Azure
Azure
Cloud Computing is nothing but the usage of technology resources for storing, retrieving, and
processing of data over the internet for increased speed, availability, scalability, and reduced
cost. Companies that provide the resources for doing these are called cloud service providers.
Azure is one such cloud service provider headed by Microsoft. Azure was launched by Microsoft
on 1 February 2010 which followed the pay-per-use model which lets the users pay only for what
they have opted for.
Azure has now grown up to be a leading service provider where around 80% of the Fortune 500
companies rely on Azure for hosting their applications, resources, or any other computing
requirements. Azure supports multiple programming languages such as Java, C#, NodeJS, etc,
and provides a wide array of more than 200 services for cloud computing purposes.
Apart from Azure, there are various big cloud providers in the market. As per a report of Q4 2020
by Canalys, Amazon Web Services holds around 31% of the market share in the cloud industry
whereas Azure holds around 20% of the share. The rest of the shares are owned by players such
as Google, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM.
The computing services provided by Azure are broadly divided into 18 categories which include
networking, computing, storage, migration, IoT, analytics, containers, management tools,
monitoring tools, developer tools, security, DevOps, etc.
Well, Azure provides a wide array of services that helps us to create any kind of web application
and host them on Azure. Azure also provides a dedicated environment for validation purposes
before actually releasing the application to the target audience. The creation and configuration of
virtual machines have been simpler than ever in Azure.
Azure also provides various integration and sync features for virtual directories and virtual
devices. Azure also provides extensive monitoring tools that help in collecting the metrics of your
application to understand how well the application performs. With the feature of virtual hard
drives, it has been possible to store massive amounts of data on the cloud.
With such amazing features offered by Azure and ever-growing demand by businesses to Azure,
being an Azure certified professional opens up a path for a wide range of career opportunities
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like being an Azure Administrator, Azure Developer, Azure Solutions Architect, etc all providing
amazing pay benefits. ☰
Cloud computing refers to the usage of computing resources (servers) on the internet
(refers to the term cloud) for the purpose of storing, managing, analyzing, and processing
the data. Here, instead of maintaining our own servers, we use the infrastructure provided
and maintained by third-party vendors such as Microsoft, AWS, etc, and pay them based on
the server usage time duration.
Cloud computing enhances the speed of execution, ensures flexibility of resources, and
easier scalability.
Cloud computing can be used to attain high fault tolerance and high system availability and
this can also be done dynamically as per the infrastructural requirements of the application.
Cloud Computing
Azure Cloud Service is a classic example of a platform as a service (PaaS). This was
designed to support those applications which demand
Get Placed high scalability,
at Top Product Companies reliability, and
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availability all within the constraints of reduced cost of operations. These are hosted on
virtual VMs and Azure provides more control over them by letting the developers install the☰
necessary software and enabling them to control remotely.
Azure cloud services are used for deploying multi-tier web-based applications in Azure by
means of creating an instance of cloud service. It is also possible to define multiple roles
such as web roles, worker roles, etc for the purpose of distributed processing. Azure cloud
services help in the easier and flexible scalability of the application.
Each role of the cloud service has its own purpose and thereby its own configuration and
application files.
Hybrid Cloud
Here, we use the best of both worlds to our requirements and advantage.
A role instance is nothing but a virtual machine where the application code runs with the help of
running role configurations. There can also be multiple instances of a role as per the definition in
the cloud service configuration files.
Cloud service roles comprise a set of application and configuration files. There are 2 kinds of
roles provided by Azure:
Web role: This provides a dedicated web server belonging to IIS (Internet Information
Services) that is used for automatic deployment and hosting of front-end websites.
Worker role: These roles help the applications hosted within them to run asynchronously for
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longer durations and are independent of the user interactions and generally do not use IIS.
They are also ideal for performing background processes. The applications are run in a
standalone manner. ☰
Azure Diagnostics API helps us collect diagnostic data such as performance monitoring,
system event logs, etc from the applications that are running on Azure.
For the verbose monitoring of the data, Azure Diagnostics has to be enabled for the cloud
service roles.
The diagnostics data can be used for building visual chart representations for better
monitoring and also for creating performance metric alerts.
The Azure SLA is a contract that ensures or guarantees that when two or more role
instances of a role are deployed on Azure, access to that cloud service is guaranteed for at
least 99.95% of the time.
It also states that if the role instance process is not in the running state, then the detection
of such processes and corrective action for the same will be taken 99.9% percent of the
time.
If the mentioned guarantees are not satisfied at any point in time, then Azure credits a
percentage of monthly fees to us depending on the pricing model of the respective Azure
services.
Azure Resource Manager is a service provided by Azure to provide management and application
deployment in Azure.
The resource manager provides the management layer that helps the developer to create, modify
or delete the resources in the Azure subscription account. This feature comes in handy when we
have requirements like managing access controls, locks, ensuring the security of the resources
post-deployment, and organization of those resources.
9. What is NSG?
NSG stands for Network Security Group that has a list of ACL (Access Control List) rules which
either allows/denies network traffic to subnets or NICs (Network Interface Card) connected to a
subnet or both. When NSG is linked with a subnet, then the ACL rules are applied to all the Virtual
Machines in that subnet.
Restrictions of traffic to individual NIC can be done by associating NSG directly to that NIC.
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10. VM creation is possible using Azure Resource Manager in a Virtual
☰
Network which was created by means of classic deployment. True or False?
These are the Azure computation resources that can be used to deploy and manage sets of
identical Virtual Machines (VMs).
These scale sets are configured in the same manner and are designed to support the
autoscaling of the applications without the need for pre-provisioning of the VMs.
They help to build large-scale applications targeting big data and containerized workloads in
an easier manner.
Availability Set is nothing but a logical grouping of VMs (Virtual Machines) that allows Azure
cloud to understand how the application was developed for providing availability and
redundancy.
Each VM in the availability set is assigned 2 kinds of domains by Azure:
Fault Domain: These define the grouping of VMs that would share a common power
source and common network switch. The VMs within availability sets are separated
across up to 3 fault domains by default. This separation of VMs in fault domains helps
our applications to be available by reducing impacts of network outages, power
interruptions, and certain hardware failures.
Update Domain: These indicate the grouping of VMs and underlying hardware which are
eligible to be rebooted at the same time. Only one update domain can be rebooted at a
time, however, the order of reboot does not proceed in a sequential manner. Before the
maintenance of another update domain, the previously rebooted domain is given a
recovery time of 30 minutes to ensure that the domain is up.
Azure provides flexibility to configure up to 3 fault domains and 20 update domains for an
availability set.
Availability Set
14. What are the available options for deployment environments provided by
Azure?
Staging Environment: This environment is used for validating the changes of our application
before making them live into the main environment.
Here, the application is identified by means of GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) of Azure
which has the URL as: GUID.cloudapp.net
Production Environment: This is the main environment where our application goes live and
can be accessed by the target audience which can be accessed by means of DNS friendly
URL: appName.cloudapp.net
The following steps need to be performed when the drive failure occurs:
To make sure that the Azure Storage functions without fail, we need to ensure that the drive
is not mounted.
Replace the drive so that the drive gets remounted and formatted.
Yes, it is possible and is done by means of the Transient Fault Handling Block. There can be
multiple causes of transient failures while using the cloud environment:
Due to the presence of more load balancers, we can see that the application to database
connections fail periodically.
While using multi-tenant services, the calls get slower and eventually time out because other
applications are using resources to hit the same resource heavily.
The last cause can be we ourselves as the user trying to hit the resource very frequently
which causes the service to deliberately deny the connection to us to support other tenants
in the architecture.
Instead of showing errors to the user periodically, the application can recognize the errors that
are transient and automatically try to perform the same operation again typically after some
seconds with the hope of establishing the connection. By making use of the Transient Fault
Handling Application Block mechanism,Get wePlaced
can generate
at Top the retry Companies
Product intervals andwith
make the
Scaler
application perform retries. In the majority of the cases, the error would be resolved on the
second try and hence the user need not be made aware of these errors unnecessarily. ☰
Following is the sample code that can be used for the retry policy. Here, if the connection is not
successful, then the action is retried based on the retry policy defined. There are 3 retry
strategies - Fixed Interval, Incremental Interval, Exponential Backoff Strategy.
/***
* Class to detect Transient Blocks - Here
* OperationCancelledException is
* detected and then the retry strategy is employed.
*/
internal class AppTransientDetection : ITransientErrorDetectionStrategy
{
bool IsTransient(Exception exception) =>
exception is OperationCanceledException;
}
/***
* Retry Strategy - Here Fixed Interval Strategy is employed and is retri
*/
RetryStrategy retryStrategy = new FixedInterval(retryCount: 5, retryInte
Azure storage key is used for authentication for validating access for the azure storage
service to control access of data based on the project requirements.
2 types of storage keys are given for the authentication purpose -
Primary Access Key
Secondary Access Key
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The main purpose of the secondary access key is for avoiding downtime of the website or
application.
☰
It is a command-line tool that is used for generating service package files. The tool also helps in
preparing the application for deployment in Microsoft Azure or compute emulator.
Every project of cloud service type has the .cscfg file which is basically the cloud service
configuration file that is generated by means of cspack tool and is primarily used to store:
The number of role instances for the deployment of each role in the project.
The thumbprint of the certificates.
User-defined configuration and settings.
19. What is the best Azure solution for executing the code without a server?
Azure Functions service can be used for executing the code without a server.
Serverless Azure Functions are used for simplifying complex orchestration and challenging
resolutions. They are meant for being stateless and short-lived.
They help to connect with other services without the need for hard coding of the integrations
thereby making the development process faster.
It helps the developer to write and concentrate on the business logic code thereby saving
time and effort.
They also provide the features of monitoring and analyzing code performance by means of
Azure Application Insights that help in identifying bottlenecks and failure points across the
components of the application.
20. What would be the best feature recommended by Azure for having a
common file sharing system between multiple virtual machines?
Azure provides a service called Azure File System which is used as a common repository system
for sharing the data across the Virtual Machines configured by making use of protocols like SMB,
FTPS, NFS, etc.
Yes, it is possible by making use of the Key Vault mapping to any Admin VM, we can log in to
another VM without the need for a password.
The main difference between Azure Scale Sets and Availability Sets are given below:
Default These have 5 fault domains and update By default, these have 3 fault domains and
Domain domains by default. 5 update domains.
Configuration Here, the VMs are configured and created in Here, the VMs are created by making use
Style the same manner from the same image. of different images and configurations.
23. What would happen when the maximum failed attempts are reached
during the process of Azure ID Authentication?
In case of maximum failed attempts, the azure account would get locked and the method of
locking is dependent on the protocol that analyzes the entered password and the IP addresses of
the login requests.
24. Is it possible to get a public DNS or IP address for the Azure Internal
Load Balancer?
No! As the name itself says, Azure Internal Load Balancer supports only Private IP addresses,
and hence the assignment of a public IP address or DNS name is not possible.
Azure Blob storage is the object storage solution provided by Microsoft for the cloud. Blob
Get Placedstorage
stands for “Binary Large Object”. Blob-based at Top Product Companies
is used to with unstructured
store massive Scaler
data in terms of text or binary format. It is ideal for serving
documents/images/audio/video/text directly to browser. ☰
The data stored in the blob storage is accessible from anywhere in the world. The blobs are
tied to user accounts by grouping them into containers. The Azure Blob Service has 3
components:
Storage Account: This can be a General Storage Account or Blob Storage Account
registered in Microsoft Azure.
Container: Container is used for grouping blobs. We can store an unlimited number of
blobs in a container. The name of the container should start in lowercase.
Blob: A blob is a Binary Large Object like a file or document of any type and size. There
are 3 kinds of Blobs supported by Azure:
Block blobs: These are intended for text and binary files and can support up to
195GB, i.e up to 50k blocks of up to 4MB each.
Append blobs: These are used for appending operations like logging data in log
files.
Page blobs: These are meant for frequent read/write operations.
Azure Scheduler helps us to invoke certain background trigger events or activities like calling
HTTP/S endpoints or to present a message on the queue on any schedule.
By using this Azure Schedule, the jobs present in the cloud call services present within and
outside of the Azure to execute those jobs on-demand that are routinely on a repeated regular
schedule or start those jobs at a future Get Placed
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date.
Azure Scheduler
☰
28. You have an application running on the On-Prem Server and have backup
on Azure East US region. Now, On-Prem server application access fails. Is it
possible to access the application via the Azure environment?
Yes, it is totally possible by making use of the Site Recovery Service provided by Azure. It is
capable of handling fail-over and fail-back scenarios between On-Prem Servers and Azure
environments.
29. What feature of Azure can be used to stop the issue of high load on the
application in cases of no man support on the flow?
This issue can be stopped by making use of VM Scale sets by defining proper configuration and
conditions to provision a new VM whenever the load to the application increases.
Azure VM Scale Sets lets the developer create and manage a group of VMs that are load
balanced. The scale sets can be configured in such a way that the count of VMs can
automatically be increased or decreased based on the application demand or based on a
pre-defined schedule.
Usage of Scale Sets ensures high availability of the applications and allows the developers
to manage, update and configure large VMs centrally and also help them support the
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development of large-scale applications supporting big data, big workloads, and compute
loads. ☰
Azure scale sets can support up to 1,000 VMs. If the custom VM images are created and
uploaded, then the limit is 600 VMs.
30. What are the types of storage services apart from blob storage provided
by Azure?
Azure provides overall 4 types of storage services - Blob Service, Table Storage, Queue Storage,
and File Storage Services as shown in the figure below:
Azure Table Storage: This type of storage lets user deploy their applications with semi-
structured data and a NoSQL-based key-value store.
This is used when there is a need for applications that follow a flexible schema of data.
Table Storage focuses on enterprise-level data and follows strongly consistent models.
The data is represented in terms of Entities grouped under tables.
Azure Queue Storage: This storage provides a message queue system for handling large
workloads by letting users develop and build flexible and modular applications.
This storage ensures that the application becomes less prone to failure of individual
components and is scalable.
With the help of message queues, it provides the queue monitoring feature for helping
the application to ensure the user demands are met.
Azure File Storage: This storage type provides features of file sharing that are accessible
using SMB (Server Message Block) Protocol. The data in this storage is protected by HTTPS
and SMB 3.0 Protocol.
They are used for improving the performance and capabilities of on-premise
applications. Get Placed at Top Product Companies with Scaler
The OS deployments and hardware management is taken by Azure itself.
☰
31. What are IaaS, PaaS and SaaS?
IaaS: This stands for “Infrastructure as a Service” which provides a set of capabilities like OS,
network connectivities, etc which are at the infrastructural level and are delivered as pay per use
policy. The infrastructure is used for hosting applications. Examples include Azure VM, VNET, etc.
PaaS: PaaS stands for “Platform as a Service” which is mostly about underlying infrastructure
abstraction to the developers for enabling quicker development of the applications without the
need for worry about hosting management. Examples include Azure web apps, Storage services,
cloud services, etc.
SaaS: SaaS stands for “Software as a Service” and are those applications which are delivered
using the service delivery model where the applications are simply consumed and used by an
organization. These applications are generally mobilized by making the organization pay for their
usage or through ads. Examples include applications like Office 365, Gmail, SharePoint Online,
and so on.
The following table shows the difference between the On-Prem Service, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
services. We can observe that as we go right, the level of control the developer or the user has
over the application reduces.
32. What are the differences between the Azure Table Storage and the Azure
SQL service?
The main difference between Azure Table Storage and Azure SQL Service is given below:
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Table Storage Service Azure SQL Table
☰
This follows a NoSQL type of storage on
This follows the relational storage structure on Azure.
Azure.
The data is stored in key-value format and is The data here is stored in rows and columns combination in
referred to as Entity. the SQL table.
The data schema is not enforced for The data schema is enforced for storing data and if the
storage. schema violation occurs, then it results in an error.
The relationship between tables is not Relationships between tables are defined by means of the
possible. foreign keys.
The partition and row key combination are Uniqueness can be defined by the user by means of a primary
considered unique for each entity. key or unique key.
This service can be used for storing log This service is widely used for transaction-based
information or diagnostics data. applications.
Possibility 1: Azure VNET based “Point to Site” service can be a correct choice for this
scenario of connecting one on-premise DB to an Azure-hosted app. “Point to Site” is valid for
cases where the count of resources to be connected via VPN is very limited.
Possibility 2: In case there is a large number of resources for connection, then “Site to Site”
or “Express routes” are the other options that could be considered.
There might be chances that using “Site to Site” might lead to network latency as VPN
due to these work only via Internet (public infrastructure). In such cases, “Express
Routes” are used as it provides dedicated leased line for overcoming latency issues.
Possibility 3: In case the customer is not willing to work via VNET, then Windows
Communication Foundation (WCF) service can be developed and hosted on-premise which
would have CRUD operations meant only for the database hosted on-premise. This works by
means of using the “Service bus relay” option for developing communication between the
Azure-hosted app to the WCF service for database access.
34. What are the differences between the Azure Storage Queue and the
Azure Service Bus Queue?
The main difference between Azure Storage Queue and the Azure Service Bus Queue is given
below:
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Azure Storage Queue Azure Service Bus Queue
☰
Here, the FIFO (First In First Out) The FIFO order is guaranteed for the messages by means of
ordering is not guaranteed. sessions.
Sessions are not supported. Sessions that are messaging level are supported here.
Here, only the “At Least Once delivery” This supports “At least once”, “Atmost once” and “Exactly once”
model is supported. delivery models for the messages.
The size of the message is 64KB. The size of the message is 256KB.
Supports one-to-one delivery of Supports both one to one and one-to-many deliveries of
messages. messages.
The behavior of receiving messages is The behavior can be either blocking or non-blocking based on the
non-blocking. configuration.
Client-side causes:
The application might have been redeployed.
The application might have just performed a scaling operation.
The client-side networking layer has been changed.
There might be transient errors in the client or the network between the client and the
server.
Another possible reason could be the bandwidth threshold limits have been crossed.
Server-side causes:
It might occur if the Azure Redis Cache service itself might undergo a failover from the
primary to the secondary node.
The server instance where the cache was deployed might have undergone patching or
maintenance.
Conclusion
Microsoft Azure has proven itself to be the fastest-growing cloud platform due to its more than
200 service offerings and benefits with pay per use pricing strategy. The revenue generated by
Microsoft Azure has been growing constantly from $880 million in 2015 to a whopping $14.6
billion in 2020.
This tremendous growth in Azure has paved the path to many businesses by creating lots of
opportunities in both tech and non-tech domains thereby making it a very lucrative domain for
building one’s career.
Additional Resources
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Azure MCQs
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WCFD
EC2
EC3
3.Azure storage services and VMs belong to which cloud computing models?
PaaS
IaaS
SaaS
4.Which Azure service helps to deploy and manage enterprise-level applications with hybrid
cloud architecture?
Azure Hybrid
Azure Pack
Azure Blob
Azure Stack
5.Which among the following Azure tool is used for enterprise-level key management?
Azure Guard
Azure Blob
Web Role, Worker Role, VM Role Get Placed at Top Product Companies with Scaler
Worker Role, Read Role, Write Role
☰
None of the Above
True
False
8.What role is an instance that runs Microsoft IIS Web Server for accepting and responding to
HTTP/HTTPS requests?
Server
Worker
Admin
Web
10.What role does the task of running background tasks and applications that don’t need IIS?
Web
Worker
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