Azure Interview Questions

Microsoft Azure has made quite a technological breakthrough, and now it finds applications in many
businesses as well as private as well as public service providers. Here are a few Azure Interview questions,
which might be asked during an Azure interview:

Q1. What is Microsoft Azure?

The companies, which provide the cloud services to businesses, are called Cloud Providers, and one of them is
Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure is an expanding cloud computing service created by Microsoft for testing,
building, managing, and deploying applications and services via a global network of data centers managed by
Microsoft. It is basically and widely used for accessing Microsoft’s infrastructure for the cloud by businesses.

Q2. What is the Windows Azure portal?

The developers, who have a hosting account, can use a Windows Azure portal to submit applications to
Windows Azure. A developer can easily access the Windows Azure portal through the Web browser, by
signing
in with a Windows Live ID to run an application.

Q3. What are the roles, which are implemented in Windows Azure?

Roles are simply servers in layman terms. They are managed and load balanced platforms like service virtual
machines, which work together to achieve a common goal. There are three roles, which are implemented in
Windows Azure:

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especially useful during development and QA efforts.

On the other hand, Bus Queues are part of a more far-reaching Windows Azure messaging framework, which
supports queuing. As a rule, Azure Service Bus Queues can delete themselves after a configurable amount of
idle time. This feature is very practical when you create Queues for each user because if a user hasn’t
interacted with a Queue for the past month, it automatically gets clean it up. It is also a great way to reduce
costs.
However, these Queues are limited to a maximum of 80 GB. Once the user has reached this limit, his or her
application will start receiving exceptions.

Q5. What is virtual machine scale sets in Windows Azure?

Virtual machine scale sets are Azure compute resources, which can be used to deploy as well as manage a set
of identical VMs. When all the VMs are configured in the same way, scale sets are automatically designed to
support true auto-scale, and no pre-provisioning or prearrangement of VMs is required. That is why it is
easier to build large-scale services, which target big compute, big data, and containerized workloads.

Q6. What is the Azure Fabric?

The Azure fabric is the main core concept over here. It provides a service called the Azure Fabric Controller.
It is called an operating system for the Azure. Because it handles or manages the following:

All roles (computing) and

resources. Deployment and
activating services. Health
monitoring for all services.
Allocating, releasing of resources.
Provisioning VM, terminating, etc.
Updating patches for installed OS on Virtual Machine automatically.

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 roles. Windows Azure supports three types of roles:

Web roles used for web application programming and supported by IIS7.
Worker roles are also used for background processing of web roles.
Virtual Machine (VM) roles are generally used for migrating windows server applications to Windows
Azure in an easy way.

Windows Azure Storage

Windows Azure provides storage in the cloud. It provides four different types of storage services:
Queues for messaging between web roles and worker roles.
Tables for storing structural data.
BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) to store text, files or large data.
Windows Azure Drives (VHD) to mount a page blob. They can easily be downloaded and uploaded via
blobs.

Windows Azure AppFabric

AppFabric provides infrastructure services for developing, deploying and managing Windows Azure
application. It provides five services:

Service bus
Access
Caching
Integration
Composite

Q8. What do you understand by Hybrid Cloud? Explain its advantages.

A hybrid cloud is a mixture of internal and external cloud services, a combination of a private cloud combined
with the use of public cloud services. This type of cloud is most suitable when you want to keep the
confidential data in your premise (private cloud) and consume the other services from a public cloud.
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 Q9. Explain what is Diagnostics in Windows Azure?

Windows Azure Diagnostics provides facility to store diagnostics data. Some diagnostics data is stored in a
table, while some are stored in a blob. For collecting the data on diagnostics, the user must initialize the
Windows Azure diagnostic monitor. The Windows Azure diagnostic monitor runs in Windows Azure as well
as in the computer’s emulator and collects diagnostic data for a role instance.

Q10. What is the method for creating a Queue in storage account?

The queue is a one-type of Azure Storage, where a user can store your data as storage. Blobs are stored in a
container, Entity in table and Message in Queue.

Listed below are the key concepts in the queue.

FIFO implementation
Messages are added to end of the Queue and processed from the front
Queues provides a good way of the Front end and Back end decoupling

Q11. What are Storage keys?

Storage keys, which are also known as Access Keys, are used as an authentication mode for accessing the
storage services account to manipulate information based on our requirements. In Windows Azure, the users
have an option to provide a Primary Access Key and a Secondary Access Key, even though it is likely that
they will use a single access key to authenticate their application to the storage.

Q12. Why do we need storage keys?

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Q14. Explain what is Federation in SQL Azure?

Federation is introduced in SQL Azure for scalability. It helps administrators by making repartitioning and
redistributing of data easier and thus, helps with scaling data. It helps developers in the routing layer and the
sharding of data. It helps in routing without application downtime. Federation does basic scaling of objects in a
SQL Azure Database. Federations are the partitioned data. There can be multiple Federations within a database.
Moreover, each Federation represents a different distribution scheme. We create a Federation with a different
distribution scheme and requirement. Student and Grade’s tables of a School Database may have a different
distribution requirement, so they are put into different Federations.

Q15. What do you know about the SQL Azure firewall rules?

The firewall checks access to the originating IPs from which a user may try to access the database. To configure
the firewall, we need to configure a range of acceptable IP addresses upon which we try to connect to the SQL
Azure server using the Management Portal or with the SQL Server Management Studio. All access to SQL
Azure is blocked by a firewall.

By default Database created in SQL Azure is blocked by the firewall for maximized security. SQL Azure
firewall rules are provided to protect the data and to prevent access restrictions to the SQL Azure database.

Q16. What is Windows Azure Traffic Manager?

The Traffic Manager allows users to control the distribution of user traffic of deployed Azure cloud services,

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you don’t need downtime for application maintenance, patch purgation or complete new package
deployment.
Quick Setup: It’s very easy to configure Azure Traffic Manager on Windows Azure portal. If you have
already hosted your application on Windows Azure (a cloud service, Azure website), you can easily
configure this Traffic Manager with a simple procedure (setting routing policy).

Q18. What is an Availability Set?

An availability set is a logical grouping of VMs that allows Azure to understand how the application for a
user is built to provide redundancy and availability. It is recommended that two or more VMs be created
within an availability set to provide for a highly available application and to meet the 99.95% Azure SLA.
When a single VM is used with Azure Premium Storage, the Azure SLA applies for unplanned maintenance
events.

Q19. Do scale sets work with Azure availability sets?

A scale set is an implicit availability set with five fault domains and five update domains. Scale sets of more
than 100 VMs span multiple placement groups, which are equivalent to multiple availability sets. An
availability set of VMs can exist in the same virtual network as a scale set of VMs. A common configuration is
to put control node VMs (which often require unique configuration) in availability set and put data nodes in
the scale set.

Q20. Explain what a break-fix issue is?

Technical problems in Azure are called break-fix issues. It is an industry term, which refers to “work
involved in supporting a technology when it fails in the normal course of its function, which requires
intervention by a support organization to be restored to working order.”

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sed in-memory data structure store, which is commonly used as a database,
 cache and message broker. Azure Redis Cache is also based on this. It gives you access to a secure, dedicated
Redis cache, managed by Microsoft, and accessible from any application within Azure. It supports data
structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperlog logs and
geospatial indexes with radius queries.

It is different from other Azure services as unlike some of the other available services; Azure Redis Cache does
not have an MSDN class library reference. This is because each client has its API that makes calls to the Redis
cache instance using Redis commands. That is why there is not one centralized class reference on MSDN, and
each client maintains its reference documentation.

Q23. How much storage can a user with a virtual machine use?

Each data disk on the VM can be up to 1 TB. However, the number of data disks, which you can use depends
on the size of the virtual machine. Azure storage accounts can also provide storage for the operating system
disk and any data disks where each disk is a .vhd file stored as a page blob.

Azure Managed Disks are the new and recommended disk storage offerings for use with Azure Virtual
Machines for persistent storage of data. A user can use multiple Managed Disks with each VM. Managed
Disks offer two types of durable storage options: Premium and Standard Managed Disks.

Q24.

For configuring with Node.Js, a user can specify the PM2 configuration file or your script file. In case of .NET
Core, the user can specify their compiled DLL name. Moreover, in case of Ruby, one can specify the Ruby
script that they want to initialize their app with.

Q25. What do you mean by the stateful and stateless micro-services for Service Fabric?

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 Q27. Explain what is Auto-Scaling in Azure?

Scaling by including extra instances is frequently referred to as scaling out. Windows Azure similarly
supports scaling up by employing a bigger role instead of more role instances. By adding and expelling role
instances to your Windows Azure application while it is running, you can adjust the execution of the
application against its running costs. An auto-scaling solution simply diminishes the amount of manual work
engaged in dynamically scaling an application.

Q28. How is a private cloud different from the public cloud?

Private clouds are those that are built solely for an individual enterprise. They enable any particular firm to
have applications in the cloud while tending to concerns concerning data security and control that is frequently
ailing in a public cloud environment. It 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. Public cloud is utilized as a service
through the Internet by the users, while a private cloud, is implemented within specific limits like firewall
settings and is overseen and checked by the users dealing with it in an organization.

Q29. What do you know about the Azure App Service?

Azure App Service is a completely managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering for proficient developers
that conveys a rich arrangement of abilities to the web, mobile and integration scenarios. They offer a very
adaptable, universally accessible mobile application development platform for Enterprise Developers and
System Integrators that conveys a rich set of capacities to mobile engineers.

Q30. What is Azure Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

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