AZ-900 Microsoft Azure 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Azure service enables you to run big data analytics workloads using open-source frameworks like Apache Spark, Hadoop, and Hive?
- Azure HDInsight (Correct answer)
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Azure Stream Analytics
- Azure Data Factory
Correct answer: Azure HDInsight
Azure HDInsight is a fully managed cloud service that makes it easy to process massive amounts of data using popular open-source frameworks including Apache Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Kafka, and HBase.
Azure HDInsight provides managed clusters for open-source analytics frameworks: Apache Hadoop (batch processing), Apache Spark (in-memory analytics), Apache Hive (SQL-like queries), Apache Kafka (real-time streaming), and Apache HBase (NoSQL). While Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft's unified analytics service (combining SQL data warehouse plus Spark plus data integration), HDInsight specifically targets organizations that want to use open-source frameworks as-is. Azure Stream Analytics is for real-time stream processing. Azure Data Factory is for ETL/data movement pipelines.
Question 2: What does the Azure Service Trust Portal provide?
- Documentation, reports, and resources about Microsoft's security, privacy, and compliance practices for Azure services (Correct answer)
- A marketplace for purchasing third-party security solutions compatible with Azure
- A dashboard for monitoring the compliance status of your specific Azure resources
- A tool for automatically remediating security vulnerabilities in Azure virtual machines
Correct answer: Documentation, reports, and resources about Microsoft's security, privacy, and compliance practices for Azure services
The Azure Service Trust Portal is a one-stop-shop for accessing compliance documentation, audit reports, and information about Microsoft's security and privacy practices for Azure services.
The Microsoft Service Trust Portal (STP) provides access to auditor-generated reports and documents about Microsoft cloud services' compliance with various standards such as ISO 27001, SOC 1/2/3, GDPR, HIPAA, and many others. This allows customers and auditors to review Microsoft's security and compliance posture. It provides whitepapers, FAQs, and guidance on topics like data protection and privacy. This is different from Microsoft Defender for Cloud (which assesses your resources' compliance) or Azure Marketplace (which sells third-party solutions).
Question 3: What is an Azure Managed Disk?
- A block storage volume for Azure VMs where Microsoft handles storage account management, replication, and availability automatically (Correct answer)
- A cloud backup service that automatically captures snapshots of Azure virtual machines
- A managed file share service accessible via SMB protocol from multiple VMs simultaneously
- A CDN cache storage layer that reduces latency for frequently accessed VM data
Correct answer: A block storage volume for Azure VMs where Microsoft handles storage account management, replication, and availability automatically
Azure Managed Disks are block-level storage volumes managed by Azure that are used with Azure VMs. Microsoft handles the storage accounts, replication, and availability; you just create and attach disks.
Azure Managed Disks are the recommended block storage solution for Azure VMs. Before Managed Disks, you had to manually create and manage storage accounts for VM disk VHDs. With Managed Disks, Azure handles all storage account management, replication, and availability. Managed Disks come in four types based on performance and cost: Ultra Disk, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. They support availability sets and availability zones for high availability. Managed Disks are not shared file storage (that is Azure Files) or backup services.
Question 4: Which Azure AI service provides the ability to analyze images and extract information such as objects, text, and scene descriptions?
- Azure Computer Vision (Correct answer)
- Azure Face API
- Azure Form Recognizer
- Azure Custom Vision
Correct answer: Azure Computer Vision
Azure Computer Vision is a broad AI service that analyzes images to identify objects, detect text (OCR), recognize celebrities and landmarks, generate captions, and more.
Azure Computer Vision (part of Azure AI Services, formerly Cognitive Services) provides multiple image analysis capabilities including: optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text, object detection and classification, scene description, face detection (not recognition), celebrity and landmark identification, and image tagging. Azure Face API specifically handles face recognition and emotion detection. Azure Form Recognizer (now Document Intelligence) extracts structured data from forms and documents. Azure Custom Vision lets you train custom image classification models for your specific use case.
Question 5: What is the purpose of Azure Cost Management and Billing?
- To provide tools for monitoring Azure spending, analyzing cost trends, and optimizing cloud expenditure across subscriptions and resource groups (Correct answer)
- To generate and send invoices to customers who use Azure services on a subscription basis
- To automatically shut down idle Azure resources to prevent unnecessary charges
- To negotiate enterprise pricing agreements between organizations and Microsoft
Correct answer: To provide tools for monitoring Azure spending, analyzing cost trends, and optimizing cloud expenditure across subscriptions and resource groups
Azure Cost Management and Billing provides visibility into Azure spending with tools to analyze costs, create budgets, set alerts, and identify optimization opportunities to reduce cloud expenditure.
Azure Cost Management and Billing helps you understand your Azure spending through cost analysis (drill down by service, resource, tag, or time period), budgets and alerts (notify when thresholds are reached), Azure Advisor cost recommendations (right-size VMs, delete idle resources), and reserved instance recommendations. While it does provide billing details and invoice access, its primary purpose for AZ-900 is cost visibility and optimization. It does not automatically shut down resources (that would be Azure Automation) or negotiate pricing (that is through enterprise agreements).
Question 6: What is serverless computing in Azure?
- A cloud execution model where the cloud provider manages all server infrastructure, and you only write and deploy code or define workflows (Correct answer)
- A computing model that uses only virtual machines with no physical servers in the datacenter
- A type of computing where code runs directly on bare-metal hardware without virtualization
- A subscription tier that provides unlimited compute resources without server capacity limits
Correct answer: A cloud execution model where the cloud provider manages all server infrastructure, and you only write and deploy code or define workflows
Serverless computing means developers focus only on code or workflows while the cloud provider handles all infrastructure concerns — provisioning, scaling, patching, and availability — automatically.
Serverless computing does not mean no servers — it means the servers are abstracted away from the developer. Azure serverless services include Azure Functions (run code on demand, event-triggered), Azure Logic Apps (automate workflows with connectors), and Azure Event Grid (event routing). The key characteristics are: no infrastructure management (the cloud handles it), automatic scaling (scales from zero to massive loads), and consumption-based billing (pay per execution, not per always-on compute). This contrasts with IaaS/PaaS where you provision specific compute capacity.
AZ-900 Microsoft Azure 2
Which Azure service enables you to run big data analytics workloads using open-source frameworks like Apache Spark, Hadoop, and Hive?