Introduction

Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform. It provides a broad range of cloud services, including compute, 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.

The Azure platform aims to help businesses manage challenges and meet their organizational goals. It offers tools that support all industries — including e-commerce, finance and a variety of Fortune 500 companies — and is compatible with open source technologies. This gives users the flexibility to use their preferred tools and technologies. In addition, Azure offers four different forms of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and serverless functions.

Microsoft charges for Azure on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis, meaning subscribers receive a bill each month that only charges them for the specific resources and services they have used.

Embark on your journey into the world of cloud computing with our curated set of Basic Azure Interview Questions & Answers. Designed for both beginners and experienced professionals, this resource delves into fundamental aspects of Microsoft Azure. Gain insights into key Azure services, deployment models, security considerations, and best practices.

Basic Azure Interview Questions

Cloud service can convey multiple web applications in Azure, characterizing a number of parts to disseminate handling and permit adaptable scaling of your application. A cloud service comprises a minimum of one web part, as well as specialist parts, each with its own particular application documents and design. The fundamental favorable position of cloud service is the capacity to help more complex multilevel structures.

Features

Microsoft Azure

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Analytics

Azure Stream Analytics

Amazon Kinesis

Backup Options

Azure Backup

Amazon Glacier

Compliance

Azure Trust Center

AWS CLoudHSM

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Azure CDN

Amazon CloudFront

Data Orchestration

Azure Data Factory

AWS Data Pipeline

Hybrid Cloud Storage

StorSimple

AWS Storage Gateway

Monitoring

Azure Operational Insights

Amazon CloudTrail

NoSQL Database Options

Azure DocumentDB

Amazon DynamoDB

Azure DevOps is a SaaS platform that provides development services for creating work plans, working together on code, developing applications, and deploying them. It offers an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for the development and deployment of software. It is able to integrate with a number of popular tools in the market and is a great way for setting up a DevOps toolchain.

Azure AD is a cloud-based IAM solution and directory by Microsoft. It brings together application access management, core directory services, and identity protection and turns them into a single solution. It helps employees of an organization sign in and access resources such as:

  • External resources, including Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and a big number of SaaS applications
  • Internal resources, such as apps on a corporate network and intranet, as well as any cloud-based apps built by that organization

Azure AD is intended for use by:

  • IT Admins
  • App Developers
  • Azure, Office 365, Microsoft 365, or Dynamics CRM online subscribers.

Azure Data Factory is a serverless and cloud-based data integration service and platform used for the creation of ETL and ELT pipelines. It helps in the creation of data-driven workflows for the planning and execution of data movements and data transformation at scale.

Azure Databricks is a Data Analytics platform that offers two environments for the development of data-intensive applications: 

  • Azure Databricks SQL Analytics 
  • Azure Databricks Workspace

Azure Databricks’ integration with the security, compute, analytics, storage, and AI services that are natively provided by cloud providers facilitate the unification of data and AI workloads.

Azure Data Lake is a cloud platform that supports Big Data Analytics through its unlimited storage for structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data of all types and sizes.

Any entity managed by Azure can be referred to as an Azure resource. The following are some examples of Azure resources: Storage accounts, virtual networks, virtual machines, etc.

 

Web Role: It gives a web solution that is front-end. This is like an ASP.NET application. While under facilitating, Azure gives IIS and required services.

Worker Role: It gives solutions for background service. It can run long activities.

Virtual Machine Role: The roles of both web and worker are executed on virtual machines. The Virtual Machine Roles give the client the capacity to modify the Azure Virtual Machine on which the web and worker roles are running.

Windows Azure has three principal segments: Compute, Storage, and Fabric.

  1. Windows Azure Compute

Windows Azure gives a code that can be managed by the hosting environment. It gives the calculation benefit through parts. Windows Azure backs three types of roles:

  • Web roles utilized for web application programming and upheld by IIS7
  • Worker roles utilized for foundation handling of web roles
  • Virtual machine (VM) roles utilized for moving windows server applications to Windows Azure in a simple way
  1. Windows Azure Storage

It gives four types of storage services:

  • Queues for informing between web parts and worker roles
  • Tables for storing structural data
  • BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) to store contents, records, or vast information
  • Windows Azure Drives (VHD) to mount a page BLOB. These can be transferred and downloaded by means of BLOBs
  1. Windows Azure AppFabric

AppFabric provides five services:

  • Service bus
  • Access
  • Caching
  • Integration
  • Composite

Windows Azure Diagnostics empowers you to gather diagnostic data from an application running in Windows Azure. Diagnostic data is used for capacity planning and evaluation.

Azure Queues give a solid, diligent messaging between and within the services. They also highlight a very straightforward rest-based get/put/peek interface.

Bus Queues are part of a more extensive Windows Azure messaging framework that supports queuing.

Windows Azure Table storage service stores a lot of organized i nformation. Windows Azure tables are perfect for putting away organized, non-relational data.

 

Table: A table is a collection of entities. Tables don’t uphold a blueprint on elements, which implies that a solitary table can contain substances that have distinctive arrangements of properties. A record can contain numerous tables.

Entity: An entity is an arrangement of properties, like a database row. An entity can be up to 1 MB in size.

Properties: A property is a name-value pair. Every entity can incorporate up to 252 properties to store data. Every entity likewise has three system properties that determine a segment key, a row key, and a timestamp.

Scaling by including extra instances is frequently referred to as scaling out. Windows Azure likewise supports scaling up by utilizing bigger roles rather than more role instances.

By adding and expelling role instances to our Windows Azure application while it is running, we can adjust the execution of the application against its running costs.

An autoscaling solution reduces the amount of manual work engaged in dynamically scaling an application.

Windows Azure runs and stores the information on Microsoft data centers.

The main features are as follows:

  • Websites enable the designers to assemble the sites utilizing ASP.NET, PHP, etc., and send these websites utilizing FTP, Git, etc.
  • SQL database, formally known as Azure database, makes, broadens, and scales the application into the cloud utilizing Microsoft SQL Server.
  • This is Microsoft’s Platform as a Service that supports multilevel applications and automated deployment.

Private clouds are those that are constructed solely for an individual enterprise. They enable a firm to have applications in the cloud while tending to concerns with respect to data security and control that is frequently ailing in a public cloud environment.

Private cloud is otherwise called an internal cloud or enterprise cloud and dwells on the organization’s Intranet or hosted data center where the data is protected.

IaaS: IaaS is short for Infrastructure as a Service. It offers a range of capabilities, such as OS and network connectivity, that are at the infrastructural level. It follows a pay-per-use policy. It is used to host applications. Azure VM and VNET are examples of this kind of infrastructure.

PaaS: PaaS is an acronym for Platform as a Service. It primarily includes underlying infrastructure abstraction that allows quicker development of applications without the hassle of hosting management. Azure web apps, cloud services, storage services, etc., are all examples of PaaS. 

SaaS: SaaS stands for Software as a Service.  These applications are delivered with the help of a service delivery model where applications are simply used by an organization. SaaS follows subscription-based payments or ads. Examples of SaaS are Gmail, Office 365, SharePoint Online, etc.

No. Azure Internal Load Balancer supports only private IP addresses.

Azure Resource Manager, offered by Azure, provides management and application deployment in Azure. The management layer helps to build, modify, or delete resources in the Azure subscription account. It is useful while managing access controls, locks, and security of resources.

NSG or Network Security Group contains a list of ACL rules that allow or deny network traffic to subnets, network interface cards (NICs) linked to a subnet, or both. When an NSG is connected to a subnet, the ACL rules are for all virtual machines that are located in that subnet. The traffic restrictions to an individual NIC are achieved by linking the NSG directly to that NIC.

Azure Redis Cache is an in-memory Redis cache system by Azure that helps web applications to optimize performance. Data is fetched from the backend database and stored in the Redis cache for the first request. On subsequent requests, data is fetched from the Redis cache. Azure Redis cache provides powerful and secure caching mechanisms by using Azure Cloud.

Azure storage key is used to authenticate access to Azure storage service data depending on the project requirements. There are two types of storage keys that are used for authentication:

  • Primary access key
  • Secondary access key, to avoid downtime of the website or application

CSPack is a command-line tool that generates the service package file and prepares an application for deployment in Azure or Compute Emulator. Every cloud service type project includes the cloud service configuration file, .cscfg file, generated using CSPack. It stores:

  • The number of role instances for each role deployment 
  • The certificate thumbprints
  • User-defined configurations
  • Cloud computing refers to the usage of computing resources (servers)on the internet (refers to the term cloud) for the purpose of storing, managing, analyzing, and processing the data. Here, instead of maintaining our own servers, we use the infrastructure provided and maintained by third-party vendors such as Microsoft, AWS, etc, and pay them based on the server usage time duration.
  • Cloud computing enhances the speed of execution, ensures flexibility of resources, and easier scalability.
  • Cloud computing can be used to attain high fault tolerance and high system availability and this can also be done dynamically as per the infrastructural requirements of the application.

There are 3 models available for cloud deployment:

  • Public Cloud: In this model, the cloud infrastructure is owned publicly by the cloud provider and there are chances that the server resources could be shared between multiple applications.
  • Private Cloud: Here, the cloud infrastructure is owned exclusively by us or exclusive service is provided by the cloud provider to us.
    • This includes hosting our applications on our own on-premise servers or hosting the application on a dedicated server provided by the cloud provider.
  • Hybrid Cloud: As the name itself says, this model is the hybrid combination of private cloud and the public cloud.
    • This might include the scenario of using on-premise servers for processing confidential, sensitive data and using public cloud features for hosting public-facing applications.

Cloud service roles comprise a set of application and configuration files. There are 2 kinds of roles provided by Azure:

  • Web role: This provides a dedicated web server belonging to IIS (Internet Information Services) that is used for automatic deployment and hosting of front-end websites.
  • Worker role: These roles help the applications hosted within them to run asynchronously for longer durations and are independent of the user interactions and generally do not use IIS. They are also ideal for performing background processes. The applications are run in a standalone manner.

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