Advanced Azure architecture design, governance, and migration concepts tested on the Azure Solutions Architect Expert exam.
39 cards · basic cards · AI-written, checked twice. Edit anything.
- What are the five pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework?
- Cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security
- What is Azure Advisor and what does it assess?
- A service that analyzes resource configurations and recommends improvements on reliability, security, performance, cost, and operational excellence
- How do Management Groups relate to Azure Subscriptions?
- Management Groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions; multiple subscriptions can be organized under one Management Group for unified governance
- What is the purpose of Azure Policy?
- To create, assign, and manage policies that enforce rules and effects on your resources, ensuring compliance and governance standards
- What is the difference between Azure RBAC and Azure Policy?
- RBAC controls who can access resources and what actions they can perform; Policy enforces compliance rules on resources themselves regardless of who accesses them
- What are the three types of roles in Azure RBAC?
- Owner, Contributor, and Reader; Owner has full control, Contributor can create and modify but not grant access, Reader has read-only access
- What is an Azure Blueprint and when would you use it?
- A package of artifacts (policies, role assignments, templates) that can be repeatably deployed to create compliant environments quickly
- What is the difference between a Service Principal and a Managed Identity?
- A Service Principal is an identity for applications that you manage; a Managed Identity is provided and managed by Azure automatically
- What do Private Endpoints enable?
- Secure private connectivity to Azure services over a private network, removing the need to access services over the public internet
- What is a Service Endpoint and how does it differ from a Private Endpoint?
- A Service Endpoint enables connectivity from a virtual network subnet to an Azure service using the Azure backbone; a Private Endpoint creates a private network interface
- When should you use an Availability Set versus Availability Zones?
- Use Availability Sets for protection within a single data center; use Availability Zones for protection across geographically separated data centers
- What is a Virtual Machine Scale Set and what problem does it solve?
- A feature that automatically scales VMs based on demand, solving the problem of manual VM management and auto-scaling requirements
- What is the relationship between an App Service Plan and App Service instances?
- An App Service Plan defines the compute resources (pricing tier, scale, region) that App Service instances run on
- What are the three key differences between Azure SQL Database and SQL Server on Virtual Machines?
- SQL Database is Platform-as-a-Service with automated maintenance and scaling; SQL Server on VMs gives you full control but requires manual management of infrastructure
- When would you choose Azure Cosmos DB over Azure SQL Database?
- Choose Cosmos DB for globally distributed, NoSQL workloads with millisecond latency requirements and flexible schema; SQL Database for relational data with strong consistency