Today’s cloud computing job market is quite competitive and getting a job is not a piece of cake. Microsoft Azure is one of the raging cloud service providers today and you must be thoroughly prepared for the interview process.
In this blog, we have covered some most commonly asked interview questions for the Microsoft Azure Solution Architect Role.
Below questions covered all type of levels:
- Beginner Level Azure Interview Questions
- Intermediate Level Azure Interview Questions
- Advanced Level Azure Interview Questions
What is a Microsoft Azure Solution Architect?
This role will demonstrate the business value of the Microsoft Platform and drive technical decisions at the customer, thus securing long-term sustainable growth for Microsoft.
Below are some of the best Azure interview questions for an Azure Solution Architect role with their relative purpose with an order predefined:
1. Beginner Level: Azure Interview Questions
Here, are some Interview questions for Microsoft Azure Solution Architect:
Question 1: What are the different types of services offered in the cloud?
Explanation:
Question 2: What are the different cloud deployment models?
Explanation: Following are the three cloud deployment models:
- Public Cloud: The infrastructure is owned by your cloud provider and the server that you are using could be a multi-tenant system.
- Private Cloud: The infrastructure is owned by you or your cloud provider gives you that service exclusively. For eg: Hosting your website on your servers, or hosting your website with the cloud provider on a dedicated server.
- Hybrid Cloud: When you use both Public Cloud, Private Cloud together, it is called Hybrid Cloud. For Example: Using your in-house servers for confidential data, and the public cloud for hosting your company’s public-facing website. This type of setup would be a hybrid cloud.
Go through this Microsoft Azure Blog to get a clear understanding of Cloud Deployment Models!
Question 3: I have some private servers on my premises, also I have distributed some of my workloads on the public cloud, what is this architecture called?
Explanation: This type of architecture would be a hybrid cloud. Why? Because we are using both, the public cloud, and on-premises servers i.e the private cloud.
Question 4: What are the three main components of the Windows Azure platform?
Explanation: Three most important components of the Windows Azure platform are:
- Compute
- Storage
- AppFabric
You can find these components in the form of Azure Compute, Azure AppFabric, and Azure Storage.
2. Intermediate Level: Azure Interview Questions
Below, are some Interview questions for Microsoft Azure Solution Architect:
Question 1: What are the different types of Storage areas in Azure?
Explanation:
BLOB: BLOBs offer a component for storing a lot of content or binary data, for example, pictures, audio, and visual documents. They can scale up to 200 terabytes and can be acquired by utilizing REST APIs.
Table: Tables represent storage areas across machines for information that is in the form of properties on the cloud.
Queue: The sole target of a queue is to empower communication among Web and Worker Role instances. They help in storing messages that may be accessed by a customer.
Question 2: What is an Availability Set?
Explanation: An availability set is a logical grouping of VMs that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide redundancy and availability. It is recommended that two or more VMs are created within an availability set to provide for a highly available application and to meet the 99.95% Azure SLA. When a single VM is used with Azure Premium Storage, the Azure SLA applies for unplanned maintenance events.
Question 3: What are Fault Domains and Update Domains?
Explanation:
A fault domain is a logical group of the underlying hardware that share a common power source and network switch, similar to a rack within an on-premise data-centers. As you create VMs within an availability set, the Azure platform automatically distributes your VMs across these fault domains. This approach limits the impact of potential physical hardware failures, network outages, or power interruptions.
An update domain is a logical group of the underlying hardware that can undergo maintenance or can be rebooted at the same time. As you create VMs within an availability set, the Azure platform automatically distributes your VMs across these update domains. This approach ensures that at least one instance of your application always remains running as the Azure platform undergoes periodic maintenance. The order of update domains being rebooted may not proceed sequentially during planned maintenance, but only one update domain is rebooted at a time.
For more information, read our blog Region, Availability Zone, Availability Sets and Fault Domain, Update Domain In Microsoft Azure
Question 4: What is autoscaling in Azure?
Explanation: Auto-scaling is a way to automatically scale up or down the number of computing resources that are being allocated to your application based on its needs at any given time.
The key point is that you can now design a scalable architecture that will automatically scale-up or scale-down to meet your needs over the lifetime of your setup regardless of how fast/slow or big/small your site grows over that time.
Here are the most popular ways of autoscaling:
- Horizontal Scaling
- Vertical Scaling
Learn more about Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set
Question 5: How is Windows Active Directory and Azure Active Directory different?
Explanation:
For more information, read our blog Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): Everything You Need To Know
Question 6: What happens when you exhaust the maximum failed attempts for authenticating yourself via Azure AD?
Explanation: We use a more sophisticated strategy to lock accounts. This is based on the IP address of the request and the passwords entered. The duration of the lockout also increases based on the likelihood that it is an attack.
Question 7: What is the difference between Service Bus Queues and Storage Queues?
Explanation:
The Azure Storage Queue is simple and the developer experience is quite good. It uses the local Azure Storage Emulator and debugging is made quite easy. The tooling for Azure Storage Queues allows you to easily peek at the top 32 messages and if the messages are in XML or JSON, you’re able to visualize their contents directly from Visual Studio Furthermore, these queues can be purged of their contents, which is especially useful during development and QA efforts.
The Azure Service Bus Queues are evolved and surrounded by many useful mechanisms that make it enterprise worthy! They are built into the Service Bus and are able to forward messages to other Queues and Topics. They have a built-in dead-letter queue and messages have a time to live that you control, hence messages don’t automatically disappear after 7 days.
Question 8: Differentiation between Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Load Balancers.
Explanation:
Azure Traffic Manager: The job of Azure Traffic Manager is to route traffic globally based on flexible policies, enabling an excellent user experience that aligns with how you’ve structured your application across the world.
Azure Load Balancer: The job of Azure Load Balancer is to direct traffic inside a region. This is combined with Azure Traffic Manager, where the traffic manager routes the interior to a region between virtual machines. If you combine the two you get global traffic management combined with local failover.
Question 9: What are the various power states of a VM?
Explanation:
Question 10: What is Azure App Service?
Explanation: Azure App Service is a completely managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering for proficient developers that conveys a rich arrangement of abilities to the web, mobile, and integration scenarios. Mobile apps in Azure App Service offer a very adaptable, universally accessible mobile application development platform for Enterprise Developers and System Integrators that conveys a rich set of capacities to mobile engineers.
Question 11: What is Azure Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
Explanation: The SLA ensures that, when you send two or more role instances for each role, access to your cloud service will be maintained not less than 99.95 percent of the time. Additionally, identification and re-correction activities will be started 99.9 percent of the time when a role instance’s procedure isn’t running.
3. Advanced Level: Azure Interview Questions
Here, are some Interview questions for Microsoft Azure Solution Architect:
Question 1: My web app still uses an old Docker container image after I’ve updated the image on Docker Hub. Does Azure support continuous integration/deployment of custom containers?
Explanation: Yes, it does. For private registries, you can update the container by stopping and then re-starting your web app. Alternatively, you can also change or add a dummy application setting to force an update of your container.
Question 2: What are the three types of RBAC controls in Microsoft Azure?
The three different types of roles are :
Explanation:
- Owner: It has full access to all resources including the right to delegate access to others.
- Contributor: It can create and manage all types of Azure resources but can’t grant access to others.
- Reader: It can view existing Azure resources.
Question 3: What should you do if your Azure Virtual Machine encounters issues caused by user configurations or host infrastructure?
Solution:
Try to move the virtual machine to a different host.
Use Virtual Machine – Redeploy blade to do this.
Question 4: What are the steps to move an Azure Virtual Machine from one virtual network to another virtual network?
Solution: Delete a virtual machine in VNET1
Create a virtual machine in VNET2
Attach an existing disk to the newly created VM
Question 5: How do you resize a virtual machine in Azure Availability Set?
Solution:
Stop all VMs in the availability set
Resize the one VM
Start the one VM that you resized
After the resizing succeeds, start the other VMs
Question 6: Your company has manufacturing facilities worldwide. Each facility has several machines that produce products. The machines generate millions of messages daily to report progress, quality control metrics, and alerts. You need to design a solution to receive and process the messages from the machines. What Azure service should you include in the design?
Solution: Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable data streaming platform and ingestion service capable of receiving and processing millions of events per second. It can process and store events, data, or telemetry produced by distributed software and devices. Data sent to an event hub can be transformed and stored using any real-time analytics provider or batching/storage adapters.
Question 7: What do you need to do in order to be able to monitor the metrics and the logs of Linux Azure Virtual Machine?
Solution: You have to add Linux Diagnostic Extension (LAD) 3.0.
The Linux Diagnostic Extension helps a user monitor the health of a Linux VM running on Microsoft Azure.
To know more about Linux Diagnostic Extension read this Microsoft Documentation.
Question 8: What is Windows Azure Diagnostics?
Solution: Windows Azure Diagnostics enables you to collect diagnostic data from an application running in Windows Azure. You can use diagnostic data for debugging and troubleshooting, measuring performance, monitoring resource usage, traffic analysis and capacity planning, and auditing.
Question 9: What is the difference between Block Blob vs Page Blob?
Explanation: Block blobs are comprised of blocks, each of which is identified by a block ID. You create or modify a block blob by uploading a set of blocks and committing them by their block IDs. If you are uploading a block blob that is no more than 64 MB in size, you can also upload it in its entirety with a single Put Blob operation.
Page blobs are a collection of pages. A page is a range of data that is identified by its offset from the start of the blob. To create a page blob, you initialize the page blob by calling Put Blob and specifying its maximum size.
Question 10: What is swap deployments?
Explanation: To promote a deployment in the Azure staging environment to the production environment, you can “swap” the deployments by switching the VIPs by which the two deployments are accessed. After the deployment, the DNS name for the cloud service points to the deployment that had been in the staging environment.
Conclusion
If reading through these Azure interview questions and answers has you a little unsure about how well you’ll do in an interview, here’s a solution: earn a certification first. With an Azure certification, you’ll know more about the platform, and you’ll be able to answer even very technical questions. More importantly, you’ll add credibility to your résumé as well as give your confidence a boost.
References/Related
- [AZ-303/AZ-304] Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies Certification Exam: Everything You Need To Know
- [AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification Exam: Everything You Must Know
- [AZ-104] Microsoft Azure Administrator Certification Exam: Everything You Need To Know
- For Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, click here
- Official Microsoft details for AZ-303/AZ-304, click here and for AZ-104 exam, click here.
Next Task For You
Interested in other Microsoft Azure Certifications as well?
Check out this blog post to know all about the [AZ-104] Microsoft Azure Certification Exam. Also, check out this blog to know everything about the AZ-400 Microsoft Azure DevOps Certification Exam.
Click on the Join Waitlist now button below to join the waitlist of our much-awaited AZ-303/AZ-304 Certification Training which will help you clear the exam with flying colors.
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