Top Azure Interview Questions In 2023

Introduction

Going for an Azure interview? Want to learn what interview questions are asked in Azure interviews? Here is a list of top Azure Interview questions and answers.

What is Azure

Windows Azure is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft that enables businesses to run in the cloud completely. Cloud platform offers a pas-as-you-go payment method to pay for cloud services. For example, you don't pay if you have a database and don't use it, you don't pay.

Azure offers every service in the cloud a company needs to run its business. It provides infrastructure, hardware, operating systems, document services, storage, databases, data services, software, third-party products, and anything you can imagine.

You can also host your virtual machines, web servers, database servers, and content storage in Azure. Azure is not only Windows but also supports Linux servers. 

What is Cloud Computing?

Windows Azure is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft that enables businesses to run in the cloud completely.

Cloud computing is web-based computing that allows businesses and individuals to consume computing resources such as virtual machines, databases, processing, memory, services, storage, or event number of calls or events and pay-as-you-go. The pay-as-you-go model charges for the resources as much as you use. Unlike traditional computing, if you do not use any resources, you do not pay. It is similar to having a water connection or an electricity line. You have a meter that keeps track of your monthly usage, and you pay for that usage at a given rate.

Cloud computing is a culmination of numerous attempts at large-scale computing with seamless access to virtually limitless resources.

Advantages of cloud computing.

1. Cloud computing allows businesses to cut their operations and fix monthly hardware, employees, and software license costs. All hardware, database servers, web servers, software, products, and services are hosted in the cloud and added to the account as needed.
2. Cloud computing offers 24/7 uptime (99.99% uptime). This is because the cloud service provider manages cloud servers and data centers; you do not need to have any employees manage that.
3. Cloud computing is scalable and reliable. There is no limit on the number of users or resources. Cloud increases processing and resources as needed. If you do not need help, you can always scale down. A cloud services provider such as Azure or AWS
4. Cloud computing provides maintainability and automatic updates of new software, OS, databases, and third-party software. It reduces IT labor costs for a business.
5. Cloud service providers have data centers in various locations around the globe, which makes it faster and more reliable.

What are Azure Services and Resources?

Azure provides thousands of resources and services. The above list is a list of various resource categories. Major featured products of Azure are Virtual Machines, Azure SQL database, Azure Cosmos DB, AKS, Cognitive Services, Windows Virtual Desktop, App Service, PlayFab, Azure Functions, and Azure Blockchain Service.

What is the difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS?

Iaas, PaaS, and SaaS are three major components of Azure and cloud computing.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure – servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, and operating systems – from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a service (PaaS) refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a service (SaaS) is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on-demand, and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure and handle maintenance, such as software upgrades and security patching. 

What is Azure Active Directory, and what is its purpose?

Azure Active Directory is a comprehensive identity and access management Cloud solution; it combines directory services, advanced identity governance, application access management, and a rich standards-based platform.

As you know, Windows Azure Active Directory is a multi-tenant Service that provides an enterprise-level identity and access management for the cloud, built to support global scale, reliability, and availability.

Some points are as follows about Windows Azure Active Directory, which are:

• For Azure Active Directory, you must have a Microsoft Account.
• Afterward, I will create a new Windows Azure Active Directory.
• Subsequently, I'll add the users to the directory as either a user or a global admin.
• The next step will be optionally enabling multi-factor authentication for the user.
• Afterward, I'll optionally add the user as a co-administrator for the subscription.

What is Azure Redis Cache, and how to implement it?

Azure Redis Cache is a managed version of the popular open-source version of Redis Cache, making it easy for you to add Redis to your applications running in Azure. Redis is an in-memory database where data is stored as a key-value pair so the keys can contain data structures like strings, hashes, and lists. You can cache information in Redis and easily read it out because it is easier to work with memory than going from the disk and talking to a SQL Server.

• Suppose we have a web server where your web application is running. The back-end has SQL Server implementation where it runs on a VM, or maybe it is an Azure SQL database.

• A user comes to your application and goes to a page with tons of products on it.

• Now, that page has to go to the database to retrieve the information, which gets sent back to the web server and delivered to the user. But if you have thousands of users hitting that web page and you are constantly hitting the database server, it gets very inefficient.

• The solution is to add Azure Redis Cache, and we can cache all of those read operations that are taking place. So, that goes to an in-memory database on the Azure Redis Cache.

• When other users come back and look for the same information on the web app, it gets retrieved quickly from the Azure Redis Cache. Hence, we take the pressure off the back-end database server.

While deploying Azure Redis Cache, we can deploy it with a single node, deploy it in a different pricing tier with a two-node implementation, and build an entire cluster with multiple nodes. 

How to create and connect to Azure SQL Database

First, we must log into the Azure Portal with our Azure credentials. Then we need to create an Azure SQL database in the Azure portal.

Click on "Create a resource" on the left side menu, and it will open an "Azure Marketplace". There, we can see the list of services. Click "Databases," then click on "SQL Database".

Create a SQL database.

After clicking the "SQL Database", it will open another section. There, we need to provide the basic information about our database, like Database name, Storage Space, Server name, etc.

What is Azure SQL Data Warehouse?

The definition given by the dictionary is "a large store of data accumulated from a wide range of sources within a company and used to guide management decisions". As per the definition, these warehouses allow collecting the data from the various databases located as remote or distributed systems. It can be built by integrating the data from multiple sources that can be used for analytical reporting, decision making, etc. SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud-based Enterprise application that allows us to work under parallel processing to quickly analyze a complex query from a huge volume of data. It is also a solution for the Big-Data concepts.

Learn more here: Getting Started with Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse.

Can you create a Virtual Machine in Azure?

In this article, we will explore what a Virtual Machine is, the step-by-step implementation, and the ways of connecting VMs to our local system.

Virtual Machines Service in Azure provides a highly flexible "compute on demand" option for running our application workloads. The Azure portal provides a large collection of templates from which we can get started with our desired server and operating system. We can create multiple virtual machines and group them together in Azure cloud services. Cloud services serve as a network and security boundary for virtual machines. By placing virtual machines in cloud service, we can create multiple instances of any tier of our application.

For example, we host our web application on three virtual machines having the same server operating system and place those virtual machines in an availability set so that at least one virtual machine will be available at all times. Virtual machines use the Hyper-V virtual hard disk format (.vhd) for their hard drives. We can upload the fixed-size virtual hard disk files from our infrastructure to Azure and download the hard disk files from Azure to our data center. 

What is Azure Table Storage?

Azure Table storage is a very popular service used across many projects, which helps store structured NoSQL data in the cloud, providing a Key/attribute store with a schematic design. Table storage is very well known for its schematic architecture design. The main advantage of using this is that table storage is fast and cost-effective for many applications.

Another advantage of table storage is that you can store flexible datasets like user data for a web application, any device information, or any other types of metadata required by your service.

You can store any number of entities in the table. One storage account may contain any number of tables up to the capacity limit of the storage account.

Another advantage of Azure Table storage is that it stores a large amount of structured data. The service is a NoSQL datastore that accepts authenticated calls from inside and outside the Azure cloud.

• It helps to store TBs of structured data.
• For storing datasets that don't require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures.
• They were quickly querying data using a clustered index.

How to migrate a SQL Server database to Azure SQL.

It is common to migrate a SQL Server database to Azure SQL. We can use the SSMS's Import and Export features for this purpose.

Continue reading: Migrate SQL Server Database To Azure SQL.

What is CosmosDB?

Azure Cosmos DB is a globally replicated, multimodal database service that offers rich querying over schema-free data.

The definition of Cosmos DB says 'Globally Replicated,' which means you can replicate your database in different geographical areas. It stores data in JSON format, and there is no need to define the schema in advance; hence it is schema-free. You can execute the SQL query on stored JSON documents. Cosmos DB was formerly known as Document DB, and it supports multimodal like SQL, Table API, Graph API, etc.

Azure Cosmos DB is the right solution for web, mobile, and gaming applications when predictable throughput, high availability, and low latency are key requirements. In upcoming articles, we will cover throughput, availability, and latency in detail.

What is Azure Blob Storage

Azure Storage is one of the cloud computing PaaS (Platform as a Service) services provided by the Microsoft Azure team. It provides cloud storage that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable, and redundant. In addition, it is massively scalable and elastic. For example, it can store and process hundreds of terabytes of data, or you can store the small amounts of data required for a small business website.

Here, we will see how to create a Storage Account.

Azure Storage Types

A storage account is a container with a group of Azure Storage services (Azure Blobs, Azure Files, Azure Queues, and Azure Tables). The following illustration shows a storage account containing several data services.

Azure Storage is a fundamental building block for all of the Azure Services. We can manage them as a group. Once you create the account, we can create any data service inside it, and once you delete the account, all the data will be deleted. A storage account can be created in Azure resources. An Azure subscription may contain multiple resource groups, each containing one or more storage accounts. Within Azure, there are two types of storage accounts, five types of storage, four levels of data redundancy, and three tiers for storing files.

What is Blob?

Blob is a service for storing large amounts of unstructured data that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS." Blob stands for "Binary Large Object ". It's designed to store large amounts of unstructured text or binary data like virtual hard disks, videos, images, or even log files.

The data can be exposed to the public or stored privately. It scales up or down as your needs change. We no longer manage it. We only pay for what we use.

Why do we use Blob?

• Store any unstructured data that includes images, videos, audio, documents, and backups at an exabyte scale. It handles trillions of stored objects, with millions of average requests per second, for customers worldwide.
• Blob has Strong Consistency. When an object is changed, it is verified everywhere for superior data integrity, ensuring you always have access to the latest version.
• We can have the flexibility to perform the edits in storage, which can improve your application performance and reduce bandwidth consumption.
• We have many different types of blobs for our flexibility. In addition, we automatically configure geo-replication options in a single menu to easily empower global and local access.
• One infrastructure but worldwide wide. With regions worldwide, it is ideal for streaming and storing media, whether live broadcast events or a long-term archive of petabytes of movies and television shows. In addition, we can perform secure backup and disaster recovery.

What Is Azure Data Factory?

Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that allows you to create data-driven workflows in the cloud for orchestrating and automating data movement and transformation. Using Azure Data Factory, you can create and schedule data-driven workflows (called pipelines) that can ingest data from disparate data stores. Then, it can process and transform the data using compute services, such as Azure HDInsight Hadoop, Spark, Azure Data Lake Analytics, and Azure Machine Learning.

How To Create Azure Functions?

Azure Functions is a solution for executing small lines of code or functions in the cloud. We can also select the programming languages we want to use. We pay only for the time our code executes; that is, we pay per usage. It supports a variety of programming languages, like C#, F#, Node.js, Python, PHP, or Java. It supports continuous deployment and integration. Azure Functions applications let us develop serverless applications. 

What Is Azure Databricks?

Azure Databricks is a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache® Spark™ based analytics platform optimized for Azure. Designed in collaboration with the founders of Apache Spark, Azure Databricks combines the best of Databricks and Azure to help customers accelerate innovation with a one-click setup; streamlined workflows, and an interactive workspace that enables collaboration between data scientists, data engineers, and business analysts.

As an Azure service, customers automatically benefit from native integration with other Azure services such as Power BI, SQL Data Warehouse, and Cosmos DB, as well as from enterprise-grade Azure security, including Active Directory integration, compliance, and enterprise-grade SLAs. 

What is Azure Advisor?

The Azure Advisor service provides information about your entire Azure landscape. In addition, it gives you a complete overview of your system needs including possible ways to save money.

• High availability shows you ways to improve the continuity of your business-critical applications.
• Security detects threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to security breaches.
• Performance shows you ways to speed up your applications.
• Cost gives you ways to reduce your overall Azure spreading. 

What are Azure App Services?

We can develop an application in any language or framework, such as .NET, .NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Python. Applications run and scale as per our needs with complex architecture on Windows and Linux-based environments. The App service has added the power of Azure to our application, such as security, load balancing, scaling, and automated management. We can also develop capabilities such as continuous deployment from GitHub, Docker Hub, Azure DevOps, and other sources, staging environments, SSL certificates, etc.

Azure App Service enables us to easily create web, mobile, logic, and API apps. Furthermore, we can run any of these apps within a single Azure App service deployment. Our apps are automatically managed by Azure App Service and run in managed VMs isolated from other customers. We can also use a built-in auto-scaling feature supported within Azure App Service that automatically increases and decrease the number of VMs based on consumption resources.

The following are additional on the different app types supported by Azure App service.

Introduction to Azure App Services.

What Is Azure Kubernetes Service?

Kubernetes is an open-source system started by Google to help orchestrate (deploy, scale, and manage) containerized applications. Azure Kubernetes Service makes working with Kubernetes easier.

Before we learn how to orchestrate containers, let's discuss containers briefly.

You can run your applications as containers. Think about containers as isolated processes with their directory, user groups, ports, etc., which run in the host machine. They are like virtual machines but not the same. Virtual machines have their operating systems, whereas containers use the host machine's operating system. Also, the containers run from images. Think of images as software installers. But images bundle up the software code with its dependencies because containers run the same way on different environments since they are environment independent to a much larger extent.

What is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps was previously known as Visual Studio Team Service. The primary use of Azure DevOps is to provide an end-to-end solution to an organization. It is highly scalable and reliable.

Above all are the basic explanations readily available. Just make sure you have gone through it for basic understanding. Now, let's start our process.