AZ-900 Practice Test 20 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Which statement BEST describes the benefit of cloud computing's 'predictable costs'?

Accepted Answer

Costs can be forecasted and controlled using consumption-based pricing and planning tools. Predictable costs in cloud computing refer to the ability to forecast and control spending through consumption-based pricing models (pay-as-you-go) and tools like Azure Cost Management + Billing. This allows organizations to estimate costs based on usage patterns, set budgets, and receive alerts, making financial planning more accurate compared to unpredictable capital expenses.

Answer

You always pay the same amount regardless of usage

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Cloud services are always cheaper than on-premises solutions

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Hardware costs are fixed for the contract term

Question 2

What is 'scalability' in the context of cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

The ability to increase or decrease resources to match demand. Scalability in cloud computing refers to the ability to dynamically adjust resources (such as compute power, memory, or storage) to match fluctuating demand. This is a core benefit of cloud platforms like Azure, enabling automatic scaling via services such as Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets or Azure App Service autoscale, ensuring performance without over-provisioning.

Answer

The ability to keep services running during failures

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The ability to recover data after a disaster

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The ability to deploy resources in multiple geographic regions

Question 3

Which Azure service enables serverless compute for running containers with scale-to-zero capabilities?

Accepted Answer

Azure Container Apps. Azure Container Apps is the correct answer because it is a fully managed serverless container service that automatically scales down to zero when there is no traffic, meaning you only pay for resources when your containers are actively running. This scale-to-zero capability is a key differentiator from other container services, as it allows cost-efficient execution of event-driven or idle workloads without maintaining a running cluster.

Answer

Azure Functions

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Azure Kubernetes Service

Answer

Azure Container Instances

Question 4

Which Azure service manages application secrets, API keys, and certificates in a centralized, secure vault?

Accepted Answer

Azure Key Vault. Azure Key Vault is the correct service because it is specifically designed to centrally store and control access to application secrets, API keys, and certificates. It provides hardware security module (HSM)-backed encryption, granular access policies via Azure RBAC, and integrates seamlessly with Azure services like VMs and App Services to inject secrets at runtime without exposing them in code.

Answer

Azure Active Directory

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Azure Information Protection

Answer

Azure Security Center

Question 5

Which cloud characteristic ensures data remains accessible and readable even when stored for long periods?

Accepted Answer

Durability. Durability is the cloud characteristic that guarantees data remains intact and readable over extended periods, even in the face of hardware failures or bit rot. Cloud providers achieve this through data replication (e.g., Azure Storage's Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) or Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS)) and erasure coding, ensuring that stored objects survive individual disk or node failures. This is distinct from availability, which focuses on uptime and access, not long-term data integrity.

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Scalability

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Availability

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Performance

Question 6

A company wants to be able to increase and decrease resources automatically based on demand without manual intervention. Which cloud characteristic does this describe?

Accepted Answer

Rapid elasticity. Rapid elasticity is the cloud characteristic that enables resources to be automatically and dynamically scaled out (increased) or scaled in (decreased) in response to real-time demand, without requiring manual intervention. This is typically implemented through autoscaling policies that monitor metrics like CPU utilization or request count and trigger provisioning or de-provisioning of virtual machines or containers via APIs. The key differentiator is that scaling happens automatically and often in near real-time, matching the elasticity definition in NIST SP 800-145.

Answer

Measured service

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Resource pooling

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On-demand self-service

Question 7

What is the purpose of Azure Marketplace?

Accepted Answer

A catalog for browsing and purchasing third-party software and solutions that run on Azure. Azure Marketplace is an online catalog that allows customers to browse, purchase, and deploy third-party software, services, and solutions that are certified to run on Azure. It provides pre-configured solutions from independent software vendors (ISVs) and simplifies deployment by integrating directly with the Azure portal and Azure Resource Manager.

Answer

A store for buying Azure hardware for on-premises use

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A repository for sharing Azure Resource Manager templates with other organizations

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A portal for comparing prices across different cloud providers

Question 8

What is the purpose of Azure Service Health?

Accepted Answer

To provide personalized alerts about Azure service issues and planned maintenance. Azure Service Health provides a personalized view of the health of Azure services, regions, and resources you use. It delivers proactive alerts and notifications about service-impacting events, planned maintenance, and health advisories, allowing you to take action before or during an incident. This is distinct from monitoring individual resource performance, which is handled by Azure Monitor.

Answer

To monitor the performance of virtual machines

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To enforce security policies across Azure resources

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To provide cost optimization recommendations

Question 9

Which Azure service provides enterprise-grade data integration and ETL/ELT pipelines for moving data between on-premises and cloud data stores?

Accepted Answer

Azure Data Factory. Azure Data Factory (ADF) is the correct answer because it is a cloud-based ETL/ELT service specifically designed for orchestrating and automating data movement and transformation between on-premises and cloud data stores. It provides over 90 built-in connectors, supports hybrid data integration via self-hosted integration runtimes, and enables code-free pipeline creation for complex data workflows.

Answer

Azure Stream Analytics

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Azure Databricks

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Azure HDInsight

Question 10

What is the purpose of Azure Active Directory B2C?

Accepted Answer

To provide customer identity management for consumer-facing applications. Azure Active Directory B2C (Business-to-Consumer) is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution designed specifically for external-facing applications. It allows developers to manage customer sign-up, sign-in, and profile management using social identity providers (e.g., Google, Facebook) or local accounts, while keeping customer identities isolated from the organization's employee directory (Microsoft Entra ID). This directly supports consumer-facing applications, not internal employee access.

Answer

To manage employee identities and corporate application access

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To replicate on-premises Active Directory to Azure

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To manage service-to-service authentication using managed identities

Question 11

A company's finance team needs to track Azure costs by project. Each resource is tagged with a 'Project' tag, but some resources were created without tags. The finance team wants to generate a report that shows costs grouped by project and also identifies untagged resources. Which Azure tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Cost Management + Billing. Azure Cost Management + Billing provides built-in cost analysis capabilities that allow you to group costs by tags (such as 'Project') and filter for untagged resources. It can generate reports that break down spending by tag values and explicitly show costs associated with resources that have no tags, meeting both requirements.

Answer

Azure Budgets

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Azure Advisor

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Azure Resource Graph

Question 12

An e-commerce application needs to handle sudden traffic spikes during flash sales while maintaining consistent performance. Which combination of Azure services BEST addresses this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Azure Front Door with autoscaling backend. Azure Front Door provides global load balancing and traffic acceleration with built-in SSL offload and path-based routing, while its autoscaling backend (e.g., Virtual Machine Scale Sets or App Service) automatically adds or removes instances based on CPU or request metrics. This combination ensures that sudden traffic spikes during flash sales are absorbed without manual intervention, maintaining consistent performance and high availability.

Answer

Azure Load Balancer with manual VM scaling

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Azure Traffic Manager with static VMs

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Azure CDN alone

Question 13

A company needs to store database connection strings and API keys securely, ensuring only authorized applications can access them. Which Azure service is designed for this?

Accepted Answer

Azure Key Vault. Azure Key Vault is the correct service because it is specifically designed to securely store and manage secrets such as database connection strings, API keys, and certificates. It provides fine-grained access control via Azure RBAC and access policies, ensuring only authorized applications and users can retrieve secrets. This aligns directly with the requirement for secure, authorized access to sensitive configuration data.

Answer

Azure Storage with encryption

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Azure Active Directory

Answer

Azure Policy

Question 14

In cloud computing, what does 'consumption-based pricing' mean?

Accepted Answer

Paying only for the resources you actually use, measured by time, amount, or transactions. Consumption-based pricing is a cloud billing model where you pay only for the resources you consume, measured by metrics such as compute hours, storage GB-months, or number of transactions. This aligns with the operational expenditure (OpEx) model, allowing you to scale costs with usage without upfront commitments. Microsoft Azure implements this through pay-as-you-go pricing, where you are billed at the end of each billing cycle based on metered usage.

Answer

Paying a fixed monthly fee regardless of actual resource usage

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Purchasing capacity upfront for a year at a discounted rate

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Paying a per-user license fee for cloud software access

Question 15

An application needs to store session state that can be accessed by multiple web server instances. The state must be retrieved in under 1 millisecond. Which Azure service BEST meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Azure Cache for Redis. Azure Cache for Redis is an in-memory data store that provides extremely low-latency (sub-millisecond) read and write operations, making it ideal for storing session state that must be accessed quickly by multiple web server instances. Unlike disk-based storage services, Redis keeps data in RAM, ensuring consistent retrieval times under 1 millisecond even under load.

Answer

Azure SQL Database

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Azure Blob Storage

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Azure Table Storage