AZ-900 Practice Test 33 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a mission-critical application on Azure virtual machines. The application must remain available even if an entire Azure datacenter in a region experiences a complete outage (e.g., power failure). The company wants all VMs to be located in the same Azure region to minimize latency. Which Azure feature should the company use to deploy the VMs?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Availability Zone. Availability Zones (AZs) are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across multiple AZs protects against a single datacenter failure while keeping all resources within the same region to minimize latency. This meets the requirement for high availability during a complete datacenter outage.

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Availability Set

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Resource Group

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Proximity Placement Group

Question 2

A development team lead needs to quickly provision a new Azure virtual machine for a short-term testing project. Instead of submitting a ticket to the IT procurement team and waiting several days for hardware approval and setup, the lead directly signs into the Azure portal, configures the VM settings, and has it running within 15 minutes. The entire process required no human interaction from the cloud provider's staff. Which cloud computing characteristic does this scenario primarily demonstrate?

Accepted Answer

On-demand self-service. The scenario demonstrates on-demand self-service because the development team lead was able to provision and configure an Azure virtual machine directly through the Azure portal without any human interaction from Microsoft's staff. This characteristic allows users to automatically obtain computing resources, such as VM time and storage, as needed without requiring manual approval or provisioning from the cloud provider's IT team.

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Broad network access

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Measured service

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Resource pooling

Question 3

A company uses Azure Management Groups to organize subscriptions. The hierarchy is: Root Management Group -> Contoso Management Group -> Sales (management group) and R&D (management group). Under Sales there are two subscriptions: Sales-Prod and Sales-Dev. Under R&D there is one subscription: R&D-Prod. The governance team assigns an Azure Policy definition that denies the creation of resources in the East US region. They assign this policy to the Contoso Management Group, but they add an exclusion for the Sales-Dev subscription. A developer in the Sales-Dev subscription attempts to create a virtual machine in the East US region. What will happen?

Accepted Answer

The creation will succeed because the Sales-Dev subscription is excluded from the policy assignment.. Azure Policy allows exclusions at any child scope when a policy is assigned at a parent management group. The policy assigned to the Contoso Management Group denies resources in East US, but the Sales-Dev subscription is explicitly excluded from that assignment. Therefore, the developer's virtual machine creation in East US will succeed, as the exclusion overrides the deny effect for that subscription.

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The creation will fail because the policy is assigned to the Contoso Management Group, and all subscriptions under it must comply.

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The creation will succeed because the policy is assigned only to the Sales and R&D management groups, not directly to subscriptions.

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The creation will fail because exclusions cannot be applied at the subscription level when the policy is assigned at a management group scope.

Question 4

A company has a governance requirement that every Azure virtual machine must have a tag named 'CostCenter' with the value 'Unassigned'. If a user creates a VM without the tag, or with a different value for that tag, the tag should be automatically corrected to 'Unassigned' immediately upon resource creation. The IT team is writing an Azure Policy definition to enforce this. Which Policy effect should they use?

Accepted Answer

Modify. The Modify effect is correct because it automatically corrects non-compliant tags (missing or wrong value) to the specified value ('Unassigned') during resource creation or update, without blocking the deployment. This satisfies the requirement for immediate, automatic remediation without denying the VM creation entirely.

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Deny

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Audit

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DeployIfNotExists

Question 5

A company runs a nightly data processing job that requires high CPU usage for only 15 minutes. During the day, the compute resources are idle. The company wants to reduce costs by automatically starting compute resources only when the job runs and shutting them down after completion, without manual intervention. Which cloud computing characteristic directly meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Elasticity. Elasticity is the cloud computing characteristic that enables resources to be automatically provisioned and de-provisioned in response to workload demands. In this scenario, the nightly job requires high CPU for only 15 minutes, and elasticity allows the compute resources to scale up exactly when the job starts and scale down to zero after completion, eliminating idle costs without manual intervention.

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High availability

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Fault tolerance

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Scalability

Question 6

A startup is building a mobile app backend and wants to use cloud services. They want to focus entirely on writing code and deploying features without worrying about server maintenance, operating system patches, or scaling infrastructure. Which cloud service model best fits this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Platform as a Service (PaaS). Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the correct model because it abstracts the underlying infrastructure, including servers, operating systems, and scaling, allowing developers to focus solely on writing code and deploying features. Azure App Service is a prime example of PaaS, providing built-in load balancing, auto-scaling, and patching without developer intervention.

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Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

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Software as a Service (SaaS)

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Function as a Service (FaaS)

Question 7

A manufacturing company traditionally purchased and maintained its own servers, paying a large upfront capital expense (CapEx) for hardware that was expected to last five years. After migrating its workloads to Azure virtual machines, the company now receives a monthly invoice that reflects only the compute and storage resources actually consumed during that month. There are no upfront payments. This change in cost structure best illustrates which benefit of cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

Consumption-based pricing model. The scenario describes a shift from a large upfront capital expenditure (CapEx) for hardware to a monthly invoice based on actual compute and storage consumption. This directly illustrates the consumption-based pricing model, where you pay only for the resources you use (e.g., VM hours, storage GB-months) with no upfront costs. This is a core financial benefit of cloud computing, enabling operational expenditure (OpEx) instead of CapEx.

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Scalability to handle variable demand

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High availability through geographic redundancy

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Resource pooling through multi-tenancy

Question 8

A company's finance team uses Azure Cost Management + Billing to monitor cloud spending. They want to configure a rule that sends an email notification to the finance team's distribution list when the monthly cost for resources tagged with Department=Marketing exceeds $10,000. Which Azure Cost Management feature should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Budget. Azure Budgets allow you to set cost or usage thresholds and configure alerts that trigger when spending reaches a specified percentage of the budget. In this scenario, the finance team can create a budget with a $10,000 threshold for the Department=Marketing tag, and configure an alert rule to send an email notification to the distribution list when costs exceed that amount.

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Invoice

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Cost analysis

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Recommendations

Question 9

A company runs a web application on Azure virtual machines. The application experiences unpredictable traffic patterns with occasional sharp spikes. The operations team wants to configure the infrastructure so that the number of running virtual machines automatically increases during spikes and decreases during low traffic periods, without manual intervention. Which cloud computing characteristic does this requirement describe?

Accepted Answer

Elasticity. Elasticity is the cloud computing characteristic that enables resources to automatically scale out (increase) during demand spikes and scale in (decrease) during low traffic periods, matching capacity to workload in real time. In Azure, this is implemented via Virtual Machine Scale Sets with autoscale rules based on metrics like CPU or memory thresholds, allowing the number of VMs to adjust without manual intervention.

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High availability

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Fault tolerance

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Geographic distribution

Question 10

A company plans to migrate a legacy application to Azure virtual machines. The application requires a shared file store that can be mounted simultaneously from multiple VMs using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. The company needs a fully managed cloud file share that supports SMB 3.0 and integrates with Active Directory Domain Services for authentication. Which Azure service should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Files. Azure Files provides fully managed SMB file shares in the cloud, supporting SMB 3.0 and integration with Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS) for identity-based authentication. This allows multiple Azure VMs to mount the same file share simultaneously using the SMB protocol, meeting all the stated requirements.

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Azure Blob Storage

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Azure NetApp Files

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Azure Disk Storage

Question 11

A company plans to migrate a line-of-business application to Azure. The application will run on a virtual machine (IaaS). The company wants to ensure that the operating system is kept up to date with security patches. According to the shared responsibility model, who is primarily responsible for applying these patches?

Accepted Answer

The customer, because the customer manages the guest operating system and is responsible for patching it.. In the shared responsibility model for IaaS, the customer retains control over the guest operating system, including applying security patches. Microsoft manages the physical host and hypervisor but does not patch the OS running inside the VM. Therefore, the customer is primarily responsible for keeping the OS up to date.

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Microsoft, because they manage all operating system updates in Azure.

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Both Microsoft and the customer share responsibility equally for operating system patching.

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The cloud service provider, as a general rule for all services in Azure.

Question 12

A company runs its line-of-business application on a virtual machine in an on-premises data center. The business continuity team wants to replicate the entire server (including operating system, applications, and data) to Azure so that if the on-premises site fails, the workload can be quickly started in an Azure region. The team also needs the ability to perform non-disruptive disaster recovery drills to validate the failover process. Which Azure service should the team use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Site Recovery. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the correct service because it provides orchestrated replication of entire on-premises virtual machines—including OS, applications, and data—to Azure. It supports planned and unplanned failover, and crucially allows non-disruptive disaster recovery drills via test failover, which isolates the replicated environment without impacting the production workload.

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Azure Backup

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Azure Migrate

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Azure Traffic Manager

Question 13

A company has traditionally managed on-premises servers for their internal business applications. Setting up a new test environment involves ordering hardware, waiting for delivery, racking, and configuring the OS and applications, which typically takes two to three weeks. The company is migrating their development and testing workloads to Azure. Now, developers can deploy a complete, pre-configured test environment using Azure Resource Manager templates in under two hours. This ability to rapidly provision resources and adapt to changing requirements best illustrates which benefit of cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

Agility. The scenario describes how the company can provision a complete test environment in under two hours using Azure Resource Manager templates, compared to the two-to-three-week on-premises process. This rapid provisioning and ability to quickly adapt to changing requirements is the definition of agility in cloud computing, which focuses on speed, flexibility, and reduced time-to-market for IT resources.

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Scalability

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High availability

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Geographic distribution

Question 14

A company runs a seasonal e-commerce application. During holidays, traffic increases tenfold, but the company does not want to over-provision resources for the rest of the year. They want to add or remove server capacity automatically based on real-time demand and pay only for what they use. Which cloud computing characteristic does this scenario describe?

Accepted Answer

Elasticity. Elasticity is the cloud computing characteristic that enables automatic scaling of resources up or down based on real-time demand. In this scenario, the e-commerce application needs to handle a tenfold traffic increase during holidays without over-provisioning for the rest of the year, which is exactly what elasticity provides by adding or removing server capacity dynamically and charging only for what is used.

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High availability

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Reliability

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Fault tolerance

Question 15

A company's security policy requires that all Azure Storage accounts must enforce a minimum TLS version of 1.2. The governance team needs to continuously audit all existing storage accounts for compliance with this requirement, and also ensure that any new storage account that does not meet the TLS version requirement is automatically flagged as non-compliant in the Azure portal compliance dashboard. The team does not want to block the creation of non-compliant resources; they only need to report them. Which Azure feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Policy. Azure Policy is the correct choice because it can continuously audit existing Azure resources and evaluate new resources against a defined policy rule—in this case, requiring a minimum TLS version of 1.2 on all storage accounts. It can be configured in audit-only mode, which flags non-compliant resources in the Azure portal compliance dashboard without blocking their creation, exactly matching the team's requirement to report rather than deny.

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Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

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Azure Blueprints

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Azure Locks