Azure Interview Q&A
Q: When would you choose this platform?
Choose based on: existing vendor relationships, team expertise, compliance requirements, pricing for your specific workload mix, and regional availability.
Q: What are the core shared services across clouds?
Compute (EC2/VM/GCE), Object Storage (S3/Blob/GCS), Managed K8s (EKS/AKS/GKE), IAM (IAM/AAD/IAM), Serverless (Lambda/Functions/Cloud Functions), Database (RDS/Azure SQL/Cloud SQL).
Q: How do you manage costs in this cloud?
Use reserved/committed use for baseline workloads (40-60% savings). Spot/preemptible for batch/fault-tolerant. Right-size instances (use monitoring data). Storage tiering. Auto-scaling to match actual demand.
Q: What is the Azure Resource Manager (ARM)?
Azure's deployment and management service. All Azure resources are deployed through ARM. ARM templates (JSON) or Bicep (DSL) define infrastructure as code. ARM provides: RBAC, tagging, resource groups, deployment history, what-if (like terraform plan). REST API is the foundation; Portal/CLI/SDK all call ARM.
Q: Explain Azure AD (now Entra ID) vs Azure RBAC.
Entra ID: identity provider — manages users, groups, service principals, managed identities, OAuth/OIDC tokens. Azure RBAC: authorization — controls who can do what to Azure resources (Reader, Contributor, Owner). They work together: Entra ID authenticates, RBAC authorizes. Similar to AWS IAM (users + policies combined in one service).
Q: What is a Managed Identity and why use it?
System-assigned or user-assigned identity for Azure resources (VMs, App Services, Functions). Eliminates need to store credentials in code or config. Azure automatically manages credential rotation. Service authenticates to other Azure services (Key Vault, Storage, SQL) using the managed identity token. Best practice for app authentication in Azure.
Q: AKS vs ACI vs App Service — when to use each?
AKS: full Kubernetes — complex microservices, stateful apps, need fine-grained control. ACI: serverless containers — short-lived tasks, burstable workloads, no cluster management overhead. App Service: PaaS for web apps — simple web apps and APIs, built-in scaling, no container expertise needed. AKS Virtual Nodes use ACI for burst capacity.
Q: How does Azure Policy differ from Azure RBAC?
RBAC: controls who can perform actions (create VM, read storage). Policy: controls what configuration is allowed (VMs must be in specific regions, tags required, SKUs allowed). Policy evaluates resource properties at deployment and audit time. Combined: RBAC prevents unauthorised actions; Policy prevents non-compliant configurations.
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