AZ-900 Describe Azure architecture and services Practice Question
A developer wants to send notifications to mobile devices from a backend service. Which Azure service is designed for this purpose?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Service Bus or Event Grid as notification services because they involve message delivery, but neither is designed for push notifications to mobile devices—they are for server-to-server or server-to-service messaging.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Azure Notification Hubs
Azure Notification Hubs is a scalable push notification engine that enables sending notifications to any platform (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) from any backend. It abstracts the complexities of platform-specific notification services (e.g., APNs, FCM, WNS) and provides features like template-based broadcasts, device tagging, and telemetry, making it the correct choice for sending mobile push notifications from a backend service.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Service Bus
Why it's wrong here
Azure Service Bus is an enterprise brokered messaging service that enables asynchronous communication between applications using queues and topics, with features like sessions, transactions, and publish-subscribe patterns. It is designed for backend-to-backend messaging, decoupling distributed systems, and does not integrate with mobile device token registries or platform-specific push notification services (APNs, FCM, WNS). Therefore, while Service Bus can relay messages within an architecture, it cannot send push notifications directly to mobile devices.
- ✗
Azure Event Grid
Why it's wrong here
Azure Event Grid is a serverless event-routing service that connects event sources to subscribers in near-real-time, using webhooks or other handlers to react to state changes in Azure resources, such as a blob being created or a VM deallocated. It operates on HTTP and event schemas, but it has no mechanism for registering mobile devices or sending platform-specific push notifications. Event Grid facilitates automation and event-driven architecture between services, not direct user-facing notifications on mobile devices.
- ✓
Azure Notification Hubs
Why this is correct
Azure Notification Hubs is a fully managed push notification service engineered specifically for sending high-volume mobile push notifications to iOS, Android, Windows, and other platforms from a single backend. It maintains device registrations, normalizes platform-specific token formats, and supports broadcasts, templated messages, and tag-based targeting to reach specific user segments. Its purpose-built capabilities, such as automatic retry and telemetry for push delivery, make it the definitive Azure service for mobile device notification campaigns.
- ✗
Azure Queue Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Queue Storage provides a simple, REST-based message queue in Azure Storage, allowing application components to exchange messages asynchronously for decoupling and scaling, typically for processing background tasks. Messages are stored in a storage account, and there is no notion of a device registration or integration with mobile push services like APNs or Firebase Cloud Messaging. It is internal plumbing between services, not a way to notify users on their mobile devices.
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