What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and service created by Microsoft. It offers a wide range of cloud services, including computing, analytics, storage, and networking. Users can choose and configure these services to build, deploy, and manage applications through Microsoft's data centers.

What are the benefits of using Azure?

Azure provides scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. It supports a wide variety of programming languages, frameworks, and tools. It also offers advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities, along with robust security and compliance features.

What is Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)?

Azure VMs are scalable, on-demand computing resources that offer flexibility to run virtualized environments. They support various operating systems and applications, providing a customizable environment for development, testing, and production.

• Virtualized Computing Resources: Scalable and customizable virtualized computing resources in Azure.
• Operating System Support: Runs Windows or Linux-based applications.
• Scalability: Scales resources up or down based on demand for optimal performance.
• Customization: Configures VM sizes, storage options, and networking settings as needed.
• High Availability: Provides features like availability sets and fault domains for high availability.
• Security: Implements robust security measures including encryption and network security groups.
• Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Azure services for management and monitoring.
• Cost-Efficiency: Follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model for cost-effective resource utilization.
• Use Cases: Application hosting, development/testing, data analysis, backup/disaster recovery, VDI.

What is Azure App Service?

Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps and APIs. It supports various programming languages, including .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, and Python, and offers integrated tools for DevOps practices.

Explain Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps is a set of development tools and services for software development. It includes Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, Azure Test Plans, and Azure Artifacts, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

What is Azure Active Directory (AD)?

Azure AD is a cloud-based identity and access management service. It helps employees sign in and access resources like Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications.

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Azure Blob Storage is a service for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. It is designed for serving images or documents directly to a browser, storing files for distributed access, and streaming video and audio.

What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?

AKS simplifies the deployment, management, and operations of Kubernetes. It provides serverless Kubernetes, integrated CI/CD experiences, and enterprise-grade security and governance, allowing you to build and scale containerized applications.

• Managed Kubernetes: Automates maintenance, patching, and upgrades.
• Scalability: Easily add or remove nodes; supports autoscaling.
• Integration: Seamlessly integrates with Azure services (e.g., Azure AD, Azure DevOps, Azure Monitor).
• Container Orchestration: Robust features for deploying, scaling, and managing containers.
• Security: Offers RBAC, Azure Policy, and network policies.
• DevOps and CI/CD: Integrates with CI/CD tools for automated pipelines

What is Azure SQL Database?

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service based on the latest stable version of Microsoft SQL Server. It offers built-in intelligence, scalability, and high availability, along with advanced security features.

Explain Azure Resource Manager (ARM).

ARM is a management framework that allows you to deploy, manage, and monitor Azure resources as a group. You can use ARM templates to define the infrastructure and dependencies for your app, ensuring consistent deployment.

What is Azure Load Balancer?

Azure Load Balancer is a service that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple virtual machines. It helps improve the availability and responsiveness of your applications by distributing the load evenly.

What is Azure Cosmos DB?

Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service designed for low latency and high availability. It supports various data models, including key-value, graph, column-family, and document, with comprehensive SLAs.

Explain Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provided by Microsoft Azure that helps organizations protect and recover their on-premises and cloud-based workloads in the event of a disaster. It orchestrates the replication, failover, and failback of virtual machines (VMs), ensuring business continuity and minimizing downtime during unplanned outages or disasters.

• Disaster Recovery Service: Provides disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) for on-premises and Azure workloads.
• Replication: Replicates VMs and physical servers to Azure for backup and recovery.
• Orchestration: Automates failover and failback processes during disasters, ensuring business continuity.
• Failover Testing: Allows non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans to validate their effectiveness.
• Integration: Integrates with Azure services for monitoring, security, and backup.
• Multi-Platform Support: Supports VMs running on VMware, Hyper-V, physical servers, and Azure VMs.

What is Azure Virtual Network (VNet)?

Azure VNet is the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. It enables many types of Azure resources to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks.

What is Azure Logic Apps?

Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service that helps you automate and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows. It integrates with various services and systems, both in the cloud and on-premises, through connectors.

What is Azure Backup?

Azure Backup is a scalable solution for protecting data and applications from loss. It offers backup for virtual machines, SQL workloads, and Azure file shares, with long-term retention and recovery options.

What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor provides full-stack monitoring for applications and infrastructure. It offers tools to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from your Azure resources, helping you understand how your applications are performing and proactively identify issues.

What is Azure Data Factory?

Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that orchestrates and automates data movement and data transformation. It allows the creation of data-driven workflows for moving and transforming data at scale.

What is Azure IoT Hub?

Azure IoT Hub is a managed service that enables reliable and secure bidirectional communications between IoT applications and the devices it manages. It supports device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device messaging.

What are Azure Functions?

Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that allows you to run code on-demand without provisioning or managing infrastructure. It supports various programming languages and integrates with other Azure services for building scalable applications.

• Event-Driven: Functions can be triggered by various events, such as HTTP requests, database changes, messages in a queue, timers, or events from other Azure services.
• Serverless Architecture: No need to manage servers or infrastructure. Azure handles provisioning, scaling, and maintenance.
• Automatic Scaling: Functions automatically scale up or down based on the number of incoming events, ensuring that resources are used efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Multiple Language Support: Supports several programming languages, including C#, JavaScript, Python, Java, and PowerShell, allowing developers to use their preferred language.
• Integration with Azure Services: Easily integrates with other Azure services such as Azure Storage, Azure Event Grid, Azure Service Bus, and more.
• Pay-per-Use Pricing: Billing is based on the number of executions, execution time, and memory usage, making it cost-effective for sporadic or unpredictable workloads.
• Development and Deployment: Provides tools for local development and easy deployment to the cloud. Supports continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

Explain Azure Governance.

Azure Governance includes tools and services like Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, and Azure Cost Management to ensure that your resources are compliant with organizational standards and to manage your cloud costs effectively.

What is Azure Cognitive Services?

Azure Cognitive Services are a set of APIs, SDKs, and services that allow developers to add intelligent features to their applications, such as computer vision, speech recognition, language understanding, and decision-making capabilities.

What is Azure ExpressRoute?

Azure ExpressRoute enables you to create private connections between Azure data centers and your on-premises infrastructure or colocation environment. These connections do not go over the public internet, offering more reliability and security.

What is Azure Service Bus?

Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise message broker with message queues and publish-subscribe topics. It decouples applications and services, providing reliable message delivery and scalable processing.

What is Azure Redis Cache?

Azure Redis Cache is a fully managed, in-memory cache service for speeding up the performance and scalability of your applications. It supports various data structures and offers high availability with automatic failover.

What is Azure CDN?

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that delivers web content to users based on their geographic location. It reduces latency and improves load times by caching content at strategically placed edge locations.

What is Azure Key Vault?

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service for securely storing and managing secrets, encryption keys, and certificates. It helps safeguard cryptographic keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services.

What is Azure Event Grid?

Azure Event Grid is a fully managed event routing service that enables event-driven architectures. It allows you to react to changes in Azure resources and to propagate events to other services like Azure Functions and Logic Apps.

• Event Routing: Routes events from sources like Azure services, custom applications, and third-party services to event handlers like Azure Functions, Logic Apps, or other services.
• Scalable: Automatically scales to handle large numbers of events, ensuring reliable event delivery even under heavy load.
• Low Latency: Provides near real-time event delivery with low latency, making it suitable for scenarios requiring immediate response.
• Serverless: Fully managed service that handles infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on application logic.
• Advanced Filtering: Allows for event filtering based on event type or content, ensuring that only relevant events are routed to the appropriate handler.
• Security: Supports managed identities and role-based access control (RBAC) to secure event publishing and subscription.
• Reliability: Guarantees at-least-once delivery of events, ensuring that no event is lost.

What is Azure Data Lake?

Azure Data Lake is a scalable data storage and analytics service. It provides high-performance data storage and query capabilities for large amounts of structured and unstructured data, enabling big data analytics.

What is Azure Firewall?

Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It provides stateful firewall capabilities, high availability, and unrestricted cloud scalability.

What is Azure Private Link?

Azure Private Link enables you to access Azure services over a private endpoint in your virtual network. This ensures that traffic between your virtual network and the Azure service travels the Microsoft backbone network, providing enhanced security and performance.

What is Azure Sentinel?

Azure Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution. It provides intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across your enterprise.

What is Azure Synapse Analytics?

Azure Synapse Analytics is an integrated analytics service that accelerates the time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems. It combines big data and data warehousing technologies to provide a unified experience for ingesting, preparing, managing, and serving data.

Explain Azure Logic Apps vs. Azure Functions.

Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions are both key services in the Azure serverless computing ecosystem, each designed to enable different aspects of workflow automation and event-driven programming. Understanding their differences and when to use each can help you choose the right tool for your specific needs.

• Workflow Automation: Creates automated workflows visually, integrating various services.
• Integration: Supports over 200 built-in connectors for seamless integration.
• Stateful Execution: Maintains state throughout workflow execution for long-running processes.
• Visual Designer: Enables non-programmers to build workflows using a drag-and-drop interface.
• Enterprise Integration: Includes capabilities for B2B workflows and on-premises system integration.

Feature	Azure Logic Apps	Azure Functions
Primary Purpose	Workflow automation and integration	Event-driven code execution
State Management	Stateful	Stateless
Development Model	Visual designer with connectors	Code-based with various language support
Triggers	Wide range, including HTTP, queues, timers	Wide range, including HTTP, queues, timers
Integration	Extensive with 200+ built-in connectors	Custom integration via code
Scalability	Scales automatically, suitable for long workflows	Scales automatically, suitable for microservices
Use Cases	Business process automation, SaaS integration	Microservices, serverless APIs, background tasks
Pricing	Pay-per-usage based on actions and triggers	Pay-per-execution, time, and memory usage

What is Azure SQL Managed Instance?

Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed SQL Server database engine instance hosted in Azure. It offers near-complete compatibility with the latest SQL Server (Enterprise Edition) database engine, allowing easy migration of SQL Server databases to Azure.

What is Azure Sphere?

Azure Sphere is a comprehensive IoT solution that includes secured hardware, a secure OS, and a cloud-based security service. It is designed to secure and power edge devices with built-in communication capabilities.

What is Azure Application Gateway?

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. It offers application-level routing and includes features like SSL termination, cookie-based session affinity, and Web Application Firewall (WAF).

What is Azure Policy?

Azure Policy is a service provided by Microsoft Azure that allows organizations to enforce and implement governance policies across their Azure resources. It enables administrators to define rules and standards for resource management and compliance, ensuring that resources deployed in Azure adhere to organizational standards and regulatory requirements.

• Definition: Enforces governance policies across Azure resources.
• Assignment: Assigns policies to specific scopes (subscriptions, resource groups).
• Enforcement: Automatically evaluates and enforces compliance.
• Built-In Policies: Offers pre-defined policies for common scenarios.
• Remediation: Provides automated actions for non-compliant resources.
• Insights: Offers visibility into compliance status and violations.
• Benefits: Promotes governance, compliance, consistency, and cost management.
• Use Cases: Security, compliance, resource tagging, configuration standards, cost management.

What is Azure Automation?

Azure Automation provides a way to automate frequent, time-consuming, and error-prone cloud management tasks. It includes process automation, configuration management, and update management.

What is Azure Traffic Manager?

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions while providing high availability and responsiveness.

What is Azure Advisor?

Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry, providing recommendations on high availability, security, performance, and cost.

What is Azure Batch?

Azure Batch is a cloud-scale job scheduling and compute management service. It allows you to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) applications efficiently in the cloud.

What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate provides a centralized hub to assess and migrate on-premises servers, infrastructure, applications, and data to Azure. It offers comprehensive assessments and migration capabilities for seamless cloud adoption.

What is Azure Cognitive Search?

Azure Cognitive Search is a search-as-a-service solution that offers powerful and sophisticated search capabilities for your applications. It integrates with various data sources and uses AI to provide advanced search features like faceted navigation and cognitive skills.

• Full-Text Search: Allows users to perform keyword searches across large volumes of text and documents, retrieving relevant results quickly and accurately.
• AI-Powered Enrichment: Uses AI capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP), entity recognition, and sentiment analysis to enrich data and improve search relevance.
• Scalability: Scales seamlessly to handle large datasets and high query volumes, ensuring consistent performance and availability.
• Customizable Relevance Ranking: Provides tools to customize and fine-tune relevance ranking algorithms based on business requirements and user feedback.
• Built-In Connectors: Offers built-in connectors to ingest data from various sources, including Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, and more, simplifying data ingestion and indexing.
• Integration with Cognitive Services: Integrates seamlessly with other Azure Cognitive Services, such as Language Understanding (LUIS) and Text Analytics, to enhance search capabilities with advanced AI features.
• RESTful API: Provides a RESTful API for easy integration with applications and services, allowing developers to build custom search experiences tailored to their specific needs.

What is Azure Logic Apps used for?

Azure Logic Apps are used for automating workflows and integrating apps, data, and services across organizations. It allows you to design complex workflows using a visual designer and integrates with numerous on-premises and cloud-based services.

What is Azure API Management?

Azure API Management is a service that enables you to create, publish, secure, and analyze APIs. It helps ensure a consistent API experience for both internal and external consumers and includes features like rate limiting, quotas, and versioning.

What is Azure Lighthouse?

Azure Lighthouse provides advanced management capabilities for service providers, enabling cross-tenant management with automation, greater visibility, and enhanced security. It allows service providers to manage multiple customer tenants from a single control plane.

What is Azure Stack?

Azure Stack is a portfolio of products that extend Azure services and capabilities to your environment of choice—from the data center to edge locations and remote offices. It enables you to build and run hybrid applications consistently across on-premises and cloud environments.

What is Azure DevTest Labs?

Azure DevTest Labs is a service that allows developers and testers to quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. It enables automated provisioning of environments using reusable templates and artifacts.

• Environment Provisioning: Quickly create and manage development and testing environments in Azure.
• Resource Management: Control resource utilization, costs, and access with policies and controls.
• Customizable Templates: Use pre-configured templates for rapid environment setup.
• Integration with Azure DevOps: Seamlessly integrate with CI/CD pipelines for automated environment provisioning.
• Auto-Shutdown and Auto-Start Policies: Schedule VMs to automatically shut down and start up, minimizing costs.
• Environment Sharing: Collaborate by sharing environments with team members or collaborators.
• Integration with Azure Monitor: Monitor resource usage, performance metrics, and compliance with policies.

What is Azure Virtual WAN?

Azure Virtual WAN is a networking service that provides optimized and automated branch-to-branch connectivity through Azure. It allows you to connect your branches, remote offices, and data centers to Azure using a single operational interface.

What is Azure Security Center?

Azure Security Center is a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers. It provides advanced threat protection across hybrid workloads in the cloud and on-premises.

What is Azure Logic Apps vs. Power Automate?

Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate both enable workflow automation but target different audiences and use cases. Logic Apps is intended for developers and IT pros to automate workflows between services, while Power Automate is geared towards business users for automating tasks across business applications.

What is Azure Time Series Insights?

Azure Time Series Insights is a fully managed analytics, storage, and visualization service for managing IoT-scale time-series data. It enables near real-time data exploration and operational intelligence for IoT solutions.

What is Azure SignalR Service?

Azure SignalR Service is a fully managed service that simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to applications. It supports high-frequency updates, such as chat applications, real-time dashboards, and notifications.

What is Azure Data Explorer?

Azure Data Explorer is a fast, fully managed data analytics service provided by Microsoft Azure that enables users to explore, analyze, and visualize large volumes of data in real-time. It is designed to handle high volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, making it well-suited for log and telemetry data, time-series data, and IoT data analytics.

• Real-Time Data Ingestion: Ingests streaming data from various sources for real-time analytics.
• Scalable Storage: Stores and queries petabytes of data with high performance.
• Fast Query Execution: Executes queries quickly on large datasets using columnar storage and distributed processing.
• Kusto Query Language (KQL): Powerful query language for complex analytics and time-series analysis.
• Advanced Analytics: Supports anomaly detection, machine learning, and geospatial analysis.
• Integration: Seamlessly integrates with Azure services like Azure Monitor and Power BI.
• Security and Compliance: Offers built-in security features and compliance certifications.
• Use Cases: Ideal for log and telemetry data analytics, time-series data analysis, and IoT analytics.

What is Azure Purview?

Azure Purview is a unified data governance service that helps manage and govern on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data. It provides data discovery, sensitive data classification, and data lineage capabilities to ensure that your data is well-managed and compliant with regulations.

What is Azure Data Share?

Azure Data Share is a service that simplifies the sharing of large datasets between organizations. It provides a secure and efficient way to share data without the need for data duplication. You can manage, govern, and track your data shares easily from the Azure portal.

What is Azure Bastion?

Azure Bastion is a fully managed service that provides secure and seamless RDP and SSH access to your virtual machines directly through the Azure portal. It eliminates the need for exposing your VMs to the public internet, enhancing security.

What is Azure Front Door?

Azure Front Door is a scalable and secure entry point for fast delivery of your global applications. It offers features such as SSL termination, application firewall, DDoS protection, and content-based routing, enhancing performance and security for your web applications.

What is Azure Stack HCI?

Azure Stack HCI is a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that integrates with Azure services. It allows you to modernize your datacenter by running virtualized workloads on-premises with seamless integration to Azure hybrid services, such as Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.

What is Azure Cognitive Services - Personalizer?

Azure Cognitive Services - Personalizer is a machine learning service provided by Microsoft Azure that enables developers to create personalized experiences for users in their applications. It uses reinforcement learning algorithms to tailor content, recommendations, and actions to individual users based on their preferences and behavior, ultimately improving user engagement and satisfaction.

• Reinforcement Learning: Utilizes reinforcement learning to adjust content based on user interactions.
• Personalization: Tailors experiences for users by learning from their behavior.
• Contextual Recommendations: Provides relevant recommendations based on user behavior and context.
• Integration: Seamlessly integrates with applications through RESTful APIs and SDKs.
• Scalability: Scales to handle large volumes of user interactions.
• Customization: Allows developers to customize models to align with business objectives.

What is Azure File Sync?

Azure File Sync is a service that centralizes your file shares in Azure while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of an on-premises file server. It helps manage file servers in multiple locations and synchronizes the data with Azure Files.

What is Azure Communication Services?

Azure Communication Services is a cloud-based communication platform that provides APIs for adding voice, video, chat, and SMS capabilities to your applications. It leverages the same reliable and secure infrastructure that powers Microsoft Teams.

What is Azure Logic Apps Connectors?

Azure Logic Apps Connectors are pre-built APIs that enable easy integration with various services and systems. They facilitate the automation of workflows by connecting to cloud-based and on-premises applications, such as Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Salesforce.

What is Azure Peering Service?

Azure Peering Service is a networking service that enhances the performance and reliability of your public internet connections to Azure and Microsoft services. It provides improved routing, latency, and connectivity through Microsoft's extensive peering relationships.