C# Programming Tutorial(8920128728): Top 20 Azure Developer Interview Questions and Answers

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a way to deliver computing as a service rather than a product. It is completely based on the Internet. Cloud computing provides on-demand hardware (like Server), storage, application hosting, and other services. In this way, it reduces the need for having your local servers or personal devices to configure and manage your services and applications.
What are the key characteristics exposed by Cloud Computing?

The key characteristics of cloud computing are given below-

Scalability and Elasticity

Scalability allows you to handle the increasing workload by increasing the number of resources or its capacity-on-demand or based upon the usage of the resources.

Elasticity allows you to use or free, a resource capacity dynamically. It is measured based upon the speed as the resources are requested on-demand and the usage of the resources.

Maintenance

Maintenance of a cloud computing application is easier, as it does not require to be installed on each user’s machine. Also, the applications which are deployed or running on the cloud, you don’t need to install on each system. Everyone can access it using the internet.

Reliability

Your deployed application or database multiple copies are maintained by the cloud vendors, which makes well-designed cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Cost

Cloud vendors always charge only for the usages and used storage. If a resource is not in use, you don’t need to pay extra cost for any unused resource.

Security

All the created resources are secured by each cloud vendors. Even they are certified from various certification authorities that ensure your privacy and data security.
What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that serves as the development, data storing, service hosting and service management environment. Microsoft Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft data centers. Microsoft Azure helps you to build and manage enterprise-level web, mobile, IoT apps faster using your existing skills and technologies you know.
What is Microsoft Azure Advantages?

These are the following advantages of Microsoft Azure:
- Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
- Reduce the cost of building and extending on-premises resources
- Respond quickly to changes in your business & customer needs
- Choose on-premises or off-premises deployment model that suits you
- Scale your IT resources up and down based on your needs
- Consume computing resources ONLY when the needs arise
- Remove the need to manage hardware
- Use your existing development skills to build cloud applications
- Consistent development and management experience across on-premises and the cloud
What are Microsoft Azure role-based certification exams or paths?

Microsoft announced new roles based Azure certification paths for Administrators, Developers, Solutions Architects and DevOps Engineer who are working with Microsoft Azure Cloud platform. These new certification paths have been introduced based on technical roles and working, rather than covering the broad range of Microsoft Azure features and services to each of them.

The new role-based certifications will help you to be aligned with your technical role and skills. Earn a role-based Azure certification and make a bright career in Microsoft Azure as a Developer, Administrator, Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer.
What is a Resource group?

A resource group is a logical container for created resources in Azure. An ARM resource can exist only in one resource group. A resource group is created in a region and it can have the resources from the other regions. All resources within the resource group share the common lifecycle.

Image Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture
Can you move a resource from one group to another?

Yes, you can. A resource can be moved among resource groups.
How many resource groups a subscription can have?

A subscription can have up to 800 resource groups. Also, a resource group can have up to 800 resources of the same type and up to 15 tags.
What is Azure Storage?

Azure Storage is Microsoft’s storage solution for data persistence scenarios. Azure Storage offers highly durable, available and scalable as compared to the traditional data storage solutions. In Azure storage, you have to pay only for what you use and it is exposed via easy and open REST APIs. It’s having support for rich Client Libraries and Tools.
What are the different types of storage available in Azure?

The different types of Storage are:
- Blobs: Used for storing massive amounts of unstructured and large data.
- Queues: Used for storing messages used for communication between application components.
- Files: Used for storing files and sharing it among the VMs as shared disk storage.
- Disks: Used for creating virtual machine disks for high I/O and random read-write operations.
- Tables: Used for storing structured data in NoSQL format. Suitable for small size database.
What are Azure App Services?

Azure App Services is the part of PaaS offering from Microsoft Azure. These are used to Quickly build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web, mobile, and API apps running on any platform. Behind the scenes, VMs are used but they are abstracted. These support manual scaling and auto-scaling. It having support for Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, .NET and Ruby.
What are the different types of applications provided by App Services in Azure?

Azure App Service supports the following types of applications.
- Web Apps
- Mobile Apps
- API Apps
- Logic Apps
What are the different ways to host web sites in Azure?

Azure supports multiple ways to Host like App Service (PaaS), Virtual Machine (IaaS) and Service Fabric.
- App Service is the best option for Most of the web sites. It allows quick deployment, scalability, management & also cost-effective.
- A Virtual Machine is an option if your existing Web Sites require Custom Configurations in IIS Level, Cannot Fit into App Service etc.
- Service Fabric is an option if you are writing a Microservice application that requires Massive Scaling, Stateful Services etc.
How the app services can be scaled?

An app service supports two types of scaling - vertical (up/down) and horizontal (out/in). During scaling, there is no impact on service availability.
- In vertical scaling, VM size can be increased or decreased as per your need.
- In horizontal scaling, identical VMs of the desired size will be created or removed as per your need
- Autoscaling is supported by standard and premium based on matrices (response time, memory, CPU, data uses etc.)
What is Server-less Computing?

Server-less computing is one of the most coined terms in the cloud these days. Unleashing the PaaS feature with an immense amount compute power without any server to host an app has really impacted web development a big way. The idea is to do compute without hosting the app on a server.

Basically, we can think of it to be a cab aggregator or even food delivery startups which provide us with a platform to book a cab or order food but the actual service will be provided by a third-party vendor. On a similar note, we put our logic on a serverless computing module which can connect to different third-party services to do the job.
What is Azure Function?

Azure Function is a Serverless Compute Service that Runs code on Demand like Events or External-Invoke. Azure Functions can Scale up Automatically based on Demand. Azure functions are the evolution of Web Jobs. You can develop functions in C#, Node, Java, Python etc. Internally, Azure functions use App services.

We can use Functions for Backend Services, Event-based Processing like Data Table creation on File Upload, Scheduled Tasks etc.
What are Azure SQL Database Models?

Azure supports the three database models for storing database as given below:

Standalone Database

An isolated and self-contained database service that has database scoped functionalities. It is designed for modern cloud-based applications, software-as-a-service solutions, and microservices that use a single database to store data.

Image Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog

Elastic pool

A group of standalone databases that share the same resources. Helpful to reduce the operational cost.

Managed Instance

A full SQL Server Instance with instance-level functionalities (SQL Agent, Broker, .NET hosting). Designed for easy migration of most of the on-premises databases to the Azure cloud.
How to choose between DTU and vCore?

Refer to the following suggestions:
- Use the DTU model If there are no performance issues.
- In DTU based model, you need to pay a fixed amount each month for pre-configured compute resources.
- vCore allows you to dig into the underlying resources and scale them independently for optimal performance.
- vCore allows you to take Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server.
- You can migrate between DTU-based and vCore-based models through the portal online.
What is Azure Cosmos DB?

Azure Cosmos DB is a Planet-scale, Globally Distributed Database provided by Azure. It is Schema-agnostic and hence considered a NoSQL database. Cosmos DB provides Incredibly Low Latency in the order of Milliseconds. Cosmos DB supports a wide range of APIs including SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Graph, Table etc.
What is Azure Search?

Azure Search is a Search-as-a-Solution hosted & managed by Azure. Azure Search allows Developers to build Search Experience over multiple sources of content in web, mobile & enterprise applications queryable with a REST API interface.

Azure Search itself takes care of Index creation, Service availability, Scaling and Service updates.