limits than standard data roles.

The interconnected and interlinked nodes are often referred to as “domains” in cloud computing environments. These domains may represent physical locations, logical divisions of a company’s IT environment, or even abstract concepts like regions, availability zones, or clouds.

A fault domain refers to a collection of related VMs, storage accounts, or other resources that are deployed together on the same hypervisor. Fault domains provide resilience against VM failure because if one VM fails, the others will automatically failover to take over their workloads.

• DevOps is about continuous delivery of software from development through testing and into production.
• Azure DevOps is built around the idea of Continuous Delivery (CD) – automating deployment processes so teams can deploy code rapidly from one stage to another without manually checking in, building, testing, and deploying new changes and updates.
• This enables people to work faster and reduce errors, allowing them to focus on developing solutions instead of waiting for deployments.

Azure Active Directory is Microsoft’s identity management service. It provides identities for access control, authentication, authorization, and directory services.

Office 365 includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Office Communications Online. With these applications, you can easily connect to and collaborate with colleagues using Outlook, Skype for Business, Lync, SharePoint, Yammer, OneDrive, and other Office 365 applications.

Yes, but it would require manual creation of such an account.

Azure Data Factory is a fully managed ETL solution that lets you move data between any source and target. The service also supports streaming data integration.

Cognitive Services is a suite of cognitive APIs that help developers build intelligent apps, games, and experiences. The API gives developers the ability to power AI capabilities within their business applications.

Databricks is a platform for managing big data analytics. It helps users quickly get started with Hadoop, Spark, and other tools to analyse massive amounts of data.

• Azure Databricks SQL Analytics
• Azure Databricks Workspace

A data lake is where all your data resides and is accessible from different sources. You can store your data in multiple formats, including files, databases, and streams. The data lake offers real-time ingest, query, and analysis.

Service fabric is a highly available, secure, distributed system designed to run microservices. It has been architected to be resilient to failures by providing automatic recovery and self-healing.

Site recovery lets you easily migrate workloads to Azure while maintaining availability and security. It provides automated replication of virtual machines with no downtime.

Microsoft Azure stores unstructured data like images, videos, and documents on a scalable cloud infrastructure. It allows you to scale up or down as needed efficiently.

A container registry is a central repository for storing containerised applications. It simplifies development and operations by making it easy to find and use containers across the organisation.

End-to-end IT services are provided by Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform in the Microsoft cloud. Microsoft Azure offers a comprehensive set of features that make deploying, managing, and operating a broad range of applications easier.

• Storage accounts
• Blob storage
• Table storage
• Queue storage

• Service bus
• Access
• Caching
• Integration
• Composite

The AppFabric Application Proxy forwards requests to backend web servers hosted in-house or third-party cloud services. For example: If a request comes from the internet, the AppFabric Application Proxy sends the request to one of the backend servers for processing. The proxy passes the request back to the internet if the backend server cannot process the request.

Autoscaling enables you to define rules to adjust capacity based on demand automatically. Autoscaling policies allow you to specify thresholds such as CPU usage, memory utilisation, number of transactions per second, or storage size. When the threshold is crossed, scaling occurs.

• Resource manager – Managing resource groups and resources.
• Resource group – A collection of related resources and their properties.
• Resources – An object represents some entity that exists within Azure. Examples include websites, virtual networks, database instances, and so on.

Virtual networks provide private network connectivity for a single tenant. VPCs offer isolation among tenants and simplify management. They support multiple protocols, including Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN technologies.

• The standard tier is suitable for small businesses and home users. The cost is low compared to the premium tier.
• The premium tier is more suitable for medium-sized businesses and large enterprises. It has high scalability and higher reliability.

CSPack is a tool used for packing binaries into compressed archives. This helps reduce bandwidth requirements and improve deployment time. You can pack your own content or upload files from your local machine.

It records information about application health and performance metrics. These data points help administrators diagnose issues before they become serious problems. We can plan remediation strategies and act proactively to avoid downtime with this insight.

You can store any file in blob storage. Create a container with the name of your choice. Upload a file directly to the container using its URL address. Access the file through the blob’s URL address. In addition, you can create, list, delete, edit and download blobs at the containers level.

Service bus queues enable you to send messages to other applications. Applications can register themselves to receive messages by providing an endpoint URI. Once registered, the message will be stored in the queue until another application picks it up.

Depending on the destination, the traffic manager routes user traffic over the most appropriate path, either on-premises or in the cloud.

A table is a persistent store of data where rows represent entities. Entities are objects that have attributes like a name and value; these are key-value pairs. Tables in Windows Azure are different from Microsoft SQL Server tables in that entities do not need to be persisted separately. Entity values will persist even though they are detached from the row. Entities may be retrieved individually and grouped in collections.

• We’ll replace the failed drive with one similar size but without data.
• We’ll copy all the data off the failed drive onto our secondary storage, then we’ll replace the failing drive with one of lower capacity, if possible.
• We’ll replace the failing drive immediately and restore it from backups.
• We don’t have a backup solution. We’ll move data out of the failing drive into the secondary storage.
• If the failing drive is still in good condition, just replace it with another identical drive.

MOSS stands for Minimal SharePoint Online Solutions architecture.

1) A minimal MOSS solution consists of three primary components:

• Site Collection Features (SPF)
• Web Application Features (WAF).
• Role-based features.

TFS Build System in Azure is a service that provides continuous integration capabilities across multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and iOS. The builds run behind the scenes and automatically trigger whenever code changes are made to source control repositories. It also allows you to get results as soon as the build completes.

Azure App Service is a completely managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. This means that developers can focus on their apps while we take care of building, deploying, monitoring, scaling, and securing their apps.

Blob storage lets you upload binary files to your Azure storage account and access those files programmatically. Table storage enables you to store structured data such as strings or numbers in an Azure storage account and retrieve them programmatically.

To perform bulk operations in Azure, use Azure Data Factory v2.0. Using this tool, you can create a pipeline to import large amounts of data into Azure.

The answer depends on whether you want to connect to an instance of SQL Azure via its public IP address or through a VPN. SQL Azure instances connect through the Internet via a publicly accessible network by default. You might choose to configure a virtual private network (VPN) to enable users outside your organization (or even inside your own company) to directly connect to any SQL Azure database. When you set up a VPN connection, the user’s computer acts as a gateway server, enabling remote users to log on to SQL Azure databases.

Windows Azure Scheduler is a cloud application scheduler that can be used to automate recurring tasks. It can execute jobs at specified times, run on demand, or both.

Profiling in Azure is a feature which will help us understand how our applications work under different conditions and scenarios. Profiling helps identify performance bottlenecks, memory leaks, thread issues, etc.

The profiling reports help in:

• Identifying the cause of the slow down or other problems which may occur during execution.
• Helping in identifying where the bottleneck lies.

You can add more than one web role to your Azure VM. It’s recommended to have two or more web roles running on a single VM so that if one crashes or goes offline, another can pick up the slack. To do this, simply add additional web roles to your VM configuration. Each role has its unique URL and port.

Resource Manager is the new management interface for Azure services. As opposed to the classic management interface, the resource manager uses REST APIs as well as PowerShell cmdlets to manage resources. For example, you cannot open a portal and manually start/stop/delete VMs from it. Also, you need to go through the API calls to see all the details about the service.

These libraries provide support for most of the core functionality provided by Windows Azure, including:

• Creating a storage account
• Listing blobs within a storage account
• Uploading blobs to a storage account
• Downloading blobs from a storage account
• Retrieving metadata about a blob
• Manipulating access control lists for a blob
• Deleting blobs
• Copying blobs between accounts
• Encrypting blobs
• Setting blob lease expiry

An Application Gateway provides load balancing across multiple websites hosted on separate Web Apps. Cloud Services provide a scalable infrastructure for hosting Web Apps, providing several capabilities beyond basic website hosting, such as scalability, availability, high availability, redundancy, failover, and security.

DDoS Attacks happen when hackers send packets of data to overwhelm the servers with traffic and prevent legitimate requests from being processed. Azure protects itself against these types of attacks by using distributed denial of service protection technology. This allows us to use hardware firewalls to detect and block incoming traffic before reaching the backend.

Virtual Machines (VM) are isolated environments that host virtual machines and run the software. These virtual machines could be deployed on physical or cloud servers. Websites are a part of a site collection, and each website belongs to a particular Azure subscription. A website contains pages served on HTTP in response to user requests. A website also supports custom domains so users can access them directly. Custom DNS records can be used to route requests to specific sites.

Blob store supports storing binary files in a highly available and secure manner. It offers a simple interface for storing and retrieving large amounts of data. The Blob Store service is based on the concept of containers. Containers allow you to organize objects into groups to be accessed easily. You can create as many containers as needed and place objects inside them. An object can belong to only one container at any given time. Each object has its unique identifier called a “key”. Objects stored in the Blob Store are accessible via REST APIs. They are encrypted while moving between nodes but not while stored locally on your computer.

SQL Database – Provides reliable, scalable, real-time database storage. Supports both online transaction processing and batch processing workloads. SQL Database is optimized for OLTP workloads like transactional data warehousing, reporting, and analytics.

SQL Managed Instances – Provides scalable, multi-tenant, high-performance SQL Server instances. It provides managed services, including support, maintenance, monitoring, backups, etc.

SQL Data Warehouse – Offers a set of integrated tools for data warehouse development and management. It includes advanced analytics features and built-in ETL functionality.

There are four major database platforms: relational databases, document-oriented databases, key-value stores, and graph databases.

• Relational Databases are widely known and have been around since the 1960s. Document Oriented Databases are often referred to as NoSQL solutions because there is no standard schema.
• Key-Value Stores are similar to traditional hash tables, except that values are unordered.
• Graph databases provide a way to process relationships between data rather than just storing it.
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL is an example of a relational database running on top of Azure. Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed MongoDB database service supporting cross-region replication with geo-distributed capabilities. Azure HDInsight is a Microsoft Hadoop offering which runs on top of Azure.

The main difference between Azure Batch Runtime and the Azure Batch Service is that Azure Batch Service is a cloud service where multiple users submit jobs to run concurrently, and Azure Batch Runtime is a component of Azure Compute Cluster which is used to schedule when the user submitted job would be executed.

App Service Web Apps is a web application deployed on Windows or Linux servers. It provides a developer experience comparable to building websites using IIS. It offers a number of features such as scaling, custom domains, SSL certificates, load balancing, static website hosting, FTP uploads, etc.

Mobile Apps is a mobile app runtime environment. A mobile app built using this technology can run directly from a device without requiring installation. This allows developers to build applications targeting all kinds of devices ranging from Android phones to Apple iPads. The platform supports both iOS and Android operating systems.

API Apps enable you to expose your own APIs to various external applications such as third-party apps, web and mobile clients. You can use HTTP requests to call your APIs. API Apps also help you authenticate endpoints with OAuth2 authorization flows.

Redis is an open-source, in memory, non-relational, networked computing storage engine popularly used as a quick response cache. Azure Redis Cache uses the new native client library available in.NET Core 2.0.

A Redis database is a collection of keys and values stored in a RAM disk. There are two ways to access these values: getting the key or value itself or getting the value associated with a given key.

Log Analytics is a subscription-based real-time solution provided by Microsoft that monitors server logs to help you troubleshoot issues and gain insight into how your customers use your services. Log files generated by IIS, SQL Server, Tomcat, Application Insights, Elastic Search, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and other sources may be monitored.

It consists of four components: agents, alerts, dashboards, and operations. Agents collect and forward event logs from various sources to Log Analytics. Alerts detect anomalous behaviour, outages, failures, and attacks. Dashboards provide visualizations of collected data. Operations perform ad hoc analysis, send alerts, and set up subscriptions.

You need to download the corresponding.PST file and import it into the respective machine agent. Alternatively, you can configure the VMM NetworkPolicyAdvisor Agent to push events to Log Analytics by specifying an endpoint URL.

Monitor SQL Database Instances

• SQL Server provides several tools to manage the performance and availability of an instance, including:
• Activity Monitor-which displays current activity within an instance; performance Monitor-which measures resource utilization, Wait for Statistics, which shows whether a query waits and why; Resource Governor-which controls CPU allocations across multiple resources; diagnostic Tools- which reports problems; and Replication Health Tool, which replicates the status of one instance to another.

Virtual Network Switch (VNS) is a software layer between physical and logical switches. It emulates the same networking functionality on a host computer so that different types of networks can be managed together under a single management console.

Repositories allow users to store their documents locally, while powerhouse servers allow them to access those documents remotely. The powerhouse server is the central point of all user work. Repositories typically organize the documents by folder structure. In a nutshell, repositories hold individual folders, and they have full control over the contents inside those folders. While powerhouse servers hold collections of folders called libraries that contain folders and documents, they have no control over what goes in those libraries.

A virtual machine allows a guest operating system to run as if it was running directly on hardware. A hypervisor manages or virtualizes the hardware resources and makes sure that each virtual machine has its own processing resources. This means that when multiple guests are being hosted on the same host, the hypervisor allocates separate memory areas for each guest’s use.

Hyper-V and ESX are two different technologies used to create virtual machines. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s proprietary solution, whereas ESX is VMware’s open-source offering. Both offer similar features but with some differences in how they provide these functions. ESX provides remote management capabilities such as monitoring, configuration, and troubleshooting, whereas Hyper-V does not. Hyper-V integrates with Windows systems much better than ESX does.

Integration Runtime is a programming interface provided by Microsoft that enables developers to write code in C/VB/.NET languages to integrate business applications with SharePoint Online. This technology provides a set of services that enable programmatic communication between SharePoint and other apps like Office 365, Dynamics CRM, etc., through REST APIs. Integration Runtime helps in connecting external data sources such as databases and web services.

Single sign-on is a process where a user only needs to enter his credentials once to log into any application on the Internet. In the case of cloud computing, this is done using the SAML protocol.

OAuth 2.0 is a protocol designed to help users authorize third-party applications to access their user information without having to share their login details with that application. For example, you may want your friend to send you an email from your Outlook account but don’t want him to know your password. If he uses OAuth 2.0 to get access to your account, then your email will be sent automatically, and he won’t need to ask you for permission before sending it.

To configure a VNet, follow these steps:

• Log in to your Azure portal and click Networking from the left menu bar and Select Virtual Networks.
• Click Create a new virtual network.
• Enter a name for the virtual network and select a location
• From the drop-down list of subnet types, choose Public Subnet.
• Choose a resource group.
• Specify the size of the virtual network.
• Add required IP addresses.
• Save the changes when finished.

The purpose of Azure Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is to allow identity providers to authenticate users against another directory service. The federation server can act as the authentication proxy and pass messages back to the Identity Provider (IdP). It also supports Single Sign On (SSO), which allows a user to skip entering user credentials during subsequent interactions with the IdP. However, the main drawback of AD FS is that it requires a dedicated infrastructure component called Federation Server.

A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, typically servers, so that each target receives roughly equal traffic. A load balancer has a front end that accepts client requests and a backend that dispatches those requests to one of its available targets. The load balancer sends the request to one of the targets, waits for the response to arrive, and repeats the process until all targets have received the same number of requests.

The application gateway acts as a firewall to protect resources within the cloud. It ensures that all incoming data passes through the gateway to reach the destination. An Application gateway is not aware of the actual content of the data being transferred. It simply routes the message to the next hop. In contrast, a web application firewall (WAF) inspects every HTTP request and blocks any malicious activity such as cross-site scripting attacks.

Yes, we can use PowerShell cmdlets to interact with the Cloud shell. But, there is no support for some commands like “Get-AzureRmSubscription”, “Connect-AzAccount”, and “Remove-AzResourceGroup”. We need to use REST API or CLI to perform these operations.

Microsoft Azure Multi-Factor Authentication enables organizations to create strong security controls by requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) for accessing sensitive data. This helps prevent unauthorized access to confidential information. By using MFA, an organization can provide additional layers of protection for its assets. With this approach, only valid users who present two-factor authentication tokens can gain access.

No, Azure AD does not use SAML. Instead, it uses OAuth 2.0 standard.

Go to the Resource Groups blade and click on the name of the resource group you want to modify. Enter the new password twice and then click OK.

Token encryption is used when sending passwords in clear text from your app to your ADFS instance. Token encryption provides added security because it encrypts the input before it’s sent to the federation server.

Key vault stores cryptographic keys securely. These keys can be used to secure applications, services, networks, and devices. Using key vault makes it easier to manage and control the keys for different services, applications, and environments. You can store secrets in Azure Key Vault and access them directly from your apps without having to manage certificates and other infrastructure.

The key clock feature allows you to synchronize keys stored in Key Vault with a local machine’s clock. This way, if the local computer loses power or time gets reset, the keys are still safe.

B2C stands for Business to Customer Identity and Access Management solution. With Azure B2C, developers can quickly build identity management solutions that integrate business processes with customers, employees, partners, and suppliers. B2C offers customizable templates to help organizations implement any number of new customer experiences. For example, B2C includes features such as single sign-on, enterprise account provisioning, custom branding, personalization, and more.

If you don’t have many users but would like to give them a user experience similar to Microsoft 365 Personal/Home users, you might consider adding managed identities to your Azure Active Directory tenant. Managed identities allow you to choose between a self-service option and a directory based one which requires IT involvement. This article explains how to configure your Azure AD tenant for a self service configuration.

S2S federation is the process of connecting cloud resources via mutual trust agreements established by web browsers. Applications such as Office 365 leverage S2S federation to provide seamless integration with their hosted counterparts, so they can make the best use of each others’ capabilities.