25 Azure Fundamentals Interview Questions & Answers

This question shows the developer's knowledge of computer terminology.

Authentication is the process of identifying an individual and making sure she is who she says she is when this person wishes to access a secured resource. It involves challenging the individual for legitimate credentials before being allowed access to the resource. Once the person has been authenticated, the process of authorization determines what level of access the individual has to that resource. If the person wishes to access an Azure file share, they may have full access rights (read, update, delete) or just read. This can be determined by what role an administrator has assigned to that individual.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of what Azure provides.

Azure IoT (Internet of Things) services allow smart devices containing sensors, for example, to send that data through the internet and a specific endpoint in Azure. This data can then be presented in reports for monitoring the status of the devices, review temperature and humidity readings, monitor motion and touch sensors, etc. IoT Central is the dashboard for reporting and controlling your IoT devices. It provides a convenient user interface for reporting and device control and monitoring. IoT Hub is the messaging conduit between your IoT application and your devices. Azure Sphere is a complete end-to-end IoT solution providing the necessary hardware and software in the scenario where an organization needs to build a complete solution from scratch. Sphere can then work with an IoT hub for message transmission and retrieval.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

Azure Key Vault allows administrators or those with the proper privileges, to securely store and retrieve password credentials, API keys, certificates, or cryptographic keys. Access to the vault can be granted at various levels or roles. Key vault data transmission is enforced by the TLS protocol so that the data in transit is encrypted. Keys can be accessed by applications programmatically, through direct access, by a user, or a combination of the two.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

The following are the different support levels for Azure users:

Basic - This plan is available for all users and does not require any additional fees. It provides billing and subscription management support, access to 24/7 self-help online material, no limit on support ticket submission, access to Azure Advisor, and access to Azure health status and notifications.

-- The next levels of support require additional subscription fees and include all services described in the basic plan above.

Developer -- access to support is available by email only during business hours. Case and severity response times with minimal impact, occur within eight business hours. General architectural support guidance is provided.

Standard -- features described in the basic and developer tiers are included. 24/7 access to support is available through email and phone. Shorter response times are included for severity cases (C - within eight business hours, B - within four hours, A - within one hour; "A" being the most critical)

Professional Direct -- all features above are available. Severity C cases include a response within 4 hours, severity B with 2 hours, and severity A within one hour. Architectural support is provided by ProDirect delivery managers. Support tickets can be generated programmatically through an Azure API. Training by Azure engineers through webinars is available in this tier. Proactive guidance is also provided by ProDirect delivery managers.

Premier - this is the highest level of support. It includes everything in the Professional Direct level but 24/7 technical support with a 15 minute response time. Guidance is offered by a dedicated technical support manager.

This question shows the developer's understanding of Azure regulations.

The Azure government provides dedicated cloud infrastructure to US government agencies at the federal, state, and local level, as well as to their partners. Azure government services follow numerous regulations such as FedRamp, NIST 800.171, ITAR, IRS 1075, DoD L4, and CJIS to name a few. All hardware and networks are located in the US. The Chinese government also has strict regulations and Azure accommodates these requirements by providing the Azure China 21Vianet. All hardware and networks are owned and operated by Shanghai Blue Cloud Technology Co., Ltd.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

Azure resource locks display a warning when a modification is attempted on a resource to which it is applied. You can set the lock level as "CanNotDelete" which disallows anyone from deleting the resource or "ReadOnly", which does not allow any modification of the resource. Resource locks can be applied at the subscription and resource group levels as well as to individual resources. Only if the lock is removed can any change be made to the resource.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

Resource tags provide a way to organize your resources, resource groups, and subscriptions into categories by creating meaningful descriptions and assigning those tags accordingly. For example, you can apply tags to VMs and storage accounts according to development, QA, Test, and production environments. You can then retrieve tagged resources programmatically through Power Shell/CLI or through your Azure portal.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

Azure Sentinel consumes data from on-prem and other cloud providers and uses AI to investigate potential threats, allowing administrators to address security holes before they become issues. By leveraging Microsoft's numerous years of cyber-security work, Sentinel has a vast set of data it can use to create a robust AI model for proactive security planning. Sentinel is a SaaS offering, so you only pay for what you use.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

Azure Policy is a service that allows an administrator to define how resources are created. Some built-in policies are:
- Allowed storage account SKU (storage keeping unit): determines if a storage account is defined within an allowed set of sizes. If not, creation is denied
- Allowed resource type: provides a list of acceptable resources which can be created
- Allowed locations: defines the specific location in which resources can be created.
- Allowed virtual machine SKU: similar to the storage account SKU, the defines a specific set up VM SKU's that can be created.

You can also group policies together, which are called policy initiatives.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

Azure Service Health monitor notifies tenant administrators of any service incidents that may affect your resources and allows an administrator to mitigate downtime. This service can be configured to notify you via email, SMS, and push notification. Azure Advisor is a service that makes recommendations for best practices in order to optimize your Azure resources. It also makes recommendations that can provide the most economical solutions, optimize performance, and the best security configurations. The Azure monitor provides real-time monitoring of your applications and services. This service collects Azure or on-prem telemetry data to detect issues for any of your resources and dependencies.

This question shows the developer's understanding of Azure features.

Azure ExpressRoute offers clients network connectivity through a private circuit outside of the public internet. This type of connectivity, therefore, provides a higher level of security, faster speeds, consistent latencies, and more reliability. Traffic going through an ExpressRoute circuit is not encrypted so security relies primarily upon the dedicated nature of the connection.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure terminology and features.

MFA or multifactor authentication is an important concept to know and implement within any organization. MFA is a process by which an individual is challenged to provide more than one form of identification before being allowed access to the requested resource. These forms of identification fall into the following categories:

-Something only the user knows: an email address and password
-Something only the user has: a mobile phone to receive a text or the Microsoft Authenticator application
-Something the user is: a fingerprint or facial scan

By using a combination of those elements, MFA provides a more secure way of authenticating a user versus single-factor authentication.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

If a company uses Microsoft Active Directory, they can synchronize those records with Azure Active Directory by using Azure AD Connect. For example, any time a user is added or removed through Active Directory Users and Computers on-premises, those changes are affected within Azure AD through the syncing process. Azure AD not only provides authentication, but also single sign-on, application management (application authentication), and device management (using Microsoft's InTune, an organization's devices can be registered and monitored through Azure as they would be on-premises).

This question is based on basic knowledge of computers and information storage.

Cloud computing is a series of computing services available and accessible through the Internet. Third providers host these services and include servers, storage, databases, networking, software analytics, and intelligence. Companies choose to opt for these services to offload hardware maintenance costs, have dedicated personnel, and take advantage of flexible resources. In most scenarios, using cloud services is less expensive than maintaining the same services in a physical data center. Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing offering. Azure services enable you to scale your resources up or down depending on your usage. You only pay for what you use, so there is generally no fixed cost.

This question shows the developer's ability to work with Azure scripts.

There are a few options for creating Azure resources (virtual machines, network security groups, storage accounts, etc) without manually creating each one over and over again from scratch. ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates allow you to define your resources once in a JSON file, such as this:

{
  "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
  "contentVersion": "",
  "apiProfile": "",
  "parameters": {  },
  "variables": {  },
  "functions": [  ],
  "resources": [  ],
  "outputs": {  }
}

You can then define your resources like this:
"resources": [
    {
      "type": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts",
      "name": "[variables('storageAccountName')]",
      "location": "[parameters('location')]",
      "apiVersion": "2018-07-01",
      "sku": {
        "name": "[parameters('storageAccountType')]"
      },
      "kind": "StorageV2",
      "properties": {}
    }
  ],

// you can then add other resources and the specs for each, to this section, like VMs or other accounts
// once this is defined, you can simply paste this file through the portal to create these resources.  You can then tear them down and recreate them again by referring to the //template.

Azure also offers command-line interfaces to run scripts that create resources such as those created in ARM templates. These interfaces Azure CLI (command-line interface) and Azure PS (Azure Power Shell) offer a different option for repeatable infrastructure creation.

This question shows the developer's knowledge of Azure features.

Azure machine learning is an available platform comprised of tools and services enabling developers to input data into a model and program that model to be trained to make a prediction. This becomes an iterative process until the model is sufficiently trained with test data, after which real data is input to formulate a prediction. The Azure Bot Service is a platform for creating a virtual agent and interacting with a human counterpart to understand and answer questions. A use case for this is a customer service chatbot that can respond to customer questions regarding a product or service. Azure cognitive services are composed of pre-built machine learning models, which enable applications to hear the language, see images and text, and understand to make decisions based upon that particular input data. For example, the cognitive services have API's available to convert speech into text or from one language to another; image recognition software for video, picture, and other visual content; pre-built script using natural language processing to evaluate user sentiment and propose options for what users may want. All of these options require little code and provide advanced functionalities for developers to incorporate into new or existing Azure applications.

This question shows the developer's understanding of Azure features.

Azure offers several options for storing data. Disk storage provides disk space for Azure VM's. Azure has disks that are functionally equivalent to their physical counterparts, such as solid-state drives (SSD) and spinning hard disks (HDD), each of which can be custom configured. Azure blob storage allows you to store immense amounts of unstructured data, such as binary files, blobs, video or audio files as well as text-based data. With blob storage, files are uploaded as needed and Azure is responsible for the corresponding sizing requirements. A VM configured with blob storage can hold up to 8 terabytes of data. Azure also has traditional file share storage, making the transition from an on-premises file share structure seamless. An Azure VM can mount a file storage share just as an on-prem desktop would mount a traditional SMB file share. Being hosted on Azure, a file share can be accessed anywhere in the world, by accessing the unique URL assigned to the share. You can secure access by requiring a shared access signature (SAS) parameter, which would need to be appended to the end of the URL. This allows access to that resource for a specified amount of time.

This question shows the developer's understanding of Azure features.

Azure allows developers to focus on creating applications without the responsibility of creating and maintaining the required infrastructure to host their applications. For example, a developer can create a web application on their local system and then deploy it to the Azure app service for hosting. The web server and all required resources are managed by Azure so the developer simply deploys the application and updates it as necessary. If the requirement is to create a simple REST API, which is triggered by a particular application event or executed according to a schedule, the developer can use an Azure function, a feature allowing the developer to expose business logic within a light-weight application, without the constraint of deploying an entire web application and required infrastructure.

This question shows the developer's understanding of Azure fundamentals.

Many companies need to leverage vast amounts of internal data to make better business decisions regarding sales, operations, consumer spending behaviors, and other elements. Azure offers the following facilities to meet these needs:

Azure Synapse Analytics - an analytics service that provides an environment for consuming extensive datasets and integrating with reporting tools such as Microsoft PowerBI.
Azure HD Insight - this service allows the processing of datasets and offers numerous integration with parallel data processing engines such as Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Apache Kafka, Apache HBase, Apache Storm, and ML services. It allows has facilities for data exchange, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes.
Azure Data Bricks - Paired with Apache Spark, Azure Data Bricks provides a robust AI and Azure Machine Learning projects platform. The Data Bricks platform supports Python, Scala, R, Java, and SQL.

This question focuses on the understanding of Azure fundamentals.

The hierarchy is as follows:

Management group
- Subscription(s)
- Resource group(s)
-Resource(s)

After creating an account and an initial subscription, there may be instances where an organization may further divide costs among different departments or groups, for example. In this case, each department can be assigned its own subscription and billing arrangements. You can also assign policies and role assignments to a management group, which are then inherited by the member subscriptions and underlying resource groups. This is the foundation of the Azure organizational structure and is therefore important to know.

This question is based on the understanding of Azure features.

Azure VM scale sets allow you to build out a set of identical virtual machines and will allow autoscaling of the VMs in case the demand for computing resources increases in the future. This eliminates the need for configuring the machines again. It is also cost-efficient since you only pay for what you use and you can scale back when resources are not needed.

This interview question shows the developer's awareness of Azure features.

Much like their on-premises versions, Azure offers the following database platforms: Azure SQL Server, Azure MySQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Postgres SQL. These are examples of PAAS, where developers simply access the database of their choice depending upon their preference and create/update the appropriate instance.

This question focuses on the benefits of Azure.

It is often critical for corporate applications to experience very little to no downtime. Azure offers a robust platform for addressing this issue. Azure instances are organized by geographical locations throughout the world and defined as specific regions (ie. Australia, US West, US East, etc). Each region has at least 16 individual datacenters with separate cooling, power, and storage capabilities. Each region can be paired with another region such that if one region becomes unavailable, access can be automatically switched to its region pair. Regions are physically separated by at least 300 miles.

This question is based on basic knowledge of Azure.

You must first create an Azure account. A free account is available, which will allow you to create resource groups and resources underneath a resource group. The free account provides 12 months of access to popular services and a credit to spend within 30 days of signing up. You can then instantiate a resource group and any type of resource available in Azure.

This question is based on basic knowledge of computers and information storage.

Infrastructure As-A-Service (IaaS) is a service that allows consumers to use virtual servers and other virtual hardware, all accessible through the cloud. This replaces the need to maintain physical hardware. Customers are still responsible for the patching and updates to the servers just as they would be for physical hardware. Platform As-A-Service(PaaS) offers customers a configurable environment in which the PAAS provider hosts both the hardware and software. The use case for this would be a development environment, such as a Visual Studio, SQL Server, that developers would simply access. Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) is a service in which the consumer simply accesses the software, such as those applications provided by an M365 subscription (Office tools). The SaaS provider hosts the infrastructure, software and is responsible for any upgrades to which consumers gain access automatically. All of these services are available from Microsoft Azure.