Azure Interview Questions

What is Azure Windows Azure is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft that enables businesses to completely run in the cloud. Cloud platform offers a pas-as-you-go payment method to pay for the use of cloud services. For example, if you have a database and you 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.What is AzureYou can also host your own virtual machines, web servers, database servers, and content storage in Azure. Azure is not only Windows but also supports Linux servers. Learn more about Azure, continue reading: Introduction to Microsoft Azure. What is Cloud Computing Windows Azure is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft that enables businesses to completely run in the cloud?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 and meter 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.Here are some key advantages of cloud computing:
Cloud computing allows business to cut their operational and fixes monthly cost of hardware, employees, and software licenses. All hardware, database servers, web servers, sottware, products, and services are hosted in the cloud and added to the account as needed.
Cloud computing offers 24/7 uptime (99.99% uptime). Cloud servers and data centers are managed by the cloud service provider and you do not need to have any employees manage that.
Cloud computing is scalable, and reliable. There is no limit of number of users or resources. Cloud increases processing and resources as needed. If you do not need resources, you can always scale down. Cloud service provider such as Azure or AWS
Cloud computing provides maintainability and automatic updates of new software, OS, databases, and third party software. It reduces IT labor cost for a business.
Cloud service providers have data centers in various locations around the globe that makes it faster and reliable.
Learn more here: Introduction to Cloud Computing. What are Azure Services and Resources? Azure Services and ResourcesAzure provides thousands of resources and services. The above list is a list of various resources 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, 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 any maintenance, such as software upgrades and security patching. Learn more here: Introduction to Cloud Computing. 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 for you. 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.
Learn more about Azure Active Directory here: Create and Work with Azure Active Directory. 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 which makes it easy for you to add Redis into your applications that are 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 can easily read it out because it is easier to work with memory than it is to go from the disk and talk to a SQL Server.
Suppose, we have a web server where your web application is running. The back-end has SQL Server implementation where the SQL Server is running on a VM or maybe it is an Azure SQL database.Azure Redis CacheA user comes to your application and they go to a page that has tons of products on it.Azure Redis CacheNow, that page has to go to the database to retrieve the information and then that gets sent back to the web server and gets 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.Azure Redis CacheThe solution to this 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.Azure Redis CacheWhen other users come back and look for the same information on the web app, it gets retrieved right out of the Azure Redis Cache very quickly and hence we take the pressure of the back-end database server.Azure Redis Cache
While deploying Azure Redis Cache, we can deploy it with a single node, we can deploy it in a different pricing tier with a two node implementation and we can also build an entire cluster with multiple nodes.Learn more about Azure Redis Cache here: Introduction to Azure Redis Cache.How to create and connect to Azure SQL DatabaseFirst, we need to 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 the “SQL Database”.create and connect to Azure 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.Learn more here: Create and Connect with Azure SQL Database.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 the integration of the data from the 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 the huge volume of data. It is also a solution for Big-Data concepts.Azure SQL Data Warehouse 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, along with 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 simply upload the fixed-size virtual hard disk files from our infrastructure to Azure and also download the hard disk files from Azure to our data center.Learn more here: Construct a Virtual Machine in Azure. What is Azure Table Storage?Azure Table storage is a very popular service used across many projects which helps to stores structured NoSQL data in the cloud, providing a Key/attribute store with a schemaless design. Table storage is very well known for its schemaless architecture design. The main advantage of using this is, table storage is fast and cost-effective for many types of applications.Another advantage of table storage is that you can store flexible datasets like user data for a web application or any other device information or any other types of metadata which your service requires. 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 which 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.
Quickly querying data using a clustered index.
Continue reading: Introduction to Azure Table Storage. 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 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, gaming applications when predictable throughput, high availability and low latency are key requirements. We will cover throughput, availability, latency in detail in upcoming articles.