AZ-900 Practice Test 8 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A small business runs its IT infrastructure in a small on-premises server room. The business owner is considering moving to Azure and asks the IT manager: 'How can a large cloud provider like Microsoft offer compute and storage at a lower per-unit cost than I can get by purchasing my own servers, even though I only need a few virtual machines?' Which cloud computing benefit best answers this question?

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

Accepted Answer

Economies of scale. Economies of scale allow Microsoft to spread massive capital and operational costs (data center construction, power, cooling, hardware procurement) across millions of customers. This per-unit cost reduction means even a small business consuming only a few virtual machines benefits from the same low-cost infrastructure that a large enterprise would, making Azure's compute and storage cheaper than purchasing and maintaining dedicated on-premises servers.

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High availability

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Elasticity

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Fault tolerance

Question 2

A company migrates its web application to Azure. The CFO wants to view detailed reports of CPU usage, storage consumption, and network bandwidth for each team's resources to accurately allocate costs. The company uses Azure Cost Management and Billing to generate these reports. Which characteristic of cloud computing does this capability best illustrate?

Accepted Answer

Measured service. Measured service is the cloud characteristic that enables providers to track and report resource usage (CPU, storage, bandwidth) for billing and cost allocation. Azure Cost Management and Billing leverages this capability by aggregating consumption metrics from Azure Monitor and resource providers, then generating detailed reports that allow the CFO to allocate costs per team. Without measured service, granular usage-based billing and cost attribution would not be possible.

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Rapid elasticity

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Resource pooling

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On-demand self-service

Question 3

A development team frequently needs to create and tear down test environments. In their on-premises datacenter, they must submit a ticket to the IT operations team, which often takes several days to provision the required servers. After migrating to Azure, developers can now create virtual machines, databases, and other resources directly through the Azure portal or using PowerShell scripts, without any interaction from the IT operations team. This ability to provision cloud resources directly is a direct example of which fundamental characteristic of cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

On-demand self-service. The scenario describes developers provisioning virtual machines, databases, and other resources directly through the Azure portal or PowerShell scripts without needing to interact with the IT operations team. This is the definition of on-demand self-service, a core characteristic of cloud computing defined by NIST (SP 800-145) as a consumer being able to unilaterally provision computing capabilities without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

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Resource pooling

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Measured service

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Rapid elasticity

Question 4

A financial services company must deploy a standardized environment for a new customer-facing application. The environment must include a specific set of Azure resources (such as virtual networks, databases, and App Service plans), pre-configured role assignments for the compliance team, and a collection of Azure Policy definitions that enforce encryption and tagging rules. The company needs to package all these components into a single, versioned artifact that can be consistently deployed across multiple subscriptions and regions, with the ability to track changes and updates. Which Azure service should the company use to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Azure Blueprints. Azure Blueprints is the correct choice because it is designed to package a standardized environment—including resource templates, role assignments, and policy definitions—into a single, versioned artifact that can be deployed consistently across multiple subscriptions and regions. Unlike ARM templates, Blueprints natively supports versioning, tracking changes, and updating deployments, which meets the company's requirement for a versioned artifact with change tracking.

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Azure Policy

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Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates

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Azure Management Groups

Question 5

A company deploys three Azure virtual machines (VMs) that host a critical line-of-business application. All three VMs are located in the same Azure region. The company notices that during planned maintenance events triggered by the Azure platform, such as host OS updates, all three VMs are updated simultaneously, causing the application to become unavailable. The company requires that during such maintenance, at least two VMs remain running to preserve application uptime. Which Azure feature should the company implement to logically group the VMs and ensure they are updated in separate batches?

Accepted Answer

Azure Availability Set. An Azure Availability Set logically groups VMs to protect against platform updates and faults. By placing VMs into an availability set, Azure assigns them to different update domains (default 5) and fault domains (default 2). During planned maintenance, only one update domain is rebooted at a time, ensuring that at most one of the three VMs is updated simultaneously, thus keeping at least two VMs running.

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Azure Availability Zone

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Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set

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Azure Site Recovery

Question 6

A company is migrating its on-premises infrastructure to Azure. Previously, the company purchased physical servers, networking equipment, and data center space every three years, paying a large sum upfront. After migration, the company expects to pay a monthly invoice based only on the virtual machines and storage it actually uses, with the ability to increase or decrease resources as needed without additional upfront costs. This change in cost structure is best described by which pair of cloud computing concepts?

Accepted Answer

Capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx). This scenario describes a shift from paying large upfront sums for hardware and data center space (CapEx) to paying a monthly invoice based on actual consumption of virtual machines and storage (OpEx). Azure's pay-as-you-go model allows resources to be scaled up or down without upfront costs, directly aligning with the CapEx-to-OpEx transition. This is a fundamental cloud concept that changes how organizations budget and manage IT expenses.

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Measured service and resource pooling

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Economies of scale and geographic distribution

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Agility and high availability

Question 7

A company has a production Azure subscription used by multiple teams. The governance team wants to enforce a rule that only virtual machines (VMs) of specific SKU sizes (e.g., Standard_D2s_v3 and Standard_D4s_v3) can be deployed. If a team attempts to deploy a VM of a different SKU size, the deployment must be blocked immediately and the user must see an error message explaining the restriction. Which Azure feature should the governance team use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Policy with the 'Deny' effect. Azure Policy with the 'Deny' effect is the correct choice because it allows the governance team to define and enforce rules that prevent the deployment of non-compliant resources, such as VMs with disallowed SKU sizes. When a policy with the 'Deny' effect is assigned, any attempt to create or update a resource that violates the policy is blocked immediately, and the user receives a clear error message explaining the restriction. This is the only Azure feature that provides proactive, resource-level enforcement with a built-in denial mechanism.

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Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with a custom role that denies the 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/write' action

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Azure Blueprints with a resource lock

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Azure resource locks at the resource group level

Question 8

A company migrates its web application to Azure App Service (PaaS) and its data to Azure SQL Database (PaaS). The company wants to understand which security responsibilities it retains after the migration. According to the shared responsibility model, which of the following responsibilities remains the responsibility of the company (customer) when using these PaaS services?

Accepted Answer

Managing user access to the application and database. In the shared responsibility model for PaaS, the cloud provider manages the underlying infrastructure, including the OS and network security groups, while the customer retains responsibility for managing access to their application and data. For Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database, this means the customer must configure authentication, authorization, and user permissions (e.g., using Microsoft Entra ID or SQL logins) to control who can access the application and database.

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Patching the operating system of the web server

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Managing network security groups for the virtual network

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Physical security of the Azure data center

Question 9

A company has deployed a production Azure SQL Database that is used by a critical line-of-business application. The database administrators need to be able to change the database schema and scaling settings. However, the operations team must ensure that no one can accidentally delete the database or its server. The company does not want to implement a complex backup strategy for this prevention; they want a simple control that can be applied at the resource level without affecting other management operations. What should the operations team configure to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

A 'CanNotDelete' resource lock on the database and the server. A 'CanNotDelete' resource lock on the database and the server prevents accidental deletion while still allowing all other management operations, including schema changes and scaling. This meets the requirement for a simple, resource-level control that does not affect read or update permissions.

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An Azure Policy definition with the 'Deny' effect assigned to the resource group containing the database

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A custom Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) role that excludes the delete action

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An Azure Blueprint that includes a policy enforcing a read-only state

Question 10

A company plans to deploy a web application on Azure Virtual Machines. The solution must remain available even if a physical datacenter in the region experiences a complete outage. The company wants to use the simplest and most cost-effective architecture that meets this requirement within a single Azure region. What should the company configure?

Accepted Answer

Deploy VMs in an Availability Zone across multiple zones.. Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across multiple zones protects against a single datacenter outage while remaining in one region, making it the simplest and most cost-effective solution for this requirement.

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Deploy VMs in an Availability Set across multiple fault domains.

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Deploy VMs in a single scale set with autoscale.

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Deploy VMs in a virtual network with a VPN gateway to a secondary region.