Microsoft Azure Interview Questions

The compute that runs App Service apps: region, OS, pricing tier, instance size and count. Several apps can share one plan and its cost.

IaaS gives you virtual machines and networks to manage (Azure VMs). PaaS manages the platform so you deploy code (App Service, Azure SQL). SaaS is a finished application (Microsoft 365).

A logical container for related Azure resources that share a lifecycle. You can deploy, secure (RBAC), tag and delete them together.

A region is a geographic area containing data centres. Availability zones are physically separate data centres within a region; spreading resources across zones protects against a data-centre failure.

Renting computing resources — servers, storage, databases, networking — on demand over the internet instead of owning hardware. You pay for what you use, scale up or down in minutes, deploy globally and let the provider handle the physical infrastructure.

A subscription is a billing and access boundary. Resource groups are folders inside it that hold related resources sharing a lifecycle. A resource is a single service instance such as an App Service, a storage account or a SQL database.

The portal is a web UI that is good for exploring, learning and one-off changes. The Azure CLI (az) and PowerShell are scriptable, repeatable and suit automation and pipelines. For production infrastructure, prefer Bicep or Terraform.

When you need full control of the operating system, custom software, legacy apps that cannot run on PaaS, or specific networking. You then own patching, scaling and backups, so prefer App Service or containers for standard web apps.

A namespace for Blob (objects), File (SMB shares), Queue (simple messages) and Table (NoSQL key–value) storage, with a choice of redundancy: LRS, ZRS, GRS and GZRS.

Store secrets in Key Vault and grant the app’s managed identity access. Reference secrets from App Service settings or load them with the Azure SDK; never commit them to source control.

For event-driven, short-running work: HTTP endpoints, queue processing, timers, blob triggers. Consumption plans scale to zero and bill per execution; Premium/Flex plans avoid cold starts.

Hot for frequently accessed data, Cool and Cold for infrequent access with lower storage cost but higher access cost, and Archive for rarely accessed data that must be rehydrated before reading.

An identity in Microsoft Entra ID automatically managed for an Azure resource, letting it access other resources (Key Vault, Storage, SQL) without storing credentials in code or config.

Extra live environments of an App Service app (staging, testing) with their own URLs and settings. You deploy to staging, warm it up and swap it into production with no downtime — and swap back if something goes wrong.

Scale up by moving to a bigger pricing tier (more CPU and memory). Scale out by adding instances, manually or with autoscale rules on CPU, memory, queue length or a schedule. The app must be stateless to scale out safely.

Enable a managed identity on the app, create a contained database user for it (CREATE USER [app-name] FROM EXTERNAL PROVIDER), grant roles, and use Authentication=Active Directory Default in the connection string.

Azure’s identity service (formerly Azure AD): users, groups, app registrations, managed identities, single sign-on, MFA and conditional access. Apps use it with OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 to sign users in and call APIs.

An application performance monitoring service in Azure Monitor. It collects requests, dependencies, exceptions, traces and custom metrics, builds an application map and supports alerts and KQL queries. Add it with the OpenTelemetry-based Azure Monitor distro.

A VNet is your private network in Azure with subnets, routing and network security groups. A private endpoint gives a PaaS service (SQL, Storage, Key Vault) a private IP in your VNet so traffic never crosses the public internet.

A serverless container platform built on Kubernetes. You deploy container images and get HTTPS ingress, autoscaling (including to zero) with KEDA, revisions for traffic splitting and Dapr integration, without managing a cluster.

Azure SQL is relational with strong consistency, joins and transactions — ideal for structured business data. Cosmos DB is a globally distributed NoSQL database with tunable consistency and low latency at scale, suited to flexible schemas and very high throughput.

Enable Application Insights for requests, dependencies, exceptions and traces; use Azure Monitor metrics and Log Analytics (KQL) for queries; and configure alerts and dashboards on key indicators.

Set budgets and alerts, right-size and auto-scale resources, use reserved instances or savings plans for steady workloads, shut down dev environments, choose appropriate storage tiers and tag resources for cost allocation.

Azure Kubernetes Service runs the Kubernetes control plane for you. You still manage node pools, upgrades, networking, ingress, scaling policies, security and the workloads themselves.

On every push: restore, build, test and publish an artifact or container image. Deploy to a staging slot or revision using workload identity federation (OIDC) instead of stored secrets, run smoke tests, then swap or shift traffic, with approvals for production.

1- uses: azure/login@v2
2  with:
3    client-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CLIENT_ID }}
4    tenant-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_TENANT_ID }}
5    subscription-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID }}
6- uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v3
7  with:
8    app-name: shop-api
9    slot-name: staging
10    package: ./publish

Azure Static Web Apps builds and hosts it with global distribution, free TLS, preview environments for pull requests and a fallback route to index.html. Alternatively serve it from Blob Storage static website hosting behind Azure Front Door.

Use Entra ID with MFA and least-privilege RBAC, managed identities instead of secrets, Key Vault, private endpoints, Microsoft Defender for Cloud recommendations, Azure Policy for guardrails, encryption, diagnostic logs and resource locks on critical resources.