Microsoft Azure Interview Questions and Answers

Do you have a basic understanding of cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the method of storing, managing, analysing, and processing data using computer resources (servers) on the internet (hence the term cloud). Rather of managing our own servers, we use infrastructure provided and maintained by third-party providers such as Microsoft, AWS, and others, and pay them depending on the amount of time the servers are used.
Cloud computing improves the speed of execution, provides resource flexibility, and facilitates scaling.
Cloud computing can be utilised to achieve high fault tolerance and system availability, and it can be done dynamically based on the application's infrastructure requirements.

Could you explain me a little bit about the Azure Cloud Service?

Azure Cloud Service is a traditional platform as a service example (PaaS). This was created to assist applications that require a high level of scalability, stability, and availability while maintaining a low cost of operation. These are housed on virtual machines, and Azure gives developers more control over them by allowing them to install the appropriate software and control them remotely.
By launching a cloud service instance, Azure cloud services can be utilised to deploy multi-tier web-based applications in Azure. It is also possible to establish numerous roles for distributed processing, such as web roles, worker roles, and so on. Scalability is made easier and more flexible with Azure cloud services.

What are the various cloud deployment models available?

For cloud deployment, there are three options:

Cloud Deployment Models

Public Cloud: In this approach, the cloud infrastructure is owned by the cloud provider publicly, and server resources may be shared between numerous applications.
Private Cloud: In this case, we own the cloud infrastructure or the cloud provider provides us with a unique service.

This could mean hosting our apps on our own on-premise servers or on a dedicated server offered by the cloud provider.

Hybrid Cloud: As the name implies, this approach combines the advantages of both private and public clouds.

This might include a scenario where on-premise servers are used for processing confidential, sensitive data and hosting public-facing applications leveraging public cloud features

Cloud Hybrid

Here, we combine the best of both worlds to meet our needs and get an advantage.

In Azure, create a role instance.

A role instance is a virtual machine in which application code is executed using running role configurations. According to the definition in the cloud service configuration files, a role can have many instances.

How many cloud service jobs does Azure offer?

A set of application and configuration files make up a cloud service role. Azure offers two different types of roles:

Web role: This role provides a dedicated web server that is part of IIS (Internet Information Services) and is used to deploy and host front-end websites automatically.
Worker roles allow the programmes housed within them to execute asynchronously for longer periods of time while remaining unaffected by user interactions.

What is the purpose of the Azure Diagnostics API?
The Azure Diagnostics API allows us to collect diagnostic data from Azure-based apps such as performance monitoring, system event logs, and so on.

Azure Diagnostics must be enabled for cloud service roles in order to monitor data verbosely.

The diagnostics information can be utilised to create visual chart representations for enhanced monitoring and performance metric alerts.

What is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in Azure?

When two or more role instances of a role are deployed on Azure, the Azure SLA ensures or guarantees that access to that cloud service is assured for at least 99.95 percent of the time.

It goes on to say that if the role instance process is successful,

When the system is not in the running condition, such processes will be detected and corrective action will be done 99.9% of the time.

If any of the above commitments are not met at any point in time, Azure will credit us a percentage of our monthly payments, based on the pricing model of the Azure services.

What is Azure Resource Manager, and what does it do?

Azure Resource Manager is a service provided by Azure that allows users to manage and deploy applications in Azure.

The resource manager is a management layer that allows developers to create, change, and delete resources in an Azure subscription account. When we have requirements like managing access restrictions, locks, guaranteeing the security of resources post-deployment, and organising such resources, this capability comes in helpful.

What is the National Security Group (NSG)?

NSG stands for Network Security Group, and it consists of a set of ACL (Access Control List) rules that allow or deny network traffic to subnets, NICs (Network Interface Cards), or both. When NSG is attached to a subnet, the ACL rules are applied to all users on that subnet.

In a Virtual Network that was formed using classic deployment, VM creation is supported using Azure Resource Manager. Is this statement true or false?

False. This is not supported by Azure.

Interview Questions for Intermediates

What is Azure Redis Cache, and how does it work?

Azure provides and maintains an open-source in-memory Redis cache technology.

It aids the efficiency of web applications by getting data from the backend database and saving it in the Redis cache during the first request, and then fetching data from the Redis cache for all subsequent requests.

Using the Azure cloud, Azure Redis Cache delivers robust and secure caching technologies.

Create virtual machine scale sets in Azure.

These are the Azure computation resources that may be used to deploy and manage groups of Virtual Machines that are all the same (VMs).
These scale sets are identically configured and are intended to facilitate autoscaling of applications without the requirement for VM pre-provisioning.
They make it easy to create large-scale apps that target big data and containerized workloads.

What do you think of the term "availability set"?

The Availability Set is a logical grouping of VMs (Virtual Machines) that enables Azure cloud to understand how the application was created for availability and redundancy.
Azure assigns two types of domains to each VM in the availability set:

Domain of Faults: These are the ones that define a collection of virtual machines that share a single power supply and network switch. By default, VMs in availability sets are split across up to three fault domains. By separating VMs into fault domains, we can reduce the impact of network outages, power outages, and certain hardware problems on our applications.

Domain to be updated: These represent a collection of VMs and underlying hardware that can be rebooted at the same time. Only one update domain can be rebooted at a time, although the order in which they are rebooted is not sequential. Before another update domain is maintained, the previously restarted domain is given a 30-minute recovery time to guarantee that it is operational.

Azure An availability set can have up to three fault domains and twenty update domains configured.

What should you do if your hard disk fails?

When a hard drive fails, the following procedures must be followed:

We must ensure that the drive is not mounted in order for Azure Storage to function properly.

Replacing the drive will cause it to be remounted and formatted.

Is it feasible to create Azure applications that deal with connection failure?

Yes, it is conceivable, and the Transient Fault Handling Block makes it possible. Transient failures in the cloud environment might have a variety of causes:

We can see that the application to database connections fail on a regular basis due to the existence of more load balancers.

Because other applications are using resources to heavily hit the same resource while employing multi-tenant services, calls get slower and finally time out.

The last factor could be that we, as users, are repeatedly attempting to access the resource, causing the service to intentionally block our connection in order to support other tenants in the architecture.

Rather than pointing out flaws to the client, Periodically, the programme can detect transitory failures and attempt to conduct the same activity again, often after a few seconds, in the hopes of reestablishing the connection. We can generate retry intervals and have the application do retries by using the Transient Fault Handling Application Block technique. In the vast majority of circumstances, the error will be addressed on the second attempt, therefore the user will not be alerted to these errors.

Create a storage key in Azure.

The Azure storage key is used for authentication and validating access to the Azure storage service in order to manage data access based on project needs.
For authentication purposes, two types of storage keys are provided: Primary Access Key and Secondary Access Key.
Key of Secondary Access
The primary goal of the secondary access key is to prevent website or application downtime.

What is the purpose of cspack in Azure?

It's a command-line programme that generates service package files. The tool also aids in the preparation of the programme for deployment in Microsoft Azure or a compute emulator.

Every cloud service project has a.cscfg file, which is essentially a cloud service configuration file generated by the cspack programme.

It's mostly used to keep:

The number of role instances required for each role's deployment in the project.
The certificates' thumbprints.
Configuration and settings that are defined by the user.

Which Azure solution is best for executing code without a server?

The Azure Functions service can be used to run code without the need for a server.
Serverless Azure Functions are used to make complex orchestration and difficult resolves simpler. They're designed to be stateless and transient.
They allow you to connect to other services without having to hard code the integrations, which speeds up the development process.
It assists the developer in writing and concentrating on business logic code, saving time and effort.
They also offer Azure Application Insights for monitoring and evaluating code performance, which aids in the identification of bottlenecks and failure locations throughout the application's components.

Which Azure feature would be the best for establishing a common file sharing system for various virtual machines?

Azure provides the Azure File System service, which is used as a common repository system for sharing data among Virtual Machines configured using protocols such as SMB, FTPS, and NFS.

Can a Linux Virtual Machine be accessed without a password?

Yes, using the Key Vault mapping to any Admin VM allows us to connect in to another VM without having to enter a password.

What happens if the maximum number of failed tries is reached during the Azure ID Authentication process?

The azure account will be locked after a certain number of failed login attempts, and the mechanism of locking is determined by the protocol that analyses the entered password and the IP addresses of the login requests.

Can the Azure Internal Load Balancer be given a public DNS or IP address?

No! The Azure Internal Load Balancer only allows Private IP addresses, as the name implies, and so assigning a public IP address or DNS name is not possible.