150 practice questions and 100 flashcards covering the full AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam objectives.
The Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Fundamentals certification is the entry point into the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and one of the most achievable credentials for anyone in the South African IT industry. No technical background is required. Tour practice set covers all three AZ-900 domains: Cloud Concepts (25-30%), Azure Architecture and Services (35-40%), and Azure Management and Governance (30-35%).
Every question is written to reflect the conceptual style of the actual AZ-900 exam. Use the flashcard set alongside tour quiz to build vocabulary of Azure service names and their purposes before sitting the exam.
Microsoft Azure AZ-900 — Azure Fundamentals. Covers cloud computing concepts, Azure architecture, core services (compute, networking, storage, databases), identity, security, compliance, pricing, and support. No technical background required — tour is the entry-level Azure certification.
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Q1/150
What does IaaS stand for?
Explanation: IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service. You manage OS, middleware, apps. Provider manages hardware, virtualisation, networking.
Q2/150
What does PaaS stand for?
Explanation: PaaS: provider manages infrastructure + OS + middleware. You manage only your application and data.
Q3/150
What does SaaS stand for?
Explanation: SaaS: complete application managed by provider. You just use it. Examples: Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Gmail.
Explanation: Pay-as-you-go: billed for actual consumption. Most flexible but most expensive per-unit. No commitment required.
Q72/150
What is Azure Spot Pricing?
Explanation: Spot VMs: up to 90% savings on unused capacity. Risk: Azure can evict with 30-second notice when capacity needed. Fault-tolerant workloads only.
Explanation: ARM templates: Infrastructure as Code for Azure. Declare desired state in JSON. Repeatable, idempotent deployments.
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Q76/150
What is Bicep?
Explanation: Bicep: transpiles to ARM templates. Cleaner syntax. Strongly typed. Microsoft's preferred IaC for Azure.
Q77/150
What is Azure DevOps?
Explanation: Azure DevOps: complete DevOps platform. Plan (Boards), code (Repos), build/release (Pipelines), test, and distribute packages (Artifacts).
Q78/150
What is GitHub Actions with Azure?
Explanation: GitHub Actions: define workflows in YAML. Trigger on push/PR/schedule. Deploy to Azure via Azure actions in marketplace.
Q79/150
What is the Azure support plan options?
Explanation: Support plans: Basic (free docs/forums), Developer ($29/mo), Standard ($100/mo), Pro Direct ($1000/mo), Premier (enterprise).
Q80/150
What is Azure Service Health?
Explanation: Service Health: personalised alerts for outages, planned maintenance, health advisories affecting YOUR specific services and regions.
Q81/150
What is the Azure Status page?
Explanation: Status page: status.azure.com. Global view of all Azure service health. Less detailed than personalised Service Health.
Q82/150
What is Microsoft Purview?
Explanation: Microsoft Purview: data governance, risk and compliance. Discover sensitive data, classify it, track lineage, manage compliance.
Q83/150
What is the principle of least privilege?
Explanation: Least privilege: only the access needed, nothing more. Fundamental security principle. Reduce blast radius if account compromised.
Q84/150
What is Zero Trust security?
Explanation: Zero Trust: 'Never trust, always verify.' Verify explicitly (identity, location, device), use least privilege, assume breach.
Q85/150
What is defence in depth?
Explanation: Defence in depth: physical → network → perimeter → application → data. Each layer provides independent protection.
Q86/150
What is data sovereignty?
Explanation: Data sovereignty: data stored in a country is subject to that country's laws. Azure regions help comply by keeping data in chosen geography.
Q87/150
What is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?
Explanation: GDPR: EU regulation. Right to be forgotten, data portability, breach notification within 72 hours. Heavy fines for non-compliance.
Q88/150
What is Azure Compliance Manager?
Explanation: Compliance Manager: pre-built assessments for standards (ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR). Score your compliance posture. Actionable recommendations.
Q89/150
What is consumption-based pricing?
Explanation: Consumption-based: flexible, no waste. Pay for VMs per hour, storage per GB, functions per execution. Most common cloud model.
Q90/150
What is the benefit of economies of scale in cloud?
Explanation: Economies of scale: Azure buys hardware in massive quantities → lower costs → passed to customers as cheaper per-unit pricing.
Explanation: Queue Storage: holds millions of messages. Up to 64KB per message. Enables decoupling of application components.
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Q101/150
What is Azure Table Storage?
Explanation: Table Storage: semi-structured data. Schema-less. Fast querying by partition key and row key. Cheaper than Cosmos DB for simple scenarios.
Q102/150
What is the purpose of subnets in a VNet?
Explanation: Subnets: logical segmentation of VNet. Put web tier, app tier, data tier in separate subnets. Apply NSGs and route tables per subnet.
Q103/150
What is Azure Peering?
Explanation: VNet Peering: low-latency, high-bandwidth connection between VNets. Global peering across regions. No gateway, no public internet.
Q104/150
What is an Azure Resource Lock?
Explanation: Resource locks: CanNotDelete (can read/modify, not delete) or ReadOnly (can only read). Override requires removing lock first.
Q105/150
What is the difference between CanNotDelete and ReadOnly lock?
Explanation: CanNotDelete: prevents deletion, allows modification. ReadOnly: prevents modification AND deletion. More restrictive.
Q106/150
What is Azure Cost Management budget alert?
Explanation: Budget alert: set budget amount (e.g., $500/month), get email when spending hits 90%, 100%, etc. Doesn't stop spending — just alerts.
Q107/150
What are Azure spending limits?
Explanation: Spending limits: only on Azure free trial and some MSDN subscriptions. Pay-as-you-go has NO spending limit — you're always charged.
Q108/150
What is the benefit of Azure geographic distribution?
Explanation: Geographic distribution: 60+ regions worldwide. Deploy near users = lower latency. Data residency = compliance. Multiple regions = DR.
Q109/150
What is the Azure portal?
Explanation: Azure portal: browser-based UI. Create, configure, monitor resources. Build dashboards. Available on desktop and mobile.
Explanation: Privacy Statement: global policy for how Microsoft handles personal data. Covers all Microsoft products and services.
Q115/150
What is the Online Services Terms (OST)?
Explanation: OST (now Microsoft Product Terms): defines terms for commercial licensing of Microsoft online services.
Q116/150
What is Azure Blueprints vs ARM Templates?
Explanation: ARM templates: deploy resources. Blueprints: orchestrate compliant environment setup including policies, roles, and templates in one package.
Q117/150
What is the SLA for Azure Virtual Machines with Availability Zones?
Explanation: VMs across 2+ Availability Zones: 99.99% SLA. Single VM with Premium Storage: 99.9%. Multi-region: even higher.
Q118/150
What is Azure Site Recovery?
Explanation: Azure Site Recovery: replicate VMs and workloads. Failover to secondary region in minutes. Test failover without impact on production.
Q119/150
What is Azure Backup?
Explanation: Azure Backup: scheduled backups, retention policies, geo-redundant storage of backups. Protects VMs, SQL, SAP HANA, files, AKS.
Q120/150
What is the difference between Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery?
Explanation: Backup: restore specific data/files after accidental deletion or corruption. ASR: keep entire workloads running by failing over to another region.
Q121/150
What is Azure managed identity?
Explanation: Managed identity: Azure handles credential rotation. Service (VM, App Service) authenticates to other services without credentials in code.
Q122/150
What is an Azure service principal?
Explanation: Service principal: non-human identity. Application registers with Azure AD, gets client ID and secret/certificate to authenticate.
Q123/150
What is a software-defined datacentre?
Explanation: Software-defined datacentre: virtualise all resources (compute, storage, networking). Azure is built on tour principle. Enables cloud agility.
Q124/150
What is green cloud computing?
Explanation: Green cloud: Azure runs on 100% renewable energy (committed). Shared infrastructure = better utilisation = less total energy vs on-prem.
Q125/150
What is metered billing in Azure?
Explanation: Metered billing: granular consumption-based charges. VM billed per second of runtime. Storage per GB per month. Functions per million executions.
Q126/150
What is Azure Cognitive Search?
Explanation: Azure Cognitive Search: full-text search with AI enrichment (OCR, entity extraction, translation). Build search experiences for applications.
Q127/150
What is Azure Form Recognizer?
Explanation: Form Recognizer (now Document Intelligence): trained models extract structured data from invoices, receipts, ID cards, forms.
Q128/150
What is Azure Bot Service?
Explanation: Azure Bot Service: build bots with Bot Framework. Deploy to Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, web. Integrate with Cognitive Services.
Q129/150
What is Power BI integration with Azure?
Explanation: Power BI: connects to Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Synapse Analytics, Blob Storage. Create dashboards and reports from Azure data.
Explanation: Synapse: unlimited analytics. Query data where it lives (SQL, Spark, Data Lake). Integrate with Power BI, Azure ML. Serverless or dedicated.
Q137/150
What is Azure Data Factory?
Explanation: Data Factory: build data pipelines. Connect to 90+ sources. Transform data. Schedule and monitor pipeline runs.
Q138/150
What is Azure Stream Analytics?
Explanation: Stream Analytics: real-time event processing. Analyse data in motion. Filter, aggregate, join streaming data. Output to storage, dashboards, alerts.
Q139/150
What is the Azure free tier of App Service?
Explanation: App Service Free tier: F1 SKU. 60 CPU minutes/day, 1 GB storage, no custom domain, no SLA. Fine for learning and development.
Q140/150
What is Azure's commitment on environmental sustainability?
Explanation: Microsoft: carbon negative 2030, historical carbon negative by 2050, water positive 2030, zero waste 2030. Azure runs on renewable energy.
Q141/150
What is an Azure Landing Zone?
Explanation: Landing Zone: foundation for enterprise Azure adoption. Includes management groups, policies, networking, security baseline. Built on Cloud Adoption Framework.
Q142/150
What is the Azure free account credit?
Explanation: Azure free account: $200 credit for first 30 days. Then 12 months of popular free services. 55+ always-free services thereafter.
Q143/150
What is Azure Cognitive Services Language service?
Explanation: Language service: text analytics, question answering, conversational language understanding. Pre-built and customisable NLP models.
Q144/150
What is Microsoft Entra External ID?
Explanation: Entra External ID (formerly Azure AD B2C/B2B): manage identities for customers and business partners accessing your apps.
Q145/150
What is Azure Communication Services?
Explanation: Azure Communication Services: embed calling, video, chat, SMS into your apps via SDKs. Powers Microsoft Teams infrastructure.
Q146/150
What is the Azure landing zone accelerator?
Explanation: Landing zone accelerator: reference implementation deploying management groups, policies, networking, and security baseline automatically.
Q147/150
What is Azure Lighthouse?
Explanation: Azure Lighthouse: MSPs get delegated access to customer tenants. Manage many customers from one control plane. Built on RBAC.
Q148/150
What is the Azure Hybrid Connection?
Explanation: Hybrid Connections: App Service feature. Connect to on-prem TCP endpoints. No inbound firewall rules needed. Relay based.
Q149/150
What is Azure Static Web Apps?
Explanation: Static Web Apps: ideal for Angular, React, Vue, Gatsby. Free tier available. Built-in CI/CD, custom domains, auth providers.
Q150/150
What is Azure Spring Apps?
Explanation: Azure Spring Apps: fully managed platform for Spring Boot microservices. Auto-scaling, service discovery, config management included.
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform, offering over 200 products and services including compute, storage, networking, AI, databases, and DevOps. Azure is the second-largest cloud provider after AWS and is widely used by enterprises due to its deep integration with Microsoft products like Office 365 and Windows Server.
The AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam covers six areas: cloud concepts (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, shared responsibility), core Azure services (compute, storage, networking), Azure pricing and cost management, core solutions and management tools, general security features, and Azure governance, privacy, and compliance.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) gives you virtualised compute, storage, and networking — you manage the OS upward. PaaS (Platform as a Service) provides a platform to build and deploy apps — the provider manages the OS and middleware. SaaS (Software as a Service) delivers complete applications via browser — you only manage your data.
The Shared Responsibility Model defines what the cloud provider (Microsoft) and the customer each manage. Microsoft is always responsible for physical infrastructure. Customer is always responsible for their data and access management. Responsibility for OS, networking, and identity shifts depending on whether you use IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.
High availability means a system continues operating with minimal downtime despite failures. Azure provides high availability through: Availability Zones (physically separate data centres within a region), Availability Sets (spreading VMs across fault domains), and load balancers. Azure's SLA guarantees 99.9% to 99.99% uptime for most services.
Azure Resource Manager is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a unified way to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure account. ARM templates let you define infrastructure as code (IaC), enabling repeatable deployments. Resource Groups are logical containers for related resources.
Azure offers: Pay-as-you-go (pay for what you use, no commitment), Reserved Instances (1 or 3 year commitment, up to 72% savings), Spot Pricing (unused capacity at deep discount, can be interrupted), and Azure Hybrid Benefit (use existing Windows Server/SQL Server licences on Azure).
TCO analysis compares the cost of running workloads on-premises versus in the cloud. On-premises TCO includes: hardware, power, cooling, physical space, IT staff, maintenance, and security. Cloud TCO: usage-based costs but no capital expenditure. Azure's TCO Calculator helps organisations estimate cloud savings.