Azure Interview Questions 2024
Microsoft Azure, often just called “Azure,” is a cloud computing platform and service created by Microsoft. It offers a wide array of cloud services, including those for computing, analytics, storage, and networking. Users can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications, in the public cloud.
It sounds like you are preparing for an interview focused on Microsoft Azure training, a key player in the cloud computing industry. To excel in such an interview, it’s essential to have a solid understanding of Azure’s services, architecture, and common use cases. Here are some frequently asked topics and questions that you might encounter.
Here are 20 common Azure interview questions along with detailed answers, tailored for 2024. These questions cover various aspects of Azure, from basic concepts to more advanced topics.
Q1. What is Microsoft Azure and why is it used?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage, and networking. Organizations use Azure to leverage big data, build applications, and extend their existing IT infrastructure.
Q2. Describe the different deployment models in cloud computing.
The three primary cloud deployment models are:
- Public Cloud: Services are delivered over the public internet and shared across different organizations.
- Private Cloud: Computing services offered either over the internet or a private internal network and only to select users instead of the general public.
- Hybrid Cloud: Combines both public and private clouds, allowing data and applications to be shared between them.
Q3. What are Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates?
ARM templates are JSON files that define the resources you need to deploy for your Azure solution. They enable repeatable and consistent deployments of various resources. ARM templates help in automating the deployment process, making it more efficient and less error-prone.
Q4. Explain Azure Virtual Machines.
Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are one of several types of on-demand, scalable computing resources offered by Azure. VMs can be used in various ways like application hosting, running large-scale compute jobs, or as a simple Windows or Linux environment. They offer flexibility of virtualization without having to buy and maintain the physical hardware.
Q5. What is Azure App Service?
Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps. It supports multiple languages and frameworks, such as .NET, .NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Python. It offers auto-scaling, high availability, and supports both Windows and Linux-based environments.
Q6. Describe Azure Storage services.
Azure Storage offers durable, highly available, and massively scalable cloud storage. It includes:
- Blob Storage: For storing large amounts of unstructured data.
- File Storage: Offers shared storage for legacy applications using standard SMB protocol.
- Queue Storage: Provides messaging for workflow processing and communication between components.
- Table Storage: Stores structured NoSQL data, ideal for storing flexible datasets.
Q7. What is Azure SQL Database?
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service based on the latest stable version of Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine. It provides a scalable, multi-tenant database service hosted by Azure. It offers high-availability, protection from hardware failures, and reduces the overhead of managing hardware and software.
Q8. Explain Azure Active Directory.
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s multi-tenant, cloud-based directory, and identity management service. It combines core directory services, application access management, and identity protection into a single solution. It’s used for identity and access management, providing a range of features to help protect user identities and regulate user access.
Q9. What is Azure Cosmos DB?
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service. It offers turnkey global distribution, supports schema-less data, and provides APIs for various data models including documents, key-value, graph, and column-family. It is widely used for its low-latency, high-availability, and consistency across globally distributed data centers.
Q10. How does Azure Virtual Network work?
Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is the fundamental building block for private networks in Azure. It allows Azure resources like VMs to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. VNet is similar to a traditional network that you’d operate in your own data center but with the benefits of Azure’s infrastructure, such as scalability, availability, and isolation.
Q11. Explain Azure Blob Storage and its types.
Azure Blob Storage is Azure’s object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. There are three types of blobs:
- Block blobs: Used for storing text or binary files, and for streaming video and audio.
- Append blobs: Optimized for append operations, ideal for logging scenarios.
- Page blobs: Used for frequent read/write operations, as in VHD files.
Q12. What are Azure Service Fabric and its uses?
Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform for packaging, deploying, and managing scalable and reliable microservices and containers. Service Fabric is used to build and manage scalable and reliable applications composed of microservices that run at very high density on a shared pool of machines, which is both on-premises and in the cloud.
Q13. Describe the Azure Internet of Things (IoT).
Azure IoT is a collection of Microsoft-managed cloud services that connect, monitor, and control billions of IoT assets. It is a suite of services and solutions that allows you to connect, monitor, and manage a wide range of internet-connected devices. It also provides a set of ready-to-use services like Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge, and Azure IoT Central to simplify the development of IoT solutions.
Q14. What is Azure Load Balancer?
Azure Load Balancer is a Layer-4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that provides high availability by distributing incoming traffic among healthy service instances in cloud services or virtual machines. It can handle millions of requests per second, providing low-latency and high-throughput, and scales up and down with your application’s traffic.
Q15. Explain Azure DevOps.
Azure DevOps is a suite of development tools provided by Microsoft for software development and operations (DevOps) teams. It provides integrated features that you can access through your web browser or IDE client, including Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, Azure Test Plans, and Azure Artifacts. It helps teams to plan work, collaborate on code development, build and deploy applications.
Q16. What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed container orchestration service, based on Kubernetes, that is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud. AKS simplifies the deployment, management, and operations of Kubernetes. It provides a host of features such as automated upgrades, scaling, self-healing, and a built-in control plane for free.
Q17. Describe Azure Functions.
Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables you to run event-triggered code without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure. It can respond to events in Azure or third-party services, and it can automatically scale based on demand. Azure Functions supports a variety of programming languages, including C#, F#, Node.js, Python, PHP, Bash, Batch, and PowerShell.
Q18. What is Azure Logic Apps?
Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service that helps you automate and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or organizations. It provides a visual designer to model and automate your process as a series of steps known as a workflow.
Q19. Explain Azure Monitor.
Azure Monitor collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from Azure and on-premises environments. It helps to understand how applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources they depend on. Azure Monitor includes a rich set of capabilities including complex querying, alerting, notification, and automated actions.
Q20. How does Azure manage identity and access?
Azure manages identity and access using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Azure AD is a comprehensive identity and access management cloud solution that provides a robust set of capabilities to manage users and groups. It helps secure access to on-premises and cloud applications, including Microsoft online services like Office 365 and a world of non-Microsoft SaaS applications.
