Top 25 Azure Interview Questions and Answers in 2024

Editorial Team

Azure Interview Questions and Answers

You should expect to be interviewed on Azure, especially when seeking a job in a company that uses this platform for its cloud computing purposes. In preparation for your interview, you must anticipate a few questions about cloud computing with Azure to increase your chances of landing the job.

In this article, we will focus on Azure, a cloud computing platform owned and provided by Microsoft, one of the biggest tech giants worldwide. Take a look at the following questions and think about some of the best answers that will guarantee you success:

1. What Do You Understand By Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the increased usage of technological resources to handle data. Cloud Computing platforms and software store, retrieve, and process data over the internet, thus allowing organizations to enjoy increased scalability, availability, speed, and reduced cost in their data operations. Cloud Computing services are offered by data service providers, such as Azure.

2. What Do You Know About Azure Cloud Service?

Axure cloud service is a platform as a service, commonly known as Paas, provided by Microsoft. It supports applications needing extra scalability, availability, and readability while reducing the cost of operations. It hosts such operations in its virtual VMS and grants, developers, more control, letting them install different software they can remotely control. The cloud services okay an important role in deploying multi-tier web-based applications after creating an instance of cloud service.

3. Since You Have Used Azure For Some Time Now, Can You Mention The Cloud Service Roles Offered By Azure?

Azure offers cloud service roles, defined as applications and configuration files. There are two such roles in existence, namely the web and worker role. The worker role normally contributes to the asynchronous running of all the hosted applications over a longer period. They do not also depend on user interactions or IIS. On the other hand, the web role has a dedicated web server that belongs to Internet Information Services or IIS, which supports automatic deployment and end website hosting.

4. Mention The Different Models For Cloud Deployment

As it stands, there are three models for cloud deployment, namely public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. For the private cloud, the cloud infrastructure of often owned privately or exclusively by users. The cloud provider, therefore, offers the cloud service. On the other hand, the public cloud has its cloud infrastructure under public ownership. Server resources are occasionally shared between different applications. Lastly, a hybrid cloud combines private and public clouds. Most of the time, one uses on-premise servers for sensitive data and public cloud features for other data or applications.

5. Define Availability Set

An availability set is a logical virtual machine or VMS grouping that empowers Azure Cloud to understand an application’s development for redundancy and availability reduction. Azure assigns these virtual machines two domains, fault and update domains. Update domains are a collection of virtual machines and hardware that can be rebooted simultaneously. On the other hand, fault domains consist of those virtual machines with a common power source and network switch, generally separated across up to three domains by default.

6. Can Someone Create Applications Capable Of Handling Connection Failure On Azure?

Yes. It is possible to develop applications that can handle connection failure on Azure. This is generally done through the transient fault handling block, which response to the different causes of transient failures in the cloud environment. Such failures are often caused by more load balancers that cause the periodical failure of the application to database connections, the use of multi-tenant services that slow calls and lead to timeouts due to overuse of similar resources, and several user applications. The transient fault handling power block helps applications recognize transient errors and automatically perform repair operations.

7. Can You Execute A Code Without A Server In Azure?

Yes. Azure has a solution if you intend to execute a code without a server. This is generally done via the Azure service function, which supports serverless execution. It has serverless Azure functions that make complex orchestrations simple and resolutions easier, even though they are short-lived and stateless. An application will easily connect with other services without necessarily requiring hard coding of integrations. They also save time and effort as a programmer can easily concentrate on the business logic code 

8. What Do You Understand By Azure Blob Storage?

Azure has different solutions, and the blob storage function is one of them. This is an object storage solution by Microsoft for cloud services purposes. Fully known as binary large object storage, it caters to large unstructured data in text or binary format. You can easily serve your documents, images, or audio directly to a given browser. Such data can be accessed remotely once stored in the blob storage since these blobs are often toed to user accounts and grouped in containers.

9. What Are The Components Of The Azure Blob Service?

The Azure Blob Service has three components: storage account, container, and blob. The storage account either exists as a general storage account or blob storage account found or registered in Microsoft Azure, while the container’s main function is to group different blobs. One of their main advantages is that they can hold an unlimited number of blobs, provided that the container’s name starts with a lower case. The last component is the blob, a large binary object of any kind or size. Azure currently supports three types of blobs: append blobs, page blobs, and block blobs. The page blobs handle frequent read/write operations, while the append blobs are used for appending operations. The block blobs are often used for text and binary files that can support up to 195GB.

10. What Would You Do To Support High Load On An Application Where There Is No-Man Support On The Flow?

One of the best ways of stopping high load on an application with no-man support on the Flow is by making a case of virtual machine scale sets. This happens when proper configurations and conditions are defined, which as a result, provision a new virtual machine whenever the application’s load increases. Luckily, Azure scale sets can adequately support up to 1000 virtual machines, a limit that comes down to 600 whenever the custom virtual machine images are created and uploaded.

11. Mention Other Storage Services That Azure Offers.

Axure has four storage services: Azure storage table, azure queue storage, and azure file storage, both of which have advantages. Users can deploy applications with semi-structured data without a NoSQL-bases key-value store for Azure table storage. It is mostly used for applications that follow a flexible data schema and enterprise data that follow consistent models. Such data usually appears in the form of entities that are grouped under tables. Azure file storage has sharing features that can be accessed through SMB protocol. Such data is protected using HTTPS and SMB 3.0 Protocol.

12. Define IaaS

IaaS means infrastructure as a service. Here, users enjoy several capabilities such as network connectivity and operating systems billed in terms of pay per use. Such are often at the infrastructural level. All the provided infrastructures are used to host applications and include Azure virtual machines and VNET.

13. Differentiate Paas And SaaS

PaaS is different from SaaS. PaaS means platform as a service and can be defined as all the infrastructure developers use for quicker application development. They save such developers the need to invest in hosting management. Examples of PaaS include storage services, cloud services and Azure web services. On the other hand, SaaS stands for software as a service, defined as all the applications running in the device delivery model. Organizations normally consume these applications but must be paid for through ads. Examples include Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

14. Outline The Differences Between Azure Table Storage And The SQL Service

There are several differences between these two services offered by Azure. First, the table storage service does not limit itself to the NoSQL type of storage, while the Azure SQL table has a rational storage structure. In the former, data is stored in the key-value format, while in the latter, data is stored in rows and column combinations. The data schema is non-reinforced for storage in data storage service, while Azure SQL table storage has an enforced data schema. Each entity has a unique partition and row combination in the table storage service, while in the Azure SQL table, uniqueness I’d determined by the user through the primary key. Lastly, a table storage service can store log information and diagnostic data, while the latter is mainly used for transaction-based applications storage.

15. Contrast Azure Storage Queue And The Azure Bus Service Queue

In the Azure Storage Queue, the FIFO is not guaranteed while it matters on the latter through sessions. The Azure storage queue does not support sessions that happen in the Azure service bus storage. Dead lettering is not supported in the azure storage queue, which is not the case for the Azure bus service queue. The former does not detect duplicates automatically, while the latter supports automatic duplicate detection. The storage queue further supports one-to-one message delivery, while the service bus queue has provisions for one-to-one and one-to-many message deliveries.

16. Clients’ Applications Can Be Disconnected From The Cache. Can You Tell Us About The Causes From The Client’s Side?

There are many reasons why client applications can be disconnected from the cache on the client-side. These include deployment or possible redeployment of the application, a possibility that the application performed a scaling operation, a change of the client-side networking layer, or the crossing of the transient errors in the client or the client’s and server’s network. All these are valid reasons.

17. What Is The Difference Between The Azure Scale Sets And Availability Sets?

The differences between the Azure scale sets and availability sets exist in their definition, default domain, workload types, VM count, and configuration styles. The scale sets are a collection of identically configured VMS spread across several fault domains, while the availability sets are defined as secretly configured virtual machines spread across different fault domains. The Azure scale sets have five default domains, while the availability sets have three default domains with five that update automatically. You can also increase or decrease the number of virtual machines in Azure scale sets based on the pre-defined schedule’s demands, while for the availability sets, a virtual machine can only be added at the time of creating the sets.

18. Define Cspack In Azure

Cspack is a Command-line tool that generates service package files. It is also used to prepare an application for deployment in a computer emulator or Microsoft Azure. A .cafg file is present on every project cloud service type. This is the cloud’s service configuration file due to the Cspack tool. It is used to store the user-defined configurations and settings, certificates, thumbprints, and the number of role instances necessary to deploy every role in a given project.

19. Can You Mention The Different Domains In Every Virtual Machine In Availability Sets?

There are two types of domains in the virtual machines found in the availability sets. The update domains show the grouping of virtual machines and the related hardware properties, which can be rebooted simultaneously. The order of rebooting these domains is not sequential, and only one can be rebooted at a given time. The previous domain must be awarded at least thirty minutes of recovery time during rebooting to ensure it functions. On the other hand, the default domain shows the virtual machines capable of sharing common power sources and network switches.

20. What Are Virtual Machine Scale Sets In Azure?

The virtual machine scale sets refer to the computation resources in Azure used to deploy and manage similar virtual machines, popularly known as VMS. They are similarly configured and capable of supporting the autoscaling of different applications without needing any pre-provisioning of virtual machines. They can easily create large-scale applications for big data and containerized workloads computation purposes.

21. Define Nsg And Azure Redis Cache

NSG refers to a network security group. It contains access control rules regulating network traffic to different subnets and network interface cards connected to them. These rules work for all virtual machines in a subnet when linked with the respective network security group. It is worth noting that individual network interface cards can also have their traffic restricted through direct associations with the network interface card. On the other hand, the Azure Redis Cache is an open-source and in-memory media cache system offered and maintained by Azure. Thanks to it, web applications can improve performance through data fetching from back-end databases.

22. Azure Has A Service Level Agreement, Popularly Known As Sea. Can You Define It?

The Azure Service Level Agreement is a contract that guarantees 99.95- percent access to a given cloud service at all times when two or more role instances are deployed in Azure. The service level agreement also guarantees the same percentage of detection and corrective action for processes whenever the role instance process is not running. Lastly, Azure guarantees users a given percentage of all monthly fees if the guarantees are not upheld. The amount refunded generally depends on the price of the service being used.

23. What Are Some Of The Advantages Of Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure guarantees several advantages for businesses. It can adapt to the ever-changing business situations given its scalability; it is cost-efficient and offers data backup and recovery. It also enables companies and organizations to quickly deploy applications in the cloud through private or public cloud services. Azure also guarantees access to key data insights thanks to its NoSQL and SQL data services and in-built support. One can also easily integrate with Excel and enjoy many other business intelligence features.

24. How Can One Integrate Azure With Other Tools?

Azure can easily integrate with other tools, which explains why it is one of the most preferred cloud computing platforms for several companies. Businesses that depend on tools such as Office 365 can easily integrate their tools with Azure, as long as they get the best service plan. It allows organizations to have their on-premise products in one integrated environment. However, for non-Microsoft users, there are several hybrid solutions thanks to Azure BizTalk’s services that allow developers to integrate across several platforms such as Oracle.

25. What Are The Cons Of Microsoft Azure?

Despite the advantages this platform provides to users, it also has disadvantages. First, it requires management, unlike the different SaaS platforms such as Office 365. Azure has to be managed and maintained expertly. This platform also requires a level of platform expertise, unlike other local servers, for efficient operation of all moving parts. This platform also incurs data transfer fees, which can be a lot for huge companies, given that such fees work for both in and out data. Lastly, people have complained over time of Microsoft’s poor support, which also applies to Microsoft Azure.

Conclusion

Microsoft Azure is one of the best cloud computing solutions for businesses. It comes with several pros worth considering, and therefore, you shouldn’t be shocked if you are asked some questions about it in your upcoming interview. We wish you all the best!