AZ-900 Describe Azure architecture and services Practice Test 3 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a multi-tier application on Azure. The web tier needs to scale out based on CPU usage, while the database tier requires high-performance storage for transactional data. Which combination of Azure services should they choose?

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

Accepted Answer

Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database. Azure App Service provides built-in autoscaling based on metrics like CPU usage, making it ideal for the web tier that needs to scale out. Azure SQL Database offers high-performance, low-latency storage for transactional data with features like automatic indexing and in-memory OLTP, meeting the database tier's requirements.

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Azure Functions and Azure Cosmos DB

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Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Azure Files

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Azure Kubernetes Service and Blob Storage

Question 2

A company is deploying a mission-critical application that must remain available even if a physical Azure datacenter within a region fails. The application will run on multiple virtual machines. Which Azure feature should they use to protect against this specific failure scenario?

Accepted Answer

Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. By deploying VMs across multiple zones, the application remains available even if one entire datacenter fails. This directly addresses the requirement for protection against a physical datacenter failure within a region.

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Availability Sets

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Virtual Machine Scale Sets

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Azure Load Balancer

Question 3

A company deploys a web application on Azure App Service. During a marketing campaign, they expect traffic to double. The app uses a Standard tier App Service plan. They want to ensure that the additional load is handled without performance degradation while keeping costs minimal. Which action should they take?

Accepted Answer

Scale out the App Service plan by increasing the instance count.. Scaling out (increasing instance count) for the Standard tier App Service plan allows the application to handle the doubled traffic by distributing requests across multiple instances, ensuring no performance degradation. This approach is cost-minimal because the Standard tier supports manual scale-out without requiring a tier upgrade, and you only pay for the additional instances while they are needed.

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Scale up the App Service plan to a Premium tier for more resources.

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Enable autoscale on the existing plan to let Azure handle scaling automatically.

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Deploy Azure CDN to cache static content.

Question 4

A company wants to deploy a custom Linux-based application in Azure. They need full control over the operating system, including installing custom software and configuration. Which Azure compute service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Azure Virtual Machines. Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) provide full control over the operating system, allowing you to install custom software, configure the kernel, and manage system-level settings. This is the correct choice for a custom Linux-based application that requires complete OS-level access, unlike platform-as-a-service offerings that abstract away the underlying infrastructure.

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Azure App Service

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Azure Container Instances

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Azure Functions

Question 5

A company uses Azure and wants to organize all their virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts into logical containers for management and billing purposes. Which Azure component should they use to group these resources?

Accepted Answer

Resource Group. Resource Groups are logical containers in Azure that allow you to group related resources such as virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts for unified management, monitoring, and billing. By placing resources in the same resource group, you can apply lifecycle operations (e.g., delete, tag) and cost tracking across all members. This directly matches the requirement to organize resources for management and billing purposes.

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Azure Policy

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Management Group

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Azure Subscription

Question 6

Which Azure region feature provides fault tolerance by isolating failures within a single region? It consists of physically separate datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Accepted Answer

Availability Zones. B is correct because Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. This isolation ensures that if one zone fails, the others remain operational, providing fault tolerance within the same region. Availability Zones protect applications from datacenter-level failures, not just server or rack failures.

Answer

Availability Sets

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Region Pairs

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Fault Domains

Question 7

A healthcare organization stores patient records in Azure Blob Storage. They require that data remains available even if an entire Azure datacenter fails, and they also need to ensure data is replicated within the same region for low latency. Which storage redundancy option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS). Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) synchronously replicates data across three Azure availability zones within the same region, ensuring data remains available even if an entire datacenter (one zone) fails. This meets both the availability requirement and the low-latency requirement because replication stays within the region, avoiding cross-region latency.

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Locally Redundant Storage (LRS)

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Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS)

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Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS)

Question 8

A company wants to migrate an on-premises SQL Server database to Azure. They require full administrative control over the database engine, including the ability to configure SQL Server Agent jobs and use cross-database queries. They also want to avoid patching the operating system. Which Azure service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Azure SQL Managed Instance. Azure SQL Managed Instance is the correct choice because it provides near 100% compatibility with on-premises SQL Server, including full administrative control over the database engine, support for SQL Server Agent jobs, and cross-database queries. It also offloads OS patching to Microsoft, meeting the requirement to avoid OS maintenance.

Answer

Azure SQL Database

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SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines

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Azure Database for SQL

Question 9

A company wants to run a containerized application in Azure without managing the underlying virtual machines. Which Azure service should they use?

Accepted Answer

B) Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed container orchestration service that abstracts the underlying virtual machines, allowing you to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications without having to manage the host infrastructure. AKS handles provisioning, upgrading, and patching of the cluster nodes, so you only interact with the control plane and your workloads.

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A) Azure Virtual Machines

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C) Azure App Service

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D) Azure Functions

Question 10

A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for a multi-tier application hosted in Azure. They need to ensure that if an entire Azure region becomes unavailable, the application can fail over to another region. The application uses Azure SQL Database. Which Azure feature should they use to replicate the database across regions?

Accepted Answer

B) Azure SQL Database automatic failover groups. Azure SQL Database automatic failover groups (Option B) are the correct choice because they provide automated, orchestrated failover of a group of databases across regions, ensuring the entire multi-tier application can fail over when an Azure region becomes unavailable. Unlike geo-replication, which only replicates data, failover groups manage the entire logical server and its databases, including updating the connection string endpoint to the secondary region, which is essential for application continuity.

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A) Azure SQL Database geo-replication

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C) Azure Traffic Manager

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D) Azure Site Recovery

Question 11

A company needs to store large amounts of unstructured data, such as images and videos, for a web application. They need to access data from anywhere via HTTP/HTTPS. Which Azure storage service should they use?

Accepted Answer

A) Azure Blob Storage. Azure Blob Storage is designed for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as images and videos, and provides REST-based access over HTTP/HTTPS from anywhere. It supports scalable object storage with global accessibility, making it ideal for web application content delivery.

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B) Azure File Storage

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C) Azure Queue Storage

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D) Azure Table Storage

Question 12

A company deploys virtual machines in Azure. They want to ensure that the VMs are distributed across multiple fault domains and update domains within an Azure datacenter to protect against hardware failures and maintenance. Which Azure construct should they use?

Accepted Answer

A) Availability Set. An Availability Set is the correct Azure construct because it logically groups VMs to protect against both hardware failures (via fault domains) and planned maintenance (via update domains) within a single Azure datacenter. Fault domains distribute VMs across separate racks with independent power, cooling, and network, while update domains ensure VMs in different groups are not rebooted simultaneously during Azure host updates. This directly matches the requirement to isolate VMs across multiple fault and update domains within a datacenter.

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B) Availability Zone

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C) Region Pair

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D) Resource Group

Question 13

A company deploys a multi-tier application using Azure virtual machines. The web tier VMs must be evenly distributed across two distinct data centers within an Azure region to avoid a single point of failure from an infrastructure outage. Which Azure construct should they use to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Availability zone. Availability zones are physically separate data centers within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. By deploying the web tier VMs across two distinct zones, the application avoids a single point of failure from an infrastructure outage at the data center level, meeting the requirement for high availability across distinct data centers.

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Availability set

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Proximity placement group

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Azure Load Balancer

Question 14

A company plans to run a large-scale batch processing job on Azure that runs for 10 hours every night. The job is fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. They want to minimize cost as much as possible. Which Azure virtual machine pricing option should they use?

Accepted Answer

Spot VMs. Spot VMs allow you to use unused Azure compute capacity at a significant discount (up to 90% compared to pay-as-you-go). Because the batch job is fault-tolerant and can be interrupted, it is an ideal workload for Spot VMs, which can be evicted when Azure needs the capacity back. This minimizes cost while meeting the job's requirements.

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Reserved Instances

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Pay-as-you-go

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Dedicated Hosts

Question 15

A company wants to run a containerized microservices application on Azure. The application requires automatic scaling, service discovery, and rolling updates without manual intervention. They prefer not to manage the underlying virtual machines. Which Azure compute service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed Kubernetes orchestration platform that handles automatic scaling (via Horizontal Pod Autoscaler), service discovery (via Kubernetes DNS and Services), and rolling updates (via Deployment strategies) without requiring you to manage the underlying virtual machines. AKS abstracts the control plane and node management, allowing you to focus on deploying and managing containerized microservices.

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Azure Container Instances

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Azure App Service

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Azure Functions