Top 50 Azure Administrator Interview Questions and Answers

Azure Administrator Interview Preparation : An Overview

Do you want to win in a job interview? If yes, You should know these Azure administrator interview questions for the Azure Administrator position. Keep in mind that even though Azure's job market is booming and many companies are hiring administrators, you will still have to compete for this job. 

As cloud computing becomes rapidly dominant, Businesses are looking for qualified administrators to help them manage their Azure cloud infrastructure. This Azure Tutorial, provides a comprehensive list of Top Azure Administrator Interview Questions and Answers (2024), with expert insights and insider tips to help you prepare for your job interview. If you want to become an expert Azure Administrator, consider the AZ-103 Exam. Also, Enroll Yourself In the Best Microsoft Azure developer certification From ScholarHat and Start Your Tech Career the Right Way!

1. What is Azure Virtual Machine?

• Azure Virtual Machines are on-demand computing resources or virtual machines offering Microsoft Azure.
• We can typically use a VM as a service when required and shut down the system when not in use. The Azure Virtual Machines are listed under the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) category in Azure. With Azure Virtual Machines we get more control over the environment to customize the development environment or hosting.
• We need to create some of the resources such as networks, disks, etc, for the virtual machines. These resources can be injected into the different resource groups.
• By using the Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines, cloud users will have a variety of options available to deploy virtual machines using the Azure GUI portal, Powershell, using the portal's cloud shell. We can get the list of all our deployed VMs in the Azure portal itself. Before deploying the VMs using any method like Powershell or GUI, users should have enough knowledge about the different characteristics of VMs in the cloud.
• Any Azure virtual machine can be created using Azure CLI, Azure portal, REST APIs, Azure PowerShell, etc. If you feel lost in the world of Azure don't waste time without progress. It's time for a change! Join our Microsoft Azure Certification, where we'll guide you on an exciting journey to master (Topic Name) efficiently and on schedule.

2. You have received an email from your company security team that a couple of VMs are exposed to the internet, how to prevent that public access without interruption of any service?

In that case, you need to create the NSG and associate your VMs if there is no NSG. Now, block the port 80/443 and allow only specific ports of Azure which will fix the issue.

• Click on the VMs
• Click on the networking tab.
• Click on the NSG
• Then create the Outbound deny rule for the internet.

3. How much does Azure certification cost?

The average cost of Azure Certification ranges from Rs. 14,000 to Rs. 18,000 in India.

4. You have a couple of VMs of 4 Core and 16GB. You need to upgrade VMs to 8 Core and 32 GB Ram since they are not performing well. So, what are the steps you will take?

You will go to specific VMs and perform the below steps:

• First, get approval from the Application Owner for downtime because it will automatically reboot the VM.
• Go to each VM and Click on the Size.
• Select the VM instance Size of 8 core 32 GB RAM VMs.
• Once you select the specific Size, it will automatically start upgrading the instance.
• After that, you need to verify all the settings of the VMs and hand them over to the application Owner if the activity is completed successfully.

5. You have a couple of VMs running in Azure environments and you need to enable the Availability set, how to do that?

No. It’s not possible to enable the AV set in running systems there is a limitation to it, if you want to enable the same then you need to recreate the VMs and Add the Availability set to it.

6. Is it possible to enable the NSG in Vnet since you don’t want to enable it on the VM level?

It’s not possible to enable the NSG in Vents but certainly, you can associate with Subnets which will help you to reduce the manageability of your NSG.

7. What is NSG?

NSG is nothing but its services will help you to allow or deny the specific port to communicate to your services within subscription or outside of the subscription. It has inbound and outbound rules.

Inbound Rule: It defines the traffic coming from the internet to VMs or specific services or VMs.

Outboard Rules: It defines the traffic going to the internet from your VMs or specific services or VMs.

8. How can you create the NSG?

You need to follow the steps to create the NSG and Associate it with VMs.

• In All Services Search the NSG.
• Provide the Name, Location, and Resource Group
• Click on the NSG and create the NSG.

9. Is it possible to host the VM in another region and connect to a different region?

Yes, you need to set up the interconnectivity while creating the V-net (Virtual Network) to V-net (Virtual Network) connection between both regions.

10. One of your clients escalated that his VM has been rebooted without intimating to him and you need to know logs on who has rebooted the VM, and how can get the details.

In that case, Activity logs will help, as any activity happens in VMs through the portal, you will get log alerts stored in the activity logs, so you will go to activity logs and find who has rebooted the VM and can share with clients after manager approval.

11. In your organization, you have some clients who don't want to give subscription access, but they have given PowerShell access, how do you create the Storage account using PowerShell?

New-AzureRmStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName azure4you -Name azureint234 -SkuNameStandard_LRS -Location 'East Us'

12. How to tag the resources using a command?

You should use the below command to tag the resources:

Set-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name "Azure4you.com" -Tag @{Department="IT"}

13. What is the difference between a Premium Storage Account and a Standard Storage Account?

Premium Storage Accounts are backed by SSD Disk which provides resilience and better performance whereas standard Storage Accounts are backed by HDD (magnetic Disk) and Provide the maximum IOPS of up to 500.

14. What is the difference between a Managed Disk and an Unmanaged Disk?

Managed Disk:

In Managed disk storage accounts creation/Management is done on the backend. It will help you with the scalability of storage accounts and is backed by Standard/premium Tires.

Unmanaged Disk:

Unmanaged disks are the disks in which you will create the storage accounts. Create the disk and Manage it by yourself and you need to make sure you can’t exceed the Storage limit of up to 20K IOPS while adding many disks which may throttle the VM's performance.

15. What is a Site-to-Site VPN?

As per the official docs:

• A Site-to-Site VPN gateway connection is used to connect your on-premises network to an Azure virtual network over an IPsec/IKE (IKEv1 or IKEv2) VPN tunnel. This type of connection requires a VPN device located on-premises that has an externally facing public IP address assigned to it.
• Azure Site-to-Site VPN will help you to connect to an On-Premises Network to Azure Virtual Network Over an IPsec/IKE (IKEV1/IKEV2) VPN tunnel. Basically, this connection required a VPN device with a public-facing IP Address assigned to it.

16. A customer has Prod, Dev, and Test environments. How do implement a solution that each environment can’t connect to each other?

In that case, you can separate the environments while creating the different subnets for Prod, Dev, and Test environments and apply the NSG on each subnet with a specific deny rule which will not allow connecting to those environments.

17. What are the tools you will use to create the Vnets?

You can use the below tools to configure the Azure Vnets.

• Azure portal
• PowerShell
• Azure CLI

18. Your customer has configured the policy-based routing but due to the issue, he wants to change to route-based configuration in Azure VPN, how you can deliver the solution?

Basically, the customer can’t change them or update their routing method directly as that is not supported by MS Azure. He must create the New connection and use the method to route based on the new connection.

• First, you need to delete the Route based connection
• Delete the Gateway
• Then you will recreate the connection using Azure Portal, CLI, or PowerShell.

19. How to configure the static public IP address VPN gateway?

Basically, it’s not supported by Microsoft and when you create the VPN gateway at that time dynamic IP address will automatically be configured and that will change only when you delete or recreate the VPN gateway.

20. What protocols are supported by the Application gateway?

It supports the HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, and WebSocket.

21. What is Azure Active Directory?

Azure Aactive Directory is a cloud-based identity and access management service that will help to access Azure resources like Azure subscriptions and other Applications. You can integrate Azure AD to O365, SharePoint Online, etc.

22. What are the advantages of Azure's active directory?

• Having secured adaptive access along with the multi-factor authentication.
• Conditional Access policies, Seamless user experience with single sign-on, seamless & passwordless user portal.
• Unified identity management (UIM) that connects all the internal and external users to all apps.
• Devices and allows them to access the resources with ease.
• Simplified Identity Governance with provisioning, access packages, and access reviews.

23. What is Azure Backup

Azure Backup is a cloud-based solution that will help you to take the backup of the Azure VM, PaaS SQLDB, file service, web apps, etc.

24. What are the benefits of Azure Backup?

• It provides a hybrid solution to take the backup.
• Storage will be managed automatically using Azure storage accounts and it doesn’t require any local storage like on-premises.
• You can transfer unlimited data and this data is stored in encrypted format in Azure storage accounts.

25. What is the use of Azure DevOps for managing software development?

It is a collection of development tools, services, and features that allow organizations to plan, develop, test, and deliver software faster and more efficiently. It also helps teams to collaborate and automate the entire development process, from writing code to deploying software to production.

26. Describe how Azure Resource Manager differs from the classic deployment model.

The main difference between the two models is that ARM provides a more organized way to manage resources. Basically WithARM, you can define a resource group and deploy all the necessary resources to that group. This makes managing and organizing your resources and deploying and managing updates to those resources easier.

27. What is Azure Blob Storage, and what are some everyday use cases for it?

It is a cloud-based object storage service that enables organizations to store and access large amounts of unstructured data, such as text and binary data. Also It is highly scalable, durable, and secure.

28. What are some common security threats in Azure?

Here are Some common security threats in Azure :

• Data breaches: The unauthorized access to sensitive data stored in the cloud.
• Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: The attempts to overload a system and prevent access to resources.
• Malware and viruses: The malicious software can spread throughout a system and cause damage.
• Configuration errors: The mistakes in setting up Azure resources, such as exposing resources to the internet.

29. Discuss the concept of resource groups in Azure.

These are like folders for organizing your resources. Just like you put your books and clothes into different boxes, you can put your different resources in Azure, like virtual machines, databases, and websites, into different resource groups. This makes it easier to manage and keep track of all your resources.

30. How do you manage storage in Azure, and what are some standard storage solutions used in Azure?

Managing storage in Azure includes deciding how to store data, what types of storage to use, and how to access and manage that data.

Here are Some standard storage solutions used in Azure are:

1. Azure Blob Storage: Used for unstructured data like images, videos, and text files.
2. Azure Files: Used for file storage and sharing and is similar to a traditional file server.
3. Azure Queue Storage: The Messages that may be read and processed by numerous apps are stored in this area.
4. Azure Disk Storage: Used for virtual machine storage and offers high performance and low latency.

To manage this storage in Azure, we can use the Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or Azure Powershell to create and also configure storage accounts, manage access control, monitor performance and usage, and set up backup and disaster recovery.

31. Discuss the difference between Azure PaaS and IaaS.

32. Define Azure Subscriptions.

It is a way to access Azure resources logically. It holds information about your resources, such as databases, virtual machines (VMs), and more. When we make an Azure resource, like a virtual machine, you set it apart from the subscription it is part of.

 Azure subscription denotes

• Entity for billing and the security boundary.
• A place where users can go.
• How much do Azure services cost each month?

33. Which is better, Google Cloud Platform Cloud AutoML or Microsoft Azure ML Studio?

When comparing the two, Azure ML Studio comes out on top due to its outstanding features, including classification, regression, anomaly detection, clustering, recommendation, and ranking. However, The GCP Cloud AutoML has built-in support for clustering, regression, and recommendation. Azure also has convenient drag-and-drop features that save time and effort.

34. Explain in detail the Azure Machine Learning Text Analysis API.

It is a collection of web services for analyzing text. Extracting relevant information and analyzing sentiment from the unstructured text are two of its primary functions. It gives out numbers between 0 and 1, which can be interpreted as positive or negative feelings.

35. Which Azure service manages Azure resources?

Here, Some of the Azure services that manage resources are

• Application Insights
• Azure Resource Manager
• Azure Portal
• Log Analytics

36. How does Azure CLI create a virtual machine (VM)?

• resource-group myResourceGroupName `
• name myVM --image win 2016 datacenter `
• admin-username AzureuserNAME `
• admin-password AzurePASSWORD

37. Why do we need the Azure Diagnostics API?

Here, We can collect diagnostic data from Azure applications such as performance monitoring, system event logs, and so on. And to monitor data verbosely for cloud service roles, Azure Diagnostics must be enabled. Diagnostics data is used to create visual chart representations for better monitoring and performance metric alerts.

38. Why does Azure Websites have a "Migration Assistant" tool?

Using Migration Assistant, we can check out your IIS configuration. It Assists in determining which server can be moved to the cloud. There are parts of it that still need to be migrated to Azure or need to be supported.

39. How can Azure deploy web applications?

The Applications that are deployable use either ASP.NET, PHP, or WCF.

40. What are Update Domains?

It is a logical collection of the underlying hardware that can be maintained or restarted simultaneously. And, the Azure platform automatically distributes the virtual machines we create within an availability set across these update domains.

41. What are Network Security Groups, and what do they do?

It is a group of Access Control List (ACL) rules that control whether network traffic can reach specific NICs (network interface cards), subnets, or both. NSGs can be linked to specific NICs connected to one or more subnets. The ACL restrictions apply to all VMs in a subnet with an NSG connection.

42. Do Azure availability and scale sets work together?

Yes. Here,The five fault domains and five update domains that make up a scale set constitute an implicit availability set. The Scale sets with more than 100 virtual machines (VMs) are distributed across several placement groups, representing several availability sets. 

43. What is Azure's CSPack?

CSPack is a command-line tool that makes the service package file and gets an app ready for deployment in Azure or Compute Emulator. Every project with a cloud service type has a configuration file .cscfg file, which was made with CSPack.

44. Why is Azure used to fix IP addresses?

The static IP address is used when a device connected to Azure should not have its address changed.

45. What is a guest OS in Microsoft Azure?

When we host a role instance in a virtual machine, the Guest OS is the OS that controls the VM.

46. What does a VNet mean?

 VNet stands for  Virtual Network. It is the cloud-based analog of your physical network. Our newly launched cloud instances can be logically isolated from the rest of your resources.

47. Is it possible to add an existing VM to an availability set?

No, it is not possible. They can only be included in an availability set if they are initially created within that set. We can't add a freshly created VM to an existing availability set.

48. How can I find a list of the already integrated Azure AD apps and what they can do?

Around 2600 applications are already set up to work with Azure AD. All the apps have already been connected to a single sign-on system (SSO). SSO lets use the login information for your organization to get into your apps. But some applications also allow provisioning and de-provisioning to be done automatically.

49. How many cloud service roles does Azure offer?

 Azure provides two types of roles:

• Worker role: These roles enable the applications they host to run asynchronously for long periods, unaffected by user interactions, and frequently not use IIS. They're also useful for background tasks. The programs operate independently of one another.
• Web role: This provides an IIS (Internet Information Services) dedicated web server to automatically deploy and host front-end websites.

50. What is Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication?

In multi-factor authentication, a user must provide multiple forms of identification during sign-in. They might be asked to enter a code on their phone or scan their fingerprint.

While using Azure active directory multi-factor authentication, two or more of the following forms of authentication are needed:

• Usually, this is a password that you know.
• Something you have, like a phone or hardware key, that you trust and can't easily copy.

Summary:

I hope the above questions and answers help you in your Azure Administrator Interview. All the above interview Questions have been taken from our newly released eBook Azure Administrator Interview Questions and Answers. You can also consider doing our Azure Training from ScholarHat to upskill your career. To know the payscale consider reading Azure Administrator Salary Article.

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