Azure Administrator Interview Questions

1. What is Azure Active Directory?

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. It helps employees sign in and access internal and external resources such as Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications.

2. What is the difference between Azure Classic and Azure Resource Manager (ARM)?

Azure Classic is the old deployment model where each resource is managed individually. ARM (Azure Resource Manager) is the new model where you can manage your infrastructure through declarative templates and group resources into resource groups.

3. What is the function of Azure Traffic Manager?

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions while providing high availability and responsiveness.

4. What are the different types of storage in Azure?

Azure provides several types of storage services:

Blob Storage
Table Storage
Queue Storage
File Storage
Disk Storage

5. What is the difference between Azure Storage Account types: Standard and Premium?

Standard storage is backed by magnetic drives and provides cost-effective storage optimized for large capacity and bulk throughput. Premium storage is backed by solid-state drives (SSD) and provides high-performance, low-latency disk support.

6. What is Network Security Group (NSG)?

A Network Security Group (NSG) is used to filter network traffic to and from Azure resources in an Azure virtual network. NSGs contain security rules that allow or deny inbound/outbound traffic.

7. What is Azure Resource Group?

A resource group is a container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. It includes those resources that you want to manage as a group.

8. How do you create a virtual machine in Azure?

You can create a virtual machine using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, or ARM templates. The basic steps include selecting the image, size, configuration settings, and resource group.

9. What is Azure Virtual Network?

An Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is a fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. It allows Azure resources like VMs to securely communicate with each other and with the internet.

10. What is the purpose of Azure Availability Set?

An availability set is a logical grouping of VMs that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide for redundancy and availability. It ensures that during maintenance or failure, not all VMs are affected at the same time.

11. What is the Azure App Service?

Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps. It supports multiple languages like .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, and Python.

12. What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is a platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry data from Azure and on-premises environments. It helps you maximize performance and availability.

13. What are the types of services provided by Azure?

Azure provides three main types of services:

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
SaaS (Software as a Service)

14. What is the use of Azure Policy?

Azure Policy helps to enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at-scale. It enables you to create, assign, and manage policy definitions to control resource behavior.

15. What is the difference between Azure Table Storage and Azure SQL Database?

Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL key-value store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets. Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) based on SQL Server.

16. How does Azure Backup work?

Azure Backup provides simple, secure, and cost-effective backup solutions. It stores backups in Azure Recovery Services vaults and supports backup for VMs, files, folders, and workloads.

17. What is Azure Site Recovery?

Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery solution that ensures business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages through replication and failover.

18. What is the purpose of Azure Key Vault?

Azure Key Vault helps safeguard cryptographic keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services. It stores keys, passwords, certificates, and other secrets securely.

19. What is Azure Load Balancer?

Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that distributes incoming traffic among healthy virtual machines to ensure high availability and reliability.

20. What are Managed Disks in Azure?

Managed Disks are Azure-managed block-level storage volumes used with Azure Virtual Machines. It simplifies disk management and provides features like availability sets and snapshots.

21. What is the difference between a Private and Public IP address in Azure?

A public IP address is used for communication with the internet, while a private IP address is used for communication within the Azure network or with on-premises networks.

22. What is Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set?

Azure VM Scale Set allows you to deploy and manage a set of identical, auto-scaling virtual machines. It ensures high availability and scalability of applications.

23. How do you secure a Virtual Network in Azure?

You can secure a Virtual Network using Network Security Groups (NSGs), Application Security Groups (ASGs), and by implementing VPN gateways, firewalls, and route tables.

24. What is Azure Bastion?

Azure Bastion is a PaaS service that allows secure and seamless RDP/SSH connectivity to Azure VMs directly through the Azure portal without exposing the VMs to the public internet.

25. What is Azure Marketplace?

Azure Marketplace is an online store that offers applications and services either built on or designed to integrate with Azure. It allows users to find, try, purchase, and deploy solutions.

26. What are Azure Tags and why are they used?

Azure Tags are name-value pairs that enable you to logically organize Azure resources. Tags are useful for resource management, billing, automation, and compliance. For example, you can tag resources by environment, department, or cost center.

27. What is Azure Disk Encryption?

Azure Disk Encryption helps protect and safeguard your data to meet organizational security and compliance commitments. It uses BitLocker for Windows and DM-Crypt for Linux to encrypt the OS and data disks.

28. How do you monitor and troubleshoot VM performance issues in Azure?

You can monitor VM performance issues using:

Azure Monitor for real-time performance metrics
Log Analytics to analyze logs
Azure Diagnostics Extension for deeper insights
Alerts to notify you on threshold breaches

29. Difference between Azure Storage Redundancy Options?

Redundancy Option	Description	Region Availability
LRS (Locally Redundant Storage)	Replicates data three times within a single data center	All Azure regions
GRS (Geo-Redundant Storage)	Replicates data to a secondary region for disaster recovery	Paired regions
ZRS (Zone-Redundant Storage)	Replicates data across availability zones in a region	Regions with AZ support
RA-GRS (Read Access GRS)	Same as GRS, but allows read access to the secondary region	Paired regions

30. What are Azure Service Principals?

An Azure Service Principal is an identity created for use with applications, hosted services, and automated tools to access Azure resources. It allows secure access without user interaction and is commonly used in CI/CD pipelines.

31. What is Azure Blob Storage?

Azure Blob Storage is a service for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. It is ideal for storing files, backups, logs, images, and videos.

32. What are Azure NSGs and how are they different from ASGs?

Network Security Groups (NSGs) control traffic to and from Azure resources. Application Security Groups (ASGs) allow you to group VMs logically and apply NSG rules based on those groups, enabling easier rule management.

33. What is Azure Advisor?

Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that provides best practices to help optimize your Azure deployments. It gives recommendations on cost, performance, reliability, and security.

34. Comparison between Azure Availability Zones and Availability Sets

Feature	Availability Sets	Availability Zones
Scope	Within a single data center	Across physically separate zones in a region
Fault Domain Isolation	Yes	Yes (at zone level)
Redundancy Level	Rack-level redundancy	Data center-level redundancy
SLAs	99.95%	99.99%

35. What is Azure Cost Management?

Azure Cost Management helps you monitor, allocate, and optimize your Azure spending. It provides insights through cost analysis, budgets, and recommendations for reducing costs.

36. What is Azure Private Endpoint?

Azure Private Endpoint is a network interface that connects you privately and securely to Azure services. It uses a private IP from your VNet, keeping traffic on the Microsoft backbone.

37. How do you automate tasks in Azure?

Azure automation can be achieved using:

Azure Automation (runbooks, DSC)
Azure Logic Apps
Azure Functions
ARM Templates

38. What is Azure MFA?

Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds an extra layer of security by requiring a second form of verification in addition to the password.

39. What is the Azure Cloud Shell?

Azure Cloud Shell is a browser-based shell that allows you to manage Azure resources using PowerShell or Bash. It comes pre-installed with Azure CLI and common tools.

40. What is Azure Update Management?

Azure Update Management enables you to manage OS updates for your Windows and Linux VMs in Azure and on-premises. It supports scheduling and compliance tracking.

41. What are Azure Reservations?

Azure Reservations allow you to save up to 72% compared to pay-as-you-go prices by committing to one or three years of service usage upfront.

42. What is Just-In-Time VM Access?

Just-In-Time VM Access allows you to lock down inbound traffic to your Azure VMs, reducing exposure to attacks while enabling access only when needed.

43. What is Azure Sentinel?

Azure Sentinel is Microsoft’s cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOAR (Security Orchestration Automated Response) solution that provides intelligent security analytics and threat detection.

44. How does Azure Handle Identity Federation?

Azure AD supports identity federation using protocols like SAML, WS-Federation, and OpenID Connect to authenticate users via external identity providers.

45. What is the role of Azure Blueprints?

Azure Blueprints help you define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implements and adheres to organizational standards, patterns, and requirements.

46. What are Managed Identities in Azure?

Managed Identities for Azure resources provide an automatically managed identity in Azure AD that can be used to authenticate to services that support Azure AD authentication.

47. Types of Azure Load Balancers

Type	Layer	Use Case	Internet Facing
Basic Load Balancer	Layer 4 (TCP/UDP)	Dev/Test Environments	Yes
Standard Load Balancer	Layer 4 (TCP/UDP)	Production Workloads	Yes
Application Gateway	Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS)	Web Traffic Load Balancing with WAF	Yes
Traffic Manager	DNS-based (Global)	Geo-distribution & Failover	Yes

48. How does Azure provide compliance and regulatory support?

Azure complies with a broad set of international and industry-specific standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and 2, GDPR, and more. Compliance offerings can be found in the Azure Trust Center.

49. What is the Azure Security Center?

Azure Security Center is a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens security posture, provides threat protection, and offers recommendations for improving security.

50. What is Azure Resource Lock?

Azure Resource Lock prevents resources from being accidentally deleted or modified. There are two types: ReadOnly and CanNotDelete.

Request more information

Azure Administrator Interview Questions