Top 100 Microsoft Azure Administrator Interview Questions and Answers for 2025
Prepare for your Azure Administrator interview with our comprehensive list of the top 100 Microsoft Azure interview questions and answers for 2025. Covering key topics like Azure services, RBAC, virtual machines, networking, storage, and more, this guide is perfect for beginners and experienced professionals aiming to ace their Azure certification or job interview.
1. What is Microsoft Azure?
Answer: Microsoft Azure is a leading public cloud platform offering a wide range of services, including computing, storage, networking, analytics, AI, and more. Launched in 2008 as “Project Red Dog,” it was rebranded as Windows Azure in 2010 and later as Microsoft Azure in 2014 to reflect its support for diverse workloads beyond Windows. Azure enables users to build, deploy, and manage applications with scalability and flexibility across global data centers.
2. What types of services does Microsoft Azure offer?
Answer: Azure provides a broad spectrum of services categorized as:
- Compute: Virtual Machines, App Services, Kubernetes Service.
- Storage: Blob Storage, Files, Disks, Queues.
- Networking: Virtual Network (VNet), Load Balancer, VPN Gateway.
- Databases: Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, MySQL.
- AI/ML: Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services.
- Analytics: Synapse Analytics, Data Lake.
- Migration: Azure Migrate, Site Recovery.
- Security: Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Key Vault. These services support Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) models.
3. What is an Azure Subscription?
Answer: An Azure Subscription is a billing and access agreement between a customer and Microsoft Azure. It allows users to consume Azure services and is tied to a payment method. Subscriptions can operate on a Pay-As-You-Go model, where costs are based on resource usage, or other plans like Enterprise Agreements for larger organizations.
4. What is the Pay-As-You-Go billing model in Azure?
Answer: Pay-As-You-Go is a flexible billing model where users are charged based on actual resource consumption, such as compute, storage, or bandwidth. Key features include:
- No upfront costs: Pay only for what you use.
- Scalability: Adjust resources dynamically to match demand.
- Monthly billing: Costs are calculated and billed monthly. This model suits businesses seeking cost flexibility without long-term commitments.
5. What is an Azure Resource Group?
Answer: An Azure Resource Group is a logical container that organizes related Azure resources, such as VMs, storage accounts, and databases, for a specific solution. Resources in the same group typically share the same lifecycle, enabling efficient deployment, management, and deletion. Deleting a resource group removes all contained resources, simplifying cleanup.
6. What are Azure Resource Locks?
Answer: Azure Resource Locks prevent accidental deletion or modification of critical resources. They can be applied at the subscription, resource group, or individual resource level. The two types are:
- Read-Only Lock: Prevents modifications and deletions, allowing only read access.
- Delete Lock: Allows modifications but prevents deletion. Locks enhance governance and protect critical infrastructure.
7. What is Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)?
Answer: Azure RBAC is a fine-grained access control system that manages permissions for Azure resources. It allows administrators to assign roles with specific permissions to users, groups, or applications at various scopes (management group, subscription, resource group, or resource). Common roles include:
- Owner: Full access, including delegating permissions.
- Contributor: Manage resources but cannot assign permissions.
- Reader: View resources without modification rights. RBAC follows the principle of least privilege to enhance security.
8. What are the scopes for assigning RBAC roles?
Answer: RBAC roles can be assigned at the following scopes:
- Management Group: For managing multiple subscriptions.
- Subscription: Across all resources in a subscription.
- Resource Group: For resources within a specific group.
- Resource: For individual resources like VMs or storage accounts.
9. What is Azure Policy?
Answer: Azure Policy is a service that enforces organizational standards and ensures compliance by defining rules for resource configurations. For example, a policy can restrict resource deployment to specific regions or enforce tagging. Policies are applied at scale across subscriptions or management groups, helping maintain governance and compliance.
10. What are Azure Regions and Geographies?
Answer:
- Azure Regions: Physical locations with Azure data centers, each containing one or more availability zones for high availability.
- Azure Geographies: Groupings of regions within a geographic area (e.g., North America, Europe) designed to meet data residency and compliance requirements. Each geography ensures data stays within its boundaries, with paired regions for redundancy.
11. What is Microsoft Entra ID?
Answer: Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) is Azure’s cloud-based identity and access management service. It provides authentication and authorization for users, groups, and applications, enabling secure access to Azure resources and other services like Microsoft 365. Features include single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
12. What is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) in Microsoft Entra ID?
Answer: MFA enhances security by requiring users to provide multiple forms of verification (e.g., password + phone verification) to access Entra ID-protected resources. It reduces the risk of unauthorized access, especially for sensitive operations.
13. How do you add a custom domain to Microsoft Entra ID?
Answer: To add a custom domain to Entra ID:
- Navigate to the Entra ID portal.
- Go to Custom Domain Names and select Add Custom Domain.
- Enter the domain name (e.g., example.com).
- Verify ownership by adding a TXT or MX record to your domain’s DNS settings, as provided by Azure.
- Once verified, the domain can be used for user authentication and branding.
14. What is the difference between a user and a group in Entra ID?
Answer:
- User: An individual account representing a person or service with specific credentials and permissions.
- Group: A collection of users that simplifies permission management by assigning roles or access to the entire group rather than individual users.
15. What are Microsoft Entra ID roles?
Answer: Entra ID roles define permissions for managing Entra ID resources. The top role is Global Administrator, which grants full control over Entra ID, including user management, password resets, and role assignments. Other roles include User Administrator, Application Administrator, and more, tailored to specific tasks. A full list is available at Microsoft’s documentation.
16. What is Microsoft Entra ID Connect?
Answer: Entra ID Connect synchronizes on-premises Active Directory (AD) with Microsoft Entra ID, enabling hybrid identity management. It supports single sign-on, password hash synchronization, and pass-through authentication, ensuring seamless user access across cloud and on-premises environments.
17. What are the commonly used Azure RBAC roles?
Answer:
- Owner: Full control, including permission delegation.
- Contributor: Manage resources but cannot assign permissions.
- Reader: View-only access to resources.
- User Access Administrator: Manage user access to resources.
18. What is the principle of least privilege in Azure RBAC?
Answer: The principle of least privilege ensures users or services have only the minimum permissions required to perform their tasks. This reduces security risks by limiting access to sensitive resources and preventing unauthorized actions.
19. What is a Management Group in Azure?
Answer: A Management Group is a container for organizing multiple Azure subscriptions. It enables centralized governance by applying RBAC roles, Azure Policies, and budgets across subscriptions, simplifying management for large-scale environments.
20. Can you change the Virtual Network (VNet) or Subnet of an Azure Virtual Machine (VM)?
Answer:
- VNet: You cannot directly change a VM’s VNet. To move a VM to a different VNet, create a new VM in the target VNet using the original VM’s disk or image.
- Subnet: You can change a VM’s subnet within the same VNet by updating its network interface card (NIC) settings, but this requires stopping the VM, which may cause a brief downtime.
21. What is the difference between Entra ID roles and RBAC roles?
Answer:
- Entra ID Roles: Control permissions for managing Entra ID resources, such as users, groups, and applications.
- RBAC Roles: Manage access to Azure resources like VMs, storage, and networks.
22. What are Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)?
Answer: Azure VMs are an IaaS offering that provides scalable, on-demand virtualized compute resources. Users have full control over the operating system (Windows or Linux), allowing them to install and manage software. VMs require maintenance tasks like patching and configuration but offer flexibility without the need for physical hardware.
23. What is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?
Answer: IaaS is a cloud computing model where Azure manages the underlying infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, and virtualization), while users manage the operating system, applications, and updates. Azure VMs are a prime example of IaaS.
24. What is Boot Diagnostics in Azure?
Answer: Boot Diagnostics is a troubleshooting feature enabled by default for Azure VMs. It captures serial logs and screenshots during the boot process, helping diagnose and resolve boot failures if a VM enters a non-bootable state.
25. What are Azure VM Sizes?
Answer: Azure VM sizes are predefined configurations optimized for specific workloads, offering varying CPU, memory, storage, and networking capabilities. They are categorized into families:
- General-purpose: Balanced CPU-to-memory ratio for testing, development, or small databases.
- Compute-optimized: High CPU-to-memory ratio for web servers or batch processing.
- Memory-optimized: High memory-to-CPU ratio for databases or analytics.
- Storage-optimized: High disk throughput for big data or NoSQL databases.
- GPU-optimized: For graphics-intensive or AI workloads.
- High-Performance Compute: For HPC tasks like simulations or rendering.
26. What is the difference between Stopped and Stopped (Deallocated) states for an Azure VM?
Answer:
- Stopped: The VM’s operating system is shut down, but compute resources (CPU, memory) remain allocated, incurring costs.
- Stopped (Deallocated): The VM is shut down, and all compute resources are released, stopping all charges except for associated storage.
27. What is Azure VM Auto-Shutdown?
Answer: Azure VM Auto-Shutdown is a feature that automatically moves a VM to the Stopped (Deallocated) state at a scheduled time, reducing costs by releasing compute resources. It’s ideal for non-production environments or workloads with predictable usage patterns.
28. How do you change the size of an Azure VM?
Answer: To change a VM’s size:
- Stop the VM in the Azure Portal.
- Navigate to the VM’s Size settings.
- Select a new size from the available options.
- Start the VM to apply the new configuration. Ensure the new size is supported in the VM’s region and availability zone.
29. What is an Azure Virtual Network (VNet)?
Answer: An Azure VNet is a logically isolated network in the cloud that enables secure communication between Azure resources, the internet, and on-premises networks. VNets support scenarios like:
- Resource-to-internet communication.
- Inter-resource communication within Azure.
- Hybrid connectivity with on-premises networks.
30. What are the recommended IP address ranges for Azure VNets?
Answer: Azure recommends using private IP address ranges for VNets:
- 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255 (10.0.0.0/8)
- 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255 (172.16.0.0/12)
- 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255 (192.168.0.0/16) These ranges avoid conflicts with public IP spaces and support subnet segmentation.
31. What is an Azure Subnet, and how many IPs are reserved?
Answer: A subnet is a subdivision of a VNet’s IP address range, used to organize and isolate resources. Azure reserves five IP addresses in each subnet:
- x.x.x.0: Network address.
- x.x.x.1: Default gateway.
- x.x.x.2, x.x.x.3: Azure DNS mapping.
- x.x.x.255: Broadcast address (for /24 subnets). For example, in a 192.168.0.0/24 subnet, only 251 IPs are usable.
32. What are Public and Private IPs in Azure?
Answer:
- Public IP: Assigned to resources for internet-facing communication, enabling external access (e.g., to a VM or load balancer).
- Private IP: Used for internal communication within a VNet, ensuring secure, isolated connectivity between Azure resources.
33. What is VNet Peering?
Answer: VNet Peering enables communication between two VNets in the same or different regions without requiring a VPN. Key points:
- Local Peering: Connects VNets in the same region.
- Global Peering: Connects VNets across different regions.
- VNets must have non-overlapping address spaces.
- No downtime is required to establish peering.
34. What are Availability Zones?
Answer: Availability Zones are isolated data centers within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Key features:
- Typically, three zones per region.
- Connected via high-speed fiber with <2ms latency.
- Provide high availability and fault tolerance, ensuring resources remain operational if one zone fails.
35. What is an Availability Set?
Answer: An Availability Set distributes VMs across multiple physical racks and hosts within a single Azure data center to prevent single points of failure. It uses:
- Fault Domains: Separate hardware to avoid simultaneous failures.
- Update Domains: Allow staggered updates to maintain availability during maintenance.
36. What is the difference between Availability Zones and Availability Sets?
Answer:
- Availability Zones: Protect against entire data center failures by distributing resources across multiple isolated locations in a region.
- Availability Sets: Protect against hardware or rack failures within a single data center, offering less comprehensive redundancy than zones.
37. What is a Proximity Placement Group?
Answer: A Proximity Placement Group (PPG) colocates VMs in the same data center to minimize network latency, ideal for latency-sensitive applications like databases or high-performance computing workloads.
38. What are Azure Managed Disks?
Answer: Managed Disks are block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs, fully managed by Azure. Users specify disk size and type (Ultra Disk, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, Standard HDD), and Azure handles provisioning, scalability, and maintenance. They simplify disk management compared to unmanaged disks.
39. What are OS Disk, Data Disk, and Temporary Disk in Azure?
Answer:
- OS Disk: Stores the VM’s operating system.
- Data Disk: Stores application data, such as databases or files.
- Temporary Disk: Provides short-term storage for paging or swap files, not persistent across reboots.
40. What is a Network Security Group (NSG)?
Answer: An NSG is a firewall that filters inbound and outbound traffic for Azure resources using security rules. It can be applied to:
- A subnet, affecting all VMs in that subnet.
- A VM’s network interface card (NIC). Rules define allowed or denied traffic based on source, destination, port, and protocol.
41. What is Azure Cost Management?
Answer: Azure Cost Management is a service that helps organizations monitor, analyze, and optimize Azure spending. Key features include:
- Budgets: Set spending limits and receive alerts.
- Cost Analysis: Identify underutilized resources for optimization.
- Reserved Instances: Pre-purchase VMs or databases for discounts.
- Azure Hybrid Benefit: Use existing on-premises licenses to save costs.
- Spot VMs: Leverage unused capacity for cost-effective, non-critical workloads.
42. What are Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets?
Answer: VM Scale Sets enable automatic scaling of identical VMs based on demand or metrics like CPU usage. Key features:
- Scale Out/In: Add or remove VMs dynamically.
- Custom Images: Use custom VM images for scaling.
- Minimum/Maximum Count: Define scaling boundaries. Ideal for high-availability applications like web servers.
43. What are the types of Azure Load Balancers?
Answer:
- Basic Load Balancer: Free, supports up to 300 VMs, works with Availability Sets, no SLA, not for production.
- Standard Load Balancer: Paid, supports up to 1,000 VMs, works with Availability Sets and Zones, 99.99% SLA, production-ready.
- Gateway Load Balancer: Routes traffic through firewalls for inspection, used for security-focused scenarios.
44. What is the purpose of an Azure Load Balancer?
Answer: An Azure Load Balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple VMs to ensure high availability and scalability. It operates within a single region and VNet, balancing traffic for workloads like web applications.
45. What is an Azure Application Gateway?
Answer: Application Gateway is a Layer 7 load balancer that manages HTTP/HTTPS traffic. It offers features like:
- SSL termination.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF).
- URL-based routing.
- Session affinity. Ideal for web applications requiring advanced traffic management.
46. What is Azure Traffic Manager?
Answer: Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based load balancer that directs client traffic to the most suitable endpoint based on routing methods. It ensures low-latency access and supports failover for global applications.
47. What are the routing methods in Azure Traffic Manager?
Answer:
- Weighted: Distributes traffic based on assigned weights.
- Performance: Routes to the lowest-latency endpoint.
- Priority: Directs traffic to a primary endpoint, with failover to secondary.
- Geographic: Routes based on user location.
- Multi-value: Returns multiple healthy endpoints for client choice.
- Subnet: Routes based on the client’s source IP subnet.
48. What is a Route Table in Azure?
Answer: A Route Table defines rules (routes) to control traffic flow within a VNet. Users can create User-Defined Routes (UDRs) to override default routing, directing traffic to specific destinations like firewalls or virtual appliances.
49. What is a NAT Gateway in Azure?
Answer: A NAT Gateway provides outbound internet connectivity for VMs without requiring public IPs. It supports secure outbound traffic but does not allow inbound connections from the internet, enhancing security.
50. What is an Azure Storage Account?
Answer: An Azure Storage Account is a scalable, durable container for storing data like blobs, files, queues, and tables. It provides a unique namespace accessible globally and supports up to 5 petabytes of data.
51. What is Azure Blob Storage?
Answer: Blob Storage is designed for unstructured data, such as documents, images, videos, and logs. It supports three blob types:
- Block Blobs: For general-purpose files.
- Append Blobs: For appending data, like logs.
- Page Blobs: For virtual machine disks.
52. What are the access tiers in Azure Blob Storage?
Answer:
- Hot Tier: For frequently accessed data, low latency.
- Cool Tier: For infrequently accessed data, stored for at least 30 days.
- Cold Tier: For rarely accessed data, stored for at least 90 days.
- Archive Tier: For long-term, rarely accessed data with the lowest cost but higher retrieval times.
53. What are the replication options for Azure Storage?
Answer:
- Locally Redundant Storage (LRS): 3 copies in a single data center.
- Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS): 3 copies across availability zones in one region.
- Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS): 3 copies in the primary region (LRS) + 3 in a secondary region.
- Read-Access GRS (RA-GRS): GRS with read access to the secondary region.
- Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (GZRS): 3 copies in the primary region (ZRS) + 3 in a secondary region (LRS).
- Read-Access GZRS (RA-GZRS): GZRS with read access to the secondary region. GRS and GZRS provide disaster recovery for regional outages.
54. What is Azure Files?
Answer: Azure Files provides fully managed file shares accessible via SMB or REST, ideal for team collaboration, application data storage, or replacing on-premises file servers. It supports cross-platform access and integration with Entra ID.
55. What is Azure CDN?
Answer: Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches content at global edge locations to reduce latency and improve content delivery speed for websites, videos, and applications.
56. What is Azure Backup?
Answer: Azure Backup is a cloud-based service for backing up and restoring VMs, files, and databases. It protects against data loss from accidental deletion, corruption, or ransomware, supporting full VM restores or file-level recovery.
57. What are the redundancy options in Azure Backup?
Answer:
- Locally Redundant Storage (LRS): 3 copies in a single region.
- Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS): 3 copies across availability zones in a region.
- Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS): 3 copies in the primary region + 3 in a secondary region for disaster recovery.
58. What are Instant Restore and Soft Delete in Azure Backup?
Answer:
- Instant Restore: Uses snapshots for rapid data recovery, minimizing downtime.
- Soft Delete: Retains deleted backups for a configurable period (e.g., 14 days) to protect against accidental or malicious deletions.
59. What is Azure Site Recovery?
Answer: Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a disaster recovery service that replicates workloads between primary and secondary regions. It ensures business continuity by enabling failover during outages and failback once the primary region is restored.
60. What is the difference between Failover and Failback?
Answer:
- Failover: Switches operations to a secondary region during an outage.
- Failback: Restores operations to the primary region after recovery.
61. What is Azure Monitor?
Answer: Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring service that collects and analyzes performance data from VMs, applications, and infrastructure. It provides insights, alerts, and automated actions to address performance issues proactively.
62. What is Azure ExpressRoute?
Answer: Azure ExpressRoute provides a private, high-speed connection between on-premises infrastructure and Azure data centers, bypassing the public internet. It ensures low latency, high security, and reliability for enterprise workloads.
63. What is a Site-to-Site VPN in Azure?
Answer: A Site-to-Site VPN connects an on-premises network to an Azure VNet over an encrypted IPsec tunnel. It enables secure hybrid connectivity for seamless resource access between environments.
64. What is Azure Bastion?
Answer: Azure Bastion provides secure RDP and SSH access to VMs within a VNet without exposing them to the public internet. It uses a browser-based interface, enhancing security by reducing attack surfaces.
65. What is Azure Migrate?
Answer: Azure Migrate is a service for assessing, planning, and migrating on-premises servers, databases, and applications to Azure. It provides tools for discovery, dependency mapping, and cost estimation.
66. What are the phases of Azure migration?
Answer: The Azure migration process includes:
- Discovery: Identify on-premises resources and dependencies.
- Assessment: Evaluate workloads for cloud compatibility and costs.
- Planning: Design the migration strategy and architecture.
- Test Migration: Perform a trial migration to validate the process.
- Migration: Execute the final migration to Azure.
67. What is a JSON Template deployment in Azure?
Answer: JSON-based Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates define infrastructure as code, specifying resources, configurations, and dependencies. They enable consistent, repeatable deployments across environments, streamlining resource management.
68. What is scaling in Azure?
Answer:
- Vertical Scaling (Scale Up/Down): Adjusts a VM’s size by increasing or decreasing CPU, memory, or storage.
- Horizontal Scaling (Scale Out/In): Adds or removes VM instances to handle load changes, often used with VM Scale Sets.
69. What are Azure Reserved Instances?
Answer: Reserved Instances allow users to commit to specific VM types for 1- or 3-year terms, offering significant cost savings (up to 72%) compared to Pay-As-You-Go pricing. They are ideal for predictable, long-term workloads.
70. How do Azure Spot VMs save costs?
Answer: Spot VMs leverage unused Azure capacity at discounted rates (up to 90% savings). They are suitable for interruptible, non-critical workloads like batch processing or testing, but can be reclaimed by Azure with short notice.
71. Why do organizations need Azure support plans, and what are the types?
Answer: Azure support plans provide technical assistance, faster response times, and proactive guidance. Types include:
- Basic: Free, for billing and subscription support.
- Developer: For non-production environments.
- Standard: For production workloads with 24/7 support.
- Professional Direct: For critical workloads with proactive advisory services.
72. What are Azure Tags?
Answer: Azure Tags are key-value pairs applied to resources for organization, cost tracking, and governance. For example, tagging resources by department or project simplifies cost allocation and resource management.
73. What is Platform as a Service (PaaS)?
Answer: In PaaS, Azure manages the infrastructure, operating system, and updates, allowing users to focus on application development and deployment. Examples include Azure App Services, Azure SQL Database, and Azure CDN.
74. What is the role of a Public IP in Azure?
Answer: A Public IP enables Azure resources (e.g., VMs, load balancers) to communicate with the internet or external services, facilitating inbound and outbound connectivity.
75. How does priority work in Azure Network Security Groups (NSGs)?
Answer: NSG rules are evaluated in priority order, with lower numbers (100–4096) taking precedence. Rules with higher priority are processed first, allowing fine-tuned control over traffic filtering.
76. What is an Application Security Group (ASG)?
Answer: An ASG groups VMs to simplify NSG rule management. Instead of specifying individual VM IPs in NSG rules, you reference the ASG, which dynamically updates as VMs are added or removed, reducing configuration overhead.
77. What is a snapshot in Azure?
Answer: A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of a managed disk, used for backups or creating new disks. It’s ideal for protecting VM data before major changes, enabling quick recovery if issues arise.
78. What is Software as a Service (SaaS)?
Answer: In SaaS, Azure manages the entire stack—hardware, operating system, applications, and updates—allowing users to focus solely on using the service. Examples include Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365.
79. What is host caching in Azure?
Answer: Host caching improves disk performance by storing frequently accessed data on the VM’s local storage. Options include:
- Read-Only: Caches read operations for faster access.
- Read/Write: Caches both read and write operations, ideal for database workloads.
80. What is an Azure image?
Answer: An Azure image is a template containing a VM’s operating system, applications, and data, used to deploy identical VMs. Unlike snapshots (disk-specific), images enable standardized, repeatable VM deployments.
81. What is a private endpoint in Azure?
Answer: A private endpoint assigns a private IP within a VNet to access Azure services (e.g., storage, databases) securely, avoiding public internet exposure. It’s ideal for high-security scenarios requiring private connectivity.
82. What are Password Hash Synchronization and Pass-Through Authentication in Entra ID?
Answer:
- Password Hash Synchronization (PHS): Syncs on-premises AD password hashes to Entra ID for cloud-based authentication and SSO.
- Pass-Through Authentication (PTA): Validates passwords directly against on-premises AD, ideal for organizations requiring real-time authentication without cloud-stored credentials.
83. What are Site-to-Site VPN, Point-to-Site VPN, and ExpressRoute in Azure?
Answer:
- Site-to-Site VPN: Connects an entire on-premises network to an Azure VNet via an encrypted IPsec tunnel.
- Point-to-Site VPN: Enables individual clients to connect to an Azure VNet securely, ideal for remote workers.
- ExpressRoute: Provides a private, dedicated connection between on-premises infrastructure and Azure for high-speed, secure data transfer.
84. What are Azure subscription limits?
Answer: Azure limits (quotas) cap the number of resources (e.g., VMs, storage accounts) a subscription can use. Limits ensure resource fairness and can be increased by requesting a quota adjustment through Azure support.
85. Why is a location required for an Azure Resource Group?
Answer: A Resource Group’s location determines where its metadata is stored. Choosing a region ensures compliance with data residency requirements and optimizes resource management within a geography.
86. What is the difference between IOPS and throughput in Azure?
Answer:
- IOPS: Measures the number of read/write operations per second, critical for transactional workloads.
- Throughput: Measures data transfer rate (MB/s), important for large data transfers. High IOPS and throughput enhance performance for applications like databases.
87. What is the difference between Public and Internal Load Balancers?
Answer:
- Public Load Balancer: Distributes internet traffic to VMs, enabling external access.
- Internal Load Balancer: Distributes traffic within a VNet for private, internal communication, such as multi-tier applications.
88. What is the difference between an Access Key and a Shared Access Signature (SAS)?
Answer:
- Access Key: Provides full administrative access to a storage account, requiring careful handling.
- Shared Access Signature (SAS): Grants limited, time-bound access to specific storage resources, offering granular control without exposing the full key.
89. How can resources be created in Azure?
Answer: Azure resources can be created via:
- Azure Portal: Web-based GUI for manual creation.
- Azure CLI: Command-line interface for scripting.
- Azure PowerShell: PowerShell-based automation.
- ARM Templates: JSON-based infrastructure as code.
- Azure SDKs: Programmatic creation using languages like Python or C#.
90. What is AZCopy?
Answer: AZCopy is a command-line tool for efficiently transferring data to and from Azure Storage accounts. It supports blobs, files, and directories, with features like parallel uploads and resumable transfers.
91. What is Blob Lifecycle Management in Azure?
Answer: Blob Lifecycle Management automates data management by applying rules to move blobs between access tiers (e.g., Hot to Cool) or delete them based on age or access patterns, optimizing storage costs.
92. What is the difference between Azure VMs and Azure App Services?
Answer:
- Azure VMs (IaaS): Provide full control over the OS and software, requiring manual maintenance.
- Azure App Services (PaaS): Abstract infrastructure management, focusing on application development and deployment with built-in scaling and updates.
93. How many Resource Groups can be created in a single Azure subscription?
Answer: A single Azure subscription can support up to 980 Resource Groups, though this limit may vary based on subscription type and can be increased by contacting Azure support.
94. What is encryption in Azure?
Answer: Azure provides multiple encryption types:
- Azure Disk Encryption: Encrypts VM disks using BitLocker (Windows) or dm-crypt (Linux).
- Storage Service Encryption: Automatically encrypts data in Azure Storage.
- Transparent Data Encryption (TDE): Protects Azure SQL databases.
- Azure Key Vault: Manages encryption keys and secrets securely.
95. What is Azure Key Vault?
Answer: Azure Key Vault is a service for securely storing and managing cryptographic keys, secrets, and certificates. It integrates with Azure services to enable secure encryption and authentication.
96. What is Azure Advisor?
Answer: Azure Advisor is a personalized recommendation engine that analyzes resource usage and provides suggestions to optimize costs, performance, security, and reliability.
97. What is Azure Blueprints?
Answer: Azure Blueprints enable repeatable, standardized deployments by defining a set of Azure resources, policies, and RBAC roles. They simplify governance and compliance for large-scale environments.
98. What is Azure DDoS Protection?
Answer: Azure DDoS Protection safeguards applications from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by monitoring and mitigating malicious traffic, ensuring availability.
99. What is Azure Firewall?
Answer: Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects VNet resources. It provides features like threat intelligence, application and network rules, and NAT support.
100. What are Azure Spot Instances?
Answer: Azure Spot Instances allow users to purchase unused compute capacity at steep discounts. They are ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads but may be evicted when Azure needs the capacity