Azure Fundamentals

Azure is a cloud computing platform with an ever-expanding set of services that help you
build solutions to meet your business goals. Azure services range from simple web
services for hosting your business presence in the cloud to running virtualized computers
to run your custom software solutions. Azure offers many cloud-based services such as
remote storage, database hosting, and centralized account management. Azure also
offers new capabilities such as AI and the Internet of Things (IoT).

In this module, you'll take an entry-level, end-to-end look at Azure and its capabilities.
You'll get a solid foundation for Azure fundamentals to work through the learning paths
available.

What are Azure Fundamentals?

Azure Fundamentals is a series of six learning paths that introduce you to Azure and its
many services and features.

Whether you're interested in learning about cloud security best practices, the core of
Azure for computing network, storage, and database services, or exploring the cutting
edge in IoT and machine learning, check out our curated guide to Azure.

Azure Fundamentals include interactive exercises that give you hands-o experience with
Azure. Many exercises offer a temporary Azure environment called Sandbox, which allows
you to learn freely and at your own pace.

Technical IT experience is not required; However, having general IT knowledge will help
you make the most of your learning experience.

Why should I take Azure Fundamentals?

Whether you're just getting started with the cloud or you already have cloud experience
and are new to Azure, Azure Fundamentals give you everything you need to get started.

Whatever your goals, Azure Fundamentals has something for you. Take Azure's
fundamentals if you:

o Have a general interest in Azure or the cloud.

o Want to earn official certification from Microsoft.
The Azure Fundamentals Learning Path Series can help you prepare for the AZ-900 Exam:
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. This exam covers six knowledge domain areas:

AZ-900 Domain Area

Describe cloud concepts

20-25%

Describe Core Azure Services

15-20%

Describe key solutions and management tools on Azure

10-15%

Describe general security and network security features

10-15%

Describe identity, governance, privacy, and compliance features

20-25%

Describe Azure cost management and service level agreements

10-15%

Each domain area maps to a learning path in Azure Fundamentals.

The percentage shows the relative weightage of each area in the exam. The higher the
percentage, the more questions will be there in that part of the exam. Be sure to read the
exam page for specific information about what skills are involved in each area.

This training helps you develop a comprehensive understanding of Azure. Having real-
world experience will help reinforce concepts so that you are throughly prepared for
exams or apply your skills on the job.

What is Azure?
Azure Cloud is an ever-expanding set of services that help your organization meet your
current and future business challenges. Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage
and deploy applications across a vast global network using the tools and frameworks of
your choice.

What does Azure provide?

With Azure, you have everything you need to build your next great solution. The following
table lists the many benefits that Azure provides for ease of invoicing with Objective.

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What can I do with Azure?

Azure provides over 100 services that enable you to do everything from running your
existing applications on virtual machines to exploring new software paradigms, such as
intelligent bots and mixed reality.

Many teams start exploring the cloud by moving their existing applications to virtual
machines running in Azure. Migrating your existing apps to virtual machines is a good
start, but the cloud is much more than a separate place to run your virtual machines.

For example, Azure offers AI and machine-learning services that communicate naturally
with your users through sight, hearing, and speech. It also provides storage solutions that
dynamically grow to accommodate large amounts of data, and Azure services enable
solutions that would not have been possible without the power of the cloud.
What is Azure Portal?
Azure Portal is a web-based, integrated console that provides an alternative to command-
line tools. With the Azure Portal, you can manage your Azure subscription using the
graphical user interface. You can do this:

o Build, manage and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud
deployments.
o Create custom dashboards for an organized view of resources.
o Configure accessibility options for the optimum experience.

The Azure Portal is designed for flexibility and constant availability. It maintains a presence
in each Azure datacenter. This configuration makes the Azure portal resilient to isolated
datacenter failures and prevents network slowdowns by being closer to users. The Azure
Portal is constantly updated, and maintenance activities do not require any downtime.

What is Azure Marketplace?

The Azure Marketplace helps users connect with Microsoft partners, independent
software vendors, and startups, providing customized solutions and services to run on
Azure. Azure Marketplace customers can find, try, purchase, and provision applications
and services from hundreds of leading service providers. All solutions and services are
certified to run on Azure.

The solution catalog spans several industry categories such as open-source container
platforms, virtual machine images, databases, application build and deployment software,
developer tools, threat detection, and blockchain.

Using the Azure Marketplace, you can quickly and reliably provide a complete solution
hosted in your Azure environment. At the time of writing, there are over 8,000 lists.

The Azure Marketplace is designed for IT professionals and cloud developers interested
in business and IT software. Microsoft partners also use it as a launch point for all joint
go-to-market activities.

Azure Services Tour

Azure can help you tackle tough business challenges. You bring your needs, creativity,
and favorite software development tools. Azure brings a vast global infrastructure that is
always available for you to build your applications on.

Let's take a quick tour of the high-end services provided by Azure.

Azure Services
Here's a big-picture view of the services and features available in Azure.

Let's take a closer look at the most commonly used categories:

o Networking
o Storage
o mobile
o database
o Web
o Internet of Things (IoT)
o big Data
o NS
 o DevOps

Compute services are often one of the primary reasons why companies move to the Azure
platform. Azure provides many options for hosting applications and services. Here are
some examples of computing services in Azure.

o Azure Virtual Machines: Windows or Linux virtual machines (VMs) hosted in Azure.
o Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set: Scaling to Windows or Linux VMs hosted in Azure.
o Azure Kubernetes Service: Cluster management for VMs running containerized services.
o Azure Service Fabric: Distributed systems platform that runs in Azure or on-premises.
o Azure batch: Managed service for parallel and high-performance computing applications.
o Azure Container Instance: Containerized apps run on Azure without provisioning servers
or VMs.
o Azure Functions: An event-driven, serverless compute service.

Networking
Connecting compute resources and providing access to applications is the core function
of Azure Networking. Networking functionality in Azure includes a range of options for
connecting the outside world to services and features in the global Azure datacenter.

Here are some examples of networking services in Azure.

o Azure Virtual Network: Connects VMs to incoming virtual private network (VPN)
connections.
o Azure Load Balancer: Balances inbound and outbound connections to applications or
service endpoints.
o Azure Application Gateway: Optimizes app server farm delivery while increasing
application security.
o Azure VPN Gateway: Accesses Azure Virtual Networks through high-performance VPN
gateways.
o Azure DNS: Provides ultra-fast DNS responses and ultra-high domain availability.
o Azure Content Delivery Network: Delivers high-bandwidth content to customers globally.
 o Azure DDoS Protection: Protects Azure-hosted applications from distributed denial of
service (DDOS) attacks.
o Azure Traffic Manager: Distributes network traffic across Azure regions worldwide.
o Azure ExpressRoute: Connects to Azure over high-bandwidth dedicated secure
connections.
o Azure Network Watcher: Monitors and diagnoses network issues by using scenario-based
analysis.
o Azure Firewall: Implements high-security, high-availability firewall with unlimited
scalability.
o Azure Virtual WAN: Creates a unified wide area network (WAN) that connects local and
remote sites.

Storage
Azure provides four main types of storage services.

o Azure Blob storage: Storage service for very large objects, such as video files or bitmaps.
o Azure File Storage: File shares that can be accessed and managed like a file server.
o Azure Queue Storage: A data store for queuing and reliably distributing messages between
applications.
o Azure table storage: Table storage is a service that stores non-relational structured data
(also known as structured NoSQL data) in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a
schemaless design.

All of these services share several common features:

o Durable and highly available with redundancy and replication.

o Secure through automatic encryption and role-based access control.
o Scalable with virtually unlimited storage.
o Manage, maintain and handle any problems that are important to you.
o It can be accessed from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.

Mobile
With Azure, developers can quickly and easily build mobile back-end services for iOS,
Android, and Windows apps. Features that used to take time and increase project risks,
such as adding corporate sign-in and connecting to on-premises resources such as SAP,
Oracle, SQL Server, and SharePoint, are now easy to include.

Other features of this service include:

o Offline data synchronization.

o Connectivity to on-premises data.
o Broadcast push notifications.
o Autoscaling to meet business needs.

Database
Azure provides several database services to store a wide variety of data types and
volumes. And with global connectivity, this data becomes immediately available to the
users.

o Azure Cosmos DB: Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL options.
o Azure SQL Database: Fully managed relational database with auto-scale, integral
intelligence, and robust security.
o Azure Database for MySQL: Fully managed and scalable MySQL relational database with
high availability and security.
o Azure Database for PostgreSQL: Fully managed and scalable PostgreSQL relational
database with high availability and security.
o SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machine: A service is hosting enterprise SQL Server apps in
the cloud.
o Azure Synapse Analytics: Fully managed data warehouse with overall security at every level
at no extra cost.
o Azure Database Migration Service: Service that migrates databases to the cloud without
any application code changes.
o Azure Cache for Redis: Fully managed service caches are frequently used to reduce data
and application latency and static data.
o Azure Database for MariaDB: Fully managed and scalable MariaDB relational database with
high availability and security.
 o Web: In today's business world, it is important to have a good web experience. Azure
includes first-class support for building and hosting Web apps and HTTP-based Web
services. The following Azure services are focused on web hosting.

Description

o Azure App Service: Quickly create powerful cloud web-based apps.

o Azure Notification Hubs : Send push notifications to any platform from any back end.
o Azure API Management: Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely
and at scale.
o Azure Cognitive Search: Deploy this fully managed search as a service.
o Web Apps feature of Azure App Service: Create and deploy mission-critical web apps
at scale.
o Azure SignalR Service: Add real-time web functionalities easily.
o IoT: People can access more information than ever before. Personal digital assistants led
to smartphones, and now there are smartwatches, smart thermostats, and even smart
refrigerators. Personal computers used to be the norm, and now the Internet allows any
online-enabled object to access valuable information. The ability for devices to collect and
then relay information for data analysis is called IoT.

Many services can help and drive an end-to-end solution for IoT on
Azure.
IoT central

A fully managed global IoT software as a service (SaaS) solution makes it easy to
connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale.

Azure IoT Hub

Messaging hub that provides secure communication and monitoring between millions of
IoT devices.

IoT edge
A fully managed service allows data analysis models to be pushed directly to IoT devices,
allowing them to react quickly to state changes without consulting a cloud-based AI
model.

Big Data: Data comes in all forms and sizes. When we talk about big data, we are talking
about the huge amount of data. Data from weather systems, communication systems,
genomic research, imaging platforms, and many other scenarios generate hundreds of
gigabytes of data. This amount of data makes it difficult to analyze and make decisions,
and it is often so large that traditional forms of processing and analysis are no longer
suitable.

Top Microsoft Azure Interview Question

1) What is Cloud Computing?

It is a platform where we can store and access our data over the internet. We can store
and access our data from anywhere in the world.

2) What is Azure Cloud Service?

The Azure Cloud service offers multiple web applications in Azure; it categorizes the
services and allows us the flexible scaling for our use. The Azure cloud service was
launched in the year 2010. It is a dynamic cloud platform that offers development, data
storage, service hosting, and service management.
3) Which service in Azure can be used to manage resources?
Azure Resource Manager is used to manage resources in Microsoft Azure. It is used to
deploy, manage, and delete all the resources together using a simple JSON script.

4) What type of web application can be deployed with Azure?

Microsoft released SDKs for both Java and Ruby to allow applications written in those
languages to place calls to the Azure Service Platform API to the AppFabric Service.

5) Explain Role in terms of Microsoft Azure.

Roles are nothing, but the servers are layman terms. Servers are managed, load-balanced,
platform as a Service virtual machine that work together to achieve a common goal.

These roles are divided into three parts

o Web Role: It is used to deploy a website, using the languages supported by the
IIS platform (like PHP, .NET, etc.). It was configured and customized to run web
applications.
o Worker Role: It helps the web role to execute background processes, unlike the
web Role, which is used to deploy the website.
o VM Role: It can be used by a user to schedule tasks and other windows services.
We can use the VM role to customize the machine on which the web and worker
role is running.

6) What is Virtual Machine scale sets?

It is an Azure compute resource that we can use to deploy and manage a set of identical
VMs. It is easy to build large-scale services that target big compute, big data, and
containerized workloads if all the VMs configured the same.
7) What are the principal segments of the Windows Azure
platform?
Windows Azure has the following three principal segments:

o Windows Azure Compute: It gives a code that can be managed by the hosting
environment. It provides the benefit of calculation through parts. It consists of
three types of roles - Web Role, Worker Role, and VM Role.
o Windows Azure Storage: It gives four types of Storage services - Queue, Tables,
Blobs, and Windows Azure Drives (VHD)
o Windows Azure AppFabric: AppFabric provides five services - Service bus, Access,
Caching, Integration, and Composite.

8) What do you understand by autoscaling in Azure?

Azure provides the scaling of the services automatically when needed. It depends upon
the use, time, and traffic that comes to our application. For example - The traffic will be
higher during the examination on any exam-related application or website. Then Azure
will automatically modify the setting and provide the resources as required.

9) What is the storage key?

A storage key is an authentication method that can be used to validate access for the
storage service account to control data based on our prerequisites. We have an alternative
to give a primary access key and a secondary access key. The main reason for using a
secondary access key is to avoid downtime to the application or website.

10) Explain the SQL Azure database.

Microsoft Azure SQL database is a way to get associated with cloud services where we
can store our database into the cloud. It has a similar component of SQL Server, i.e., high
accessibility, versatility, and security in the core.
11) Explain cmdlet in Azure?
A cmdlet is a lightweight command that can be used as a part of the Microsoft Azure
PowerShell environment. The cmdlets are summoned by the Azure PowerShell that
automates the script, which is in the command line. Azure PowerShell runtime additionally
invokes them automatically through Azure PowerShell APIs.

12) Explain the Migration Assistant tool in Microsoft Azure.

The migration assistant tool examines our IIS installation and recognizes the sites that can
be migrated to the cloud, featuring any components which can't be relocated or not
supported by the platform. This tool similarly creates websites and databases provided
under the given Azure membership.

13) What is Azure SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

The SLA ensures that when we send two or more role instances for each role. Access to
our cloud service will be maintained with an accuracy of 99.95 % of the time. The
identification and re-correction activities will be started 99.9 % of the time whenever a
role instance's procedure is not running.

14) What is Availability Set in Azure?

Availability Set is a grouping of Azure Virtual Machines. The availability set allows the
Azure cloud to build and understand how the application for a user is constructed to
provide availability and redundancy.

15) What steps should we take in case of drive failure?

In case of a drive failure, we should follow these steps:

o Unmount the drive, which allows the Azure storage object to function without fault.
 o In the case of replacement, we will format and remount the drive.

16) Why we use VNet? Name the power states of a Virtual

Machine.
We can represent our network within the cloud using VNet. VNet logically isolates our
instances launched in the cloud, from the rest of our resources. The various power state
of a Virtual Machine is: Running, Starting, Stopping, Deallocating, etc.

17) What is network security groups?

A network security group allows us to manage the network traffic to NIC or subnets etc.
The network load will be distributed as needed if it is connected wisely.

18) What is cspack?

Cspack is a command-line tool, which is used to generate a service package file. It helps
us to prepare an application for deployment, either in compute emulator or Microsoft
Windows Azure.

19) Name two blobs used in Microsoft Azure.

The two types of blobs in Azure are:

o Block Blob
o Page Blob

20) Can we add an existing VM to an availability set?

No, if we want our VM to be part of an availability set, then we need to create the VM
within the set.
21) How much storage can we use with a virtual machine?
In Azure, each data disk can be up to 1 TB. The number of disks we can use depends upon
the size of the virtual machine. Azure Managed Disks are the recommended disk storage
offering to use with Azure Virtual Machines for persistent storage of data. We can use
multiple Managed Disks with each Virtual Machine.

22) How to create a VM in Azure CLI?

1. az vm create `
2. --resource-group myResourceGroup `
3. --name myVM --image win2016datacenter `
4. --admin-username Azureuser `
5. --admin-password myPassword12

23) What is Azure Search?

It is a cloud search-as-a-service solution that delegates server and infrastructure
management to Microsoft, leaving us with a ready-to-use service that we can populate
with our data and then use to add search to our web or mobile application. Azure search
allows us to easily add a robust search experience to our applications using a simple REST
API or .NET SDK without managing search infrastructure or becoming an expert in search.

24) Explain stateful and stateless micro-services for Service

Fabric?
Service Fabric enables us to build applications that consist of microservices. Stateless
micro-service doesn't maintain a mutable state outside a request. Azure Cloud Service's
worker role is an example of a stateless service. Stateful microservice maintains a mutable,
authoritative state beyond the request and its response.
25) What is a Web role in Azure Cloud Service?
A web role in Azure is a virtual machine instance running Microsoft IIS Web server that
can accept and respond to HTTP or HTTPS requests.

26) Can we create a VM using Azure Resource Manager in a

Virtual Network that was created using classic deployment?
It is not supported by the Azure portal. We cannot use Azure Resource Manager to deploy
a Virtual machine into a virtual network which was created using classic deployment.

27) What are the options available in Azure for data storage?
Options for storing data includes:

o Azure files
o OS drive
o Scale set
o Temp drive
o Azure data service
o External data service

28) What is Azure Redis Cache?

Redis cache is an open-source, in-memory data structure store, which is used as a
database, cache, and message broker. Azure Redis Cache resembles the famous open-
source Redis cache. It provides access to a secure and dedicated Redis cache that is
managed by Microsoft and accessible from any application inside Azure.

29) What are Redis databases?

It is a fully managed, open-source, compatible in-memory data store to power fast and
scalable applications.

30) How to create a VM in PowerShell?

1. # Define a credential object

2. $cred = Get-Credential
3. # Create a virtual machine configuration
4. $vmConfig = New-AzureRmVMConfig -VMName myVM -
VMSize Standard_DS2 |
5. ` Set-AzureRmVMOperatingSystem -Windows -ComputerName myVM -
Credential $cred |
6. ` Set-AzureRmVMSourceImage -PublisherName MicrosoftWindowsServer -
Offer WindowsServer `
7. -Skus 2016-Datacenter -Version latest | Add-AzureRmVMNetworkInterface -
Id $nic.Id