Microsoft Azure Interview Questions – General Azure Architecture & Design

What is Azure Architecture?

Azure Architecture refers to the design and structure of various services provided by Microsoft Azure to build cloud-based applications. It involves utilizing services like virtual machines, storage, networking, and databases, ensuring scalability, security, and fault tolerance while optimizing performance and cost.

1. What are the different types of Azure storage accounts?

Azure provides several types of storage accounts based on specific use cases:

General-purpose v2: Supports Blob, File, Queue, and Table storage.

Blob storage: Optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data.
File storage: For shared storage accessible over SMB protocol.
Disk storage: Managed disks for VM storage.
Queue storage: For message-based communication between applications.

2. What is Azure Resource Manager (ARM)?

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the deployment and management service for Azure resources. It provides a management layer for provisioning, managing, and organizing resources in Azure using templates, policies, and access control.

3. What are resource groups in Azure?

A resource group in Azure is a container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. It includes services like VMs, storage, and networking resources. Resource groups help in managing, organizing, and securing resources.

4. Explain Azure Virtual Networks (VNet).

Azure Virtual Networks (VNet) provide a private, isolated network in the cloud for securely connecting Azure resources. It allows you to define IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and network security groups (NSGs) for effective traffic management and control.

Design for Identity and Security

5. What is Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)?

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management service that helps organizations manage user identities and access to applications and resources. It supports single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and conditional access policies.

6. How does Azure AD differ from on-premises Active Directory?

Azure AD is a cloud-based service designed to handle cloud and SaaS application access, while on-premises Active Directory manages network resources within an organization's local network. Azure AD supports cloud-specific scenarios like SSO to web apps, whereas AD is primarily for managing Windows Server environments.

7. What is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) in Azure?

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) in Azure is an added layer of security that requires users to provide two or more verification methods—something they know (password), something they have (mobile device), or something they are (biometric data).

8. What is a Network Security Group (NSG) in Azure?

A Network Security Group (NSG) is a set of rules that allow or deny network traffic to Azure resources. It is used to filter traffic to and from Azure resources by defining inbound and outbound rules based on IP address, port, and protocol.

9. What is Azure Key Vault and its use?

Azure Key Vault is a service used to securely store and manage sensitive information such as secrets, encryption keys, certificates, and passwords. It provides secure access to critical data for applications and services.

Design for Data Storage and Integration

10.What is Azure SQL Database?

Azure SQL Database is a fully-managed relational database service in Azure that supports SQL Server workloads. It provides built-in high availability, scalability, and automated backups without the need for manual management of the underlying hardware.

11. Explain the difference between Azure Blob Storage and Azure Files.

Azure Blob Storage is used for storing unstructured data like text or binary data, images, and videos.
Azure Files provides shared file storage accessible via SMB, supporting Windows and Linux workloads. It is suitable for legacy applications that require shared file access.

12. What is Azure Data Lake Storage?

Azure Data Lake Storage is a scalable and secure data storage solution designed for big data analytics. It provides high throughput and low-latency access to large amounts of data, often used with Azure analytics services like Azure Databricks.

13. What is Azure Cosmos DB?

Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model NoSQL database designed for low-latency, high-availability, and scalability. It supports multiple APIs like SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Gremlin, allowing developers to store data in various formats.

14. What is Azure Synapse Analytics?

Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly SQL Data Warehouse) is an analytics service that combines big data and data warehousing capabilities. It allows you to query and analyze large datasets in real-time using both relational and non-relational data sources.

Design for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

15. What is Azure Availability Set?

An Availability Set is a logical grouping of virtual machines (VMs) in Azure. It ensures that VMs are distributed across multiple fault and update domains to avoid simultaneous failure during maintenance or hardware failures, providing high availability.

16. What is Azure Availability Zone?

An Availability Zone is a physically separate data center within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. It offers improved resilience by replicating resources across multiple zones for high availability.

17. What is Azure Site Recovery?

Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery service that replicates workloads from on-premises or Azure to another Azure region, ensuring business continuity in case of outages. It supports automated failover, failback, and testing for disaster recovery scenarios.

18. What is Azure Load Balancer?

Azure Load Balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple virtual machines or services to ensure high availability and reliability. It supports both public and internal load balancing and is ideal for applications requiring low-latency, high-availability solutions.

19. What is Azure Traffic Manager?

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that directs user traffic to different endpoints, such as Azure VMs or web apps, based on performance, geographic location, or weighted routing, improving application availability.

Design for Monitoring, Management, and Automation

20. What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is a platform that provides full-stack monitoring and management of Azure resources, collecting telemetry data like logs, metrics, and alerts from various sources. It helps in diagnosing performance issues, security threats, and resource optimization.

21. What is Azure Automation?

Azure Automation is a cloud-based service for automating repetitive tasks, such as VM provisioning, patch management, and operational workflows. It includes runbooks, change tracking, and update management features.

22. What is Azure Resource Health?

Azure Resource Health helps monitor the health of Azure resources like virtual machines, storage accounts, and databases. It provides real-time insights into resource status, helping in troubleshooting issues.

23. How do you implement cost management in Azure?

Azure Cost Management helps track and optimize cloud spending by providing insights, budgets, and recommendations. It includes tools for analyzing usage patterns, setting cost alerts, and implementing governance policies to manage resources efficiently.

24. What is Azure Advisor?

Azure Advisor provides personalized best practices and recommendations based on your usage patterns. It helps improve the performance, security, reliability, and cost efficiency of your Azure resources.

Design for Governance, Privacy, and Compliance

25. What is Azure Policy?

Azure Policy helps enforce governance by defining and managing policies that govern resources across Azure. It ensures compliance with organizational standards, regulatory requirements, and cost management objectives.

26. What is Azure Blueprints?

Azure Blueprints allow you to define and deploy a set of governance and compliance controls, such as resource templates, policies, and role-based access controls (RBAC), as part of your cloud architecture.

27. How do you manage security in Azure?

Azure provides multiple security services, including:

Azure Security Center: Provides threat protection and security management.
Azure Sentinel: Cloud-native SIEM solution.
Azure Firewall and NSG: For network-level security.
Azure DDoS Protection: To defend against distributed denial-of-service attacks.

28. What is the purpose of Azure RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)?

Azure RBAC provides fine-grained access control for Azure resources. It allows you to define roles for users, groups, and applications, restricting access to specific actions and resources based on the least privilege principle.

29. What is Azure Key Vault's role in compliance and security?

Azure Key Vault helps manage cryptographic keys and secrets used for encryption, identity, and access management. It aids in meeting compliance requirements by securely storing sensitive data and offering built-in auditing.

Azure Networking Design

30. What is the difference between a public IP and a private IP in Azure?

Public IP: Assigned to resources accessible from the internet (e.g., VMs, load balancers).
Private IP: Used for internal communication within an Azure VNet, not accessible from the internet.

31. What is Azure ExpressRoute?

Azure ExpressRoute is a private, dedicated connection between on-premises data centers and Azure data centers. It offers higher reliability, lower latency, and enhanced security compared to public internet connections.

32. What is Azure VPN Gateway?

Azure VPN Gateway is a service that connects on-premises networks or remote users to Azure Virtual Networks via IPsec/IKE encrypted VPN tunnels, providing secure communication.

33. What is Azure Application Gateway?

Azure Application Gateway is a fully managed application delivery controller (ADC) that offers load balancing, SSL termination, and application firewall functionality for web applications.

34. What is a VNet Peering?

VNet Peering allows you to connect two virtual networks in Azure, enabling resources in different VNets to communicate with each other using private IP addresses.

Azure Networking Design (Continued)

35. What is Azure Bastion?

Azure Bastion is a fully managed platform that allows secure and seamless RDP/SSH connectivity to Azure virtual machines without exposing them to the public internet. It operates over SSL, ensuring encrypted traffic between users and resources.

36. What is Azure Load Balancer?

Azure Load Balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple Azure resources (such as VMs) to ensure high availability and reliability. It supports both internal and external load balancing with low-latency routing.

37. What is a Network Interface in Azure?

A Network Interface (NIC) in Azure is a virtual network interface card that connects a VM or other Azure resource to a virtual network. It can be assigned a public or private IP address and can be part of a subnet.

38. What is a subnet in Azure Virtual Network (VNet)?

A subnet is a segment within a virtual network (VNet) that divides the VNet into smaller, manageable sections. Subnets provide isolation and control of network traffic between resources.

39. What is the difference between an internal and external load balancer in Azure?

Internal Load Balancer: Used to balance traffic within a private network, with internal-only IP addresses.
External Load Balancer: Used to distribute traffic from external clients to Azure resources, with public IP addresses.

Azure Compute Design

40. What are the different types of virtual machines (VMs) in Azure?

Azure provides various types of VMs designed for specific use cases, including:

General Purpose: Balanced CPU and memory (e.g., B-series, D-series).
Compute-Optimized: High CPU to memory ratio (e.g., F-series).
Memory-Optimized: More memory, less CPU (e.g., E-series).
Storage-Optimized: High disk throughput (e.g., L-series).
GPU-based: For high-performance computing (e.g., NV-series).

41. What is Azure App Service?

Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web applications and APIs. It supports multiple languages (e.g., .NET, Node.js, Python) and offers features like auto-scaling, security, and integrated monitoring.

42. What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed container orchestration service based on Kubernetes. It simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications, ensuring seamless operation in the cloud.

43. How do you scale a VM in Azure?

You can scale a VM in Azure either vertically (by changing the VM size) or horizontally (by adding more VMs and using load balancing). Azure VM Scale Sets can automatically scale the number of VMs based on demand.

44. What is the Azure VM Scale Set?

Azure VM Scale Sets provide high availability to your applications by enabling automatic scaling of a set of identical VMs. It integrates with load balancers to distribute traffic among VM instances.

Design for Application Services

45. What is Azure Functions?

Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that allows you to run event-driven code without managing the infrastructure. It is used for building lightweight applications that respond to triggers like HTTP requests, database changes, or file uploads.

46. What is Azure Logic Apps?

Azure Logic Apps enables you to automate workflows between services and applications, integrating systems, services, and APIs without writing code. It supports connectors for over 200 services, including Office 365, Salesforce, and Azure services.

47. What is Azure Service Bus?

Azure Service Bus is a fully managed message queuing service that facilitates communication between distributed applications. It supports both message queues and publish/subscribe patterns for reliable messaging.

48. What is Azure Event Grid?

Azure Event Grid is a fully managed event routing service that allows you to build event-based architectures. It supports serverless apps and sends events to various Azure services like Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Hubs.

49. What is Azure API Management (APIM)?

Azure API Management (APIM) is a platform for managing and publishing APIs to external and internal users. It helps secure, monitor, and scale APIs and provides features like rate limiting, authentication, and logging.

Design for Security and Identity

50. What is Azure Security Center?

Azure Security Center is a unified security management system that provides threat protection, compliance monitoring, and security recommendations for Azure resources. It helps identify vulnerabilities and offers insights for securing cloud workloads.

51. How do you secure Azure Virtual Machines?

Securing Azure VMs involves multiple practices, such as:

Enabling firewalls and Network Security Groups (NSG).
Applying automatic OS and application patching.
Using Azure Defender for real-time protection.
Encrypting data using Azure Disk Encryption and Key Vault.

52. What is Azure Identity Protection?

Azure Identity Protection is a service that uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to identify potential security risks to user identities. It can enforce conditional access policies and automate threat responses like password resets.

53. What is Azure Sentinel?

Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) service that helps detect, investigate, and respond to threats across an organization. It collects data from various sources, including Azure resources, on-premises systems, and third-party applications.

54. What is Azure AD Conditional Access?

Azure AD Conditional Access is a policy engine that allows you to control access to cloud apps based on conditions like location, device type, user risk level, and group membership. It enhances security by enforcing policies that match business needs.

Design for Cost Optimization

55. What is Azure Cost Management and how does it help optimize costs?

Azure Cost Management is a suite of tools that help track, manage, and optimize cloud spending. It provides cost analysis, budgeting, and forecasting features to ensure resources are used efficiently and expenses are within budget.

56. What is Azure Reserved Instances?

Azure Reserved Instances allow you to reserve virtual machines for 1 or 3 years at a discounted rate. It provides significant savings compared to pay-as-you-go pricing, especially for workloads with predictable usage.

57. What is Azure Hybrid Benefit?

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to use existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to save costs when migrating to Azure. This reduces the overall cost of running virtual machines in Azure.

58. How does Azure Advisor help in cost management?

Azure Advisor provides personalized best practices for optimizing cloud resources. It offers recommendations related to cost management, such as right-sizing VMs, removing unused resources, and consolidating storage to reduce costs.

59. What is Azure Spot Virtual Machines?

Azure Spot Virtual Machines are low-cost VMs that use unused Azure capacity. These VMs are ideal for workloads that are flexible and can tolerate interruptions, offering significant savings compared to standard VMs.

Design for Monitoring and Management

60. What is Azure Monitor Logs?

Azure Monitor Logs is a tool used to collect, analyze, and visualize log data from Azure resources. It provides deep insights into resource activity, performance metrics, and security events, helping with troubleshooting and monitoring.

61. How do you use Azure Alerts for monitoring?

Azure Alerts can notify you of resource changes or issues by setting up threshold-based rules for various metrics and logs. Alerts can be delivered via email, SMS, or integration with ITSM tools like ServiceNow.

62. What is Azure Network Watcher?

Azure Network Watcher is a monitoring and diagnostic service for Azure network resources. It provides tools for troubleshooting network connectivity, monitoring traffic patterns, and analyzing packet captures to resolve network issues.

63. What is Azure Log Analytics?

Azure Log Analytics is a tool within Azure Monitor used to query and analyze log and performance data. It enables the creation of custom queries, reports, and dashboards for better understanding and troubleshooting.

64. What is Azure Application Insights?

Azure Application Insights is an application performance monitoring tool that helps you detect, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues in your applications. It provides real-time insights into application behavior, availability, and performance.

Design for Migration and Hybrid Cloud

65. What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate is a service that helps in the discovery, assessment, and migration of on-premises workloads to Azure. It supports multiple workloads, including virtual machines, databases, and apps, simplifying the migration process.

66. What is Azure Stack?

Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that extends Azure services to on-premises data centers. It provides consistency in hybrid environments by allowing organizations to deploy Azure services in their own data centers.

67. What is Azure Site Recovery?

Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery solution that replicates workloads from on-premises or between Azure regions, ensuring business continuity in case of system failures or outages.

68. What is Azure Database Migration Service?

Azure Database Migration Service is a tool designed to simplify the migration of databases to Azure. It supports a wide range of databases, including SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and minimizes downtime during migration.

69. What is Azure File Sync?

Azure File Sync is a service that syncs on-premises file servers with Azure Files, enabling centralized data management, backup, and access from anywhere. It provides hybrid cloud storage and disaster recovery for file-based workloads.

70. What is Azure Virtual WAN?

Azure Virtual WAN is a networking service that allows you to create a large-scale, global network connecting your branches, remote users, and Azure resources. It provides a simplified hub-and-spoke model for centralized management of routing, VPNs, and other services.

71. How does Azure ExpressRoute differ from a VPN Gateway?

Azure ExpressRoute is a private, dedicated, and high-speed connection between your on-premises data center and Azure. It offers lower latency and more consistent performance compared to public internet connections.
VPN Gateway uses encrypted VPN tunnels over the public internet to connect on-premises networks to Azure.

72. What is the purpose of Azure Traffic Manager?

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based global traffic distribution service that routes traffic to the most appropriate endpoints based on criteria like geographic location, performance, and priority. It enhances the availability and responsiveness of applications deployed across multiple regions.

73. What are the benefits of using multiple Azure regions for deploying applications?

Using multiple Azure regions provides benefits such as:

High Availability: By distributing applications across regions, you minimize the risk of regional outages affecting services.
Disaster Recovery: Multi-region deployments enable quick failover to another region in case of failure.
Performance Optimization: Traffic can be routed to the closest region, improving response time.

74. What is a Virtual Network Gateway in Azure?

A Virtual Network Gateway is a resource used to connect an Azure virtual network to on-premises networks or other Azure VNets. It supports site-to-site VPN, point-to-site VPN, and VNet-to-VNet connections, and is essential for hybrid cloud setups.

Design for Resilience and Recovery

75. What is the difference between Backup and Disaster Recovery in Azure?

Backup refers to creating copies of data or workloads for recovery in case of data loss or corruption.
Disaster Recovery focuses on recovering entire systems, applications, and services after major failures or outages, ensuring business continuity.

76. What is Azure Backup and how is it different from traditional backup solutions?

Azure Backup is a cloud-based backup service that protects data and applications by storing backup copies in Azure. It offers advantages over traditional solutions, such as off-site storage, scalability, and integrated encryption. It also supports VM backup and file/folder backup.

77. What is an Azure Availability Zone and why is it important for disaster recovery?

Azure Availability Zones are physically separated data centers within an Azure region. They ensure high availability by replicating resources across different zones. They are essential for disaster recovery, allowing applications to stay operational even if one zone experiences a failure.

78. What is the difference between a failover and a failback in Azure?

Failover refers to switching operations to a secondary location or resource during an outage or failure.
Failback is the process of reverting operations back to the primary location after the issue is resolved.

79. What is Azure Site Recovery?

Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery service that ensures business continuity by replicating workloads (virtual machines, physical servers, and applications) to Azure or another Azure region. It provides automated failover and failback to recover applications and services with minimal downtime.

Design for Compliance and Security

80. What is Azure Security Center?

Azure Security Center provides a unified view of your cloud security posture, helping protect resources in Azure and on-premises environments. It offers threat protection, security policy enforcement, and actionable security recommendations to improve the overall security state.

81. What is Azure Sentinel?

Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) service that provides intelligent security analytics. It collects, analyzes, and acts on data from various sources, helping organizations detect, investigate, and respond to security threats.

82. What is the role of Azure Firewall in network security?

Azure Firewall is a cloud-based network security service that protects Azure Virtual Networks from unauthorized access and threats. It provides features like application and network-level filtering, threat intelligence, and logging for visibility into network activity.

83. What is Azure DDoS Protection?

Azure DDoS Protection helps defend against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks by automatically detecting and mitigating malicious traffic that attempts to overwhelm your network resources, ensuring availability and uptime.

84. What is Azure AD Identity Protection?

Azure AD Identity Protection uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to detect potential security risks to user identities. It helps automate threat mitigation by enforcing conditional access policies like requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Design for Automation and DevOps

85. What is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps is a suite of development tools that provide an end-to-end solution for planning, developing, testing, and delivering applications. It integrates with Git, Jenkins, and other tools to support CI/CD pipelines, version control, and agile project management.

86. What is the purpose of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates?

ARM templates are JSON files that define the infrastructure and configuration of Azure resources in a declarative manner. They allow for consistent and repeatable deployments, enabling Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for managing Azure resources.

87. What is Azure Automation and how can it be used for DevOps?

Azure Automation provides cloud-based automation for repetitive tasks, including the management of virtual machines, patching, and configuration management. It integrates with Azure DevOps pipelines to automate application deployment, configuration, and monitoring tasks.

88. What is Azure Logic Apps and how can it be used in a DevOps pipeline?

Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service for automating workflows between applications and services. In a DevOps pipeline, it can be used to automate tasks like deployment notifications, monitoring, and integrating various services to trigger actions based on events.

89. What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in Azure?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice of defining and managing infrastructure through code instead of manual processes. In Azure, tools like ARM templates, Terraform, and Azure CLI are used to automate the deployment and management of resources.

Design for Monitoring and Cost Optimization

90. What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is a full-stack monitoring service that collects and analyzes data from Azure resources, applications, and services. It provides capabilities like performance tracking, alerts, log analysis, and insights to help optimize the performance and availability of resources.

91. What is Azure Cost Management?

Azure Cost Management helps you track, manage, and optimize Azure costs. It provides features like cost analysis, budgeting, and recommendations for reducing resource spending by identifying unused or underutilized resources.

92. How do you implement auto-scaling in Azure?

Auto-scaling in Azure can be configured to automatically adjust the number of resources (like VMs or App Service plans) based on usage demand. It can be set up using Azure Scale Sets or App Service auto-scaling features, ensuring optimal resource allocation and cost efficiency.

93. What is Azure Advisor and how does it assist in cost optimization?

Azure Advisor provides personalized best practices and recommendations for improving the performance, security, availability, and cost-efficiency of your Azure resources. It helps identify over-provisioned resources and offers guidance on right-sizing and consolidating.

94. What is Azure Elasticity?

Azure Elasticity refers to the ability to scale resources up or down automatically based on demand. This dynamic scaling helps optimize resource utilization and cost by allocating resources only when necessary.

Design for Migration and Hybrid Cloud

95. What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate is a tool that helps in assessing and migrating on-premises workloads to Azure. It supports the migration of virtual machines, databases, and apps, providing insights on the readiness of your workloads and the best migration strategies.

96. What are the types of migration strategies in Azure?

Common migration strategies include:

Rehost: Lift and shift to Azure without changes.
Refactor: Modify the app to leverage cloud benefits.
Rearchitect: Redesign the application for cloud-native architecture.
Rebuild: Rewrite the app from scratch in Azure.

97. What is Azure Hybrid Benefit?

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to leverage existing on-premises licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server to save on Azure Virtual Machines. It helps reduce the cost of running workloads in the cloud.

98. What is Azure File Sync?

Azure File Sync is a hybrid cloud service that syncs on-premises Windows file servers with Azure Files. It enables centralized management of files across multiple locations and provides cloud-based backup and disaster recovery for file-based workloads.

99. What is Azure Stack and how does it support hybrid cloud?

Azure Stack extends Azure services to on-premises data centers, enabling a consistent hybrid cloud experience. It allows organizations to run Azure services on their infrastructure, providing a seamless connection between on-premises and cloud environments.