Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Practice Test (AZ-900)

Azure Cost Management + Billing provides tools to analyze, manage, and optimize the costs of Azure resources. It offers detailed insights into where resources are being consumed and identifies underutilized resources, allowing for cost optimization. Azure Advisor, while it does suggest cost-saving recommendations, is more general purpose and does not provide the deep financial insights characteristic of Azure Cost Management + Billing. Azure Monitor is mainly for performance and health monitoring and does not focus on cost management.

Azure File Storage supports the SMB protocol and allows multiple virtual machines to share the same files with both read and write access. It can be mounted concurrently by cloud-based or on-premises deployments of Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it ideal for scenarios that require shared file storage accessible via standard file system APIs.

Azure Blob Storage is optimized for storing unstructured data such as images and documents accessed over HTTP/HTTPS and does not support the SMB protocol.

Azure Disk Storage provides block-level storage volumes for use with Azure VMs but is not designed for sharing across multiple VMs.

Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL datastore used for storing structured, non-relational data and does not support file sharing or the SMB protocol.

Microsoft Purview provides a unified data governance solution that allows organizations to discover, classify, and manage data across on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS sources. It helps create a holistic map of data assets, enabling better data governance and compliance. Other services like Azure Policy focus on enforcing organizational standards and assessing compliance for resources, Azure Monitor is used for collecting and analyzing telemetry data to maximize performance, and Azure Security Center enhances security posture and provides threat protection, but they do not offer unified data governance capabilities.

Cloud services provide on-demand self-service, enabling organizations to quickly deploy and run applications without the need to purchase or maintain physical hardware. This reduces setup time and operational costs, allowing the company to focus on development and innovation. While increased security measures, global network infrastructure, and automated backups are advantages of cloud computing, they do not directly address the need to avoid hardware investment and management.

Azure Application Insights is a part of Azure Monitor. It provides powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app. It's aimed at developers to help improve application performance and usability. Azure Service Health provides insights into the health of Azure services, which is more about the health of the Azure platform rather than specific applications. Azure Advisor offers personalized recommendations to optimize Azure deployments. Azure PowerShell is a set of cmdlets for managing Azure resources directly from the PowerShell command line.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. It allows the company to have full control over the operating system, installed software, server configurations, and network settings. IaaS is suitable when you need to manage and control the underlying infrastructure but want to avoid the costs and complexities of purchasing and managing physical servers. In contrast, Platform as a Service (PaaS) abstracts away the underlying infrastructure and limits control over the operating system, while Software as a Service (SaaS) provides fully managed applications without any control over the infrastructure or platform.

The Contributor role grants full access to manage all Azure resources but does not allow the user to grant access to others.

The Owner role includes the ability to grant access to others, which is unnecessary in this scenario.

The Reader role only permits viewing resources.

The User Access Administrator role is intended for managing access permissions rather than resource management.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the appropriate model because it delivers fully managed applications over the internet. In this case, an email service provided as a SaaS solution allows the company to use the service without worrying about installing software, managing hardware, or handling updates—the cloud provider takes care of everything. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) would require the company to manage the operating systems and applications themselves, and Platform as a Service (PaaS) would require them to develop or deploy their own applications, which is more work than desired in this scenario.

In the consumption-based model, which is also known as pay-as-you-go, clients are charged based on the actual usage of cloud resources. This means there are no long-term contracts and clients only pay for the services that they consume, such as storage used or compute hours. This contrasts with subscription models that charge a flat recurring fee, or tiered pricing models which set prices at different levels based on resource usage brackets.

Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL key-value store designed for semi-structured data. It is optimized for storing large amounts of data that can be queried quickly by partition and row keys, making it ideal for scenarios where you need fast lookups and large-scale storage for semi-structured data.

Azure Blob Storage is used primarily for unstructured data like images, videos, backups, and other binary or text data. While it provides excellent storage for large files, it is not optimized for key-based querying of semi-structured data.

Azure Queue Storage is a messaging service for queuing and managing asynchronous messages between application components. It is not designed for storing or querying large datasets.

Azure File Storage provides fully managed file shares that can be accessed over the SMB protocol. It is best suited for shared files and is not optimized for storing and querying semi-structured data.

Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) allows you to assign specific permissions to users, groups, and services in Azure at a granular level. By using Azure RBAC, the company can assign the developers roles that grant them access to manage networking resources while restricting access to other resource types. This ensures that developers have the permissions they need without exposing other resources.

Azure Policy is used to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance, not to assign resource-level permissions to users.

Network Security Groups (NSGs) are used to filter network traffic to and from Azure resources and do not manage user permissions.

Azure Resource Locks prevent resources from being modified or deleted but do not control user access.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is designed to help secure Azure resources by providing continuous security assessments, offering actionable recommendations to improve security posture, and protecting against threats with advanced threat detection.

Azure Policy helps enforce organizational standards and assess compliance but does not offer threat protection or continuous security assessments.

Azure Firewall provides network security by filtering traffic but lacks the comprehensive security assessments and recommendations.

Azure Monitor collects and analyzes telemetry data for monitoring performance and health but isn't focused on security enhancements or threat protection.

In the shared responsibility model, the customer is always responsible for the security of their own data, information, and identity management. The cloud provider, Microsoft Azure, is responsible for the security of the cloud itself, which includes the physical datacenters, network, and hosts. This division of responsibility varies depending on the service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), but accountability for data security always remains with the customer.

Azure Policy allows you to enforce governance rules over your resources to ensure they comply with your organization's standards and requirements. It evaluates resources for non-compliance with assigned policies and can enforce compliance by blocking or modifying resource properties.

Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) manages user access to resources but does not enforce compliance standards.

Azure Advisor provides recommendations to improve your Azure resources but does not enforce rules.

Azure Monitor collects and analyzes telemetry data from your Azure resources but does not enforce governance rules.

Azure Resource Manager provides infrastructure as code capabilities by allowing you to define and deploy resources using declarative JSON templates known as ARM templates. This facilitates consistent and repeatable deployments in Azure. Azure Advisor offers personalized recommendations to optimize your resources, Azure Policy helps enforce organizational standards and assess compliance, and Azure Monitor provides full observability into your applications and infrastructure.