Azure Fundamentals is one of the core study topics in our Technology catalog. This page gathers the essentials: what the topic covers, the key concepts and
terminology, worked examples and exam-style questions — everything also available as 207 companion flashcards for spaced-repetition practice.
Main questions this page answers:
- What Azure term describes a geographic area containing one or more datacenters, such as 'East US'?
- What is the purpose of an Azure Availability Zone?
- What Azure service provides serverless computing where you run code in response to events without managing servers?
- Which Azure compute service offers managed Kubernetes clusters?
- What does Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provide?
- Which Azure storage service is best for storing unstructured data like images, videos, and backups?
- What is the maximum size of a single Azure Blob (Block Blob)?
- Which Azure storage redundancy option replicates data to a secondary region hundreds of miles away from the primary?
What Azure term describes a geographic area containing one or more datacenters, such as 'East US'?
Region. A region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined geographic boundary and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.
What is an Azure Service Level Agreement (SLA) typically expressed as?
An SLA is a formal agreement that defines the performance guarantees Microsoft commits to for an Azure service, usually expressed as a percentage of uptime (e.g., 99.9%).
How many availability zones does a typical Azure region contain?
Most Azure regions contain three availability zones, though the exact count varies. Each zone is one or more physically separate datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking within the same region.
What is the maximum size of an Azure managed disk?
Azure managed disks currently support up to 64 TiB for Ultra Disks and Premium SSD v2, with higher sizes available on specific disk types. Standard SSDs and older Premium SSDs have lower per-disk limits.
What Azure construct is a logical container used to group related resources for management and billing purposes?
An Azure resource group. It holds resources like VMs, storage accounts, and databases that share a common lifecycle, permissions, and policies, and it can contain resources deployed across multiple Azure regions.
What is the difference between Hot and Cool access tiers for Azure Blob Storage?
Hot tier has higher storage cost but lower access cost, optimized for frequent read/write. Cool tier has lower storage cost but higher access and longer retrieval latency (minutes), for data accessed less than once per month and stored at least 30 days.
What is Azure Blueprints (deprecated) and what replaced it?
Blueprints were used to orchestrate deployment of resource groups, policies, RBAC, and ARM templates as a repeatable package. Microsoft has replaced it with landing zone accelerators and recommends using Azure Deployments (Deployment Stacks) with ARM templates and policies.
What Azure networking component allows inbound and outbound traffic rules for network traffic at the subnet level?
Azure Network Security Groups (NSGs) contain security rules that filter network traffic flowing in and out of network interfaces and subnets. Rules use five-tuple parameters (source, source port, destination, destination port, protocol) and can be configured with default or custom priorities.
What is Azure Container Instances (ACI) and when is it most useful?
Azure Container Instances is a serverless container service offering fast, isolated containers without managing underlying VMs. It's ideal for short-lived or burst workloads, event-driven processing, simple deployments, and scenarios where you want container execution without the orchestration overhead of Kubernetes clusters.
What is the purpose of Azure Application Gateway?
Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer with OSI Layer 7 features including URL-based routing, SSL termination, cookie-based session affinity, and a Web Application Firewall (WAF).