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🇬🇧 Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900) · flashcards
Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900) Core Azure Services and Workloads Flashcards
50 question-and-answer cards covering Core Azure Services and Workloads as it is examined in Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900). 24 of them are printed below, taken from across the deck — no signup, no paywall on the preview.
24 sample cards from the Core Azure Services and Workloads deck
Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.
What is Azure ExpressRoute and what bandwidths and peering types does it support?
A private, dedicated connection to Azure via a connectivity provider, bypassing the public internet. Supports bandwidths up to $100\,\text{Gbps}$ and peering types: Private peering (to VNets) and Microsoft peering (to Microsoft 365/public services).
What is Azure DNS?
A hosting service for DNS domains that provides name resolution using Microsoft Azure's global infrastructure. It lets you manage public DNS records for your domain (e.g. mapping names to IPs) but does not register domain names.
What is an Azure Private DNS Zone used for?
It provides name resolution for resources within and between VNets without exposing records to the public internet, allowing custom private domain names instead of Azure-provided names.
List common DNS record types and what each maps.
A (name → IPv4 address), AAAA (name → IPv6 address), CNAME (alias → another domain name), MX (mail exchange server), TXT (text data, e.g. verification), NS (nameserver), and SOA (start of authority/zone info).
What are the four types of Azure Storage Account services (data services)?
Blob storage (objects/unstructured data), File storage (managed SMB/NFS file shares), Queue storage (messaging between app components), and Table storage (NoSQL key-value structured data). Azure Disks are also storage account-related for VM disks.
What are the three Azure Blob access tiers and their use cases?
Hot (frequently accessed data, highest storage cost, lowest access cost), Cool (infrequently accessed, stored at least 30 days), and Archive (rarely accessed, lowest storage cost but high retrieval cost/latency, stored at least 180 days).
What are the three types of blobs in Azure Blob Storage?
Block blobs (text/binary files, documents, media — most common), Append blobs (optimised for append operations like logging), and Page blobs (random read/write, used for VHDs / Azure VM disks).
What is Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) and how many copies does it keep?
LRS keeps 3 synchronous copies of your data within a single physical location (datacentre) in the primary region. It provides at least 99.999999999% (eleven nines) durability over a year but no protection against datacentre-level failure.
What is Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS)?
ZRS replicates data synchronously across three Azure Availability Zones in the primary region, protecting against the failure of a single zone/datacentre while keeping data within one region.
Compare GRS and GZRS storage redundancy.
GRS (Geo-Redundant Storage) = LRS in the primary region plus asynchronous copy to a secondary region (3 copies in each via LRS). GZRS (Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage) = ZRS in the primary region (across 3 zones) plus async copy to a secondary region. GZRS gives both zone and regional protection.
What does the 'RA' prefix mean in RA-GRS / RA-GZRS?
RA = Read-Access. It allows read-only access to the data in the secondary region even when the primary region is available, instead of only after a failover.
How many copies of data does GRS maintain in total and across how many regions?
GRS maintains 6 copies of the data in total — 3 in the primary region and 3 in the secondary region — providing at least 16 nines (99.99999999999999%) durability over a year.
What is AzCopy?
A command-line utility for copying/migrating data to and from Azure Blob and File storage, and between storage accounts. It is optimised for high-performance, scriptable bulk data transfer.
What is Azure Storage Explorer?
A standalone GUI application (Windows/macOS/Linux) for visually managing and transferring data in Azure storage accounts — blobs, files, queues, and tables — without using the portal or command line.
What is the Azure Data Box family and when is it used for migration?
A set of physical offline transfer devices (Data Box Disk, Data Box, Data Box Heavy) shipped to your site to move very large volumes of data (terabytes to petabytes) when network transfer would be too slow or costly. Data is copied locally then physically shipped back to Azure.
What is Azure Database Migration Service (DMS)?
A fully managed service that enables seamless migrations of multiple database sources to Azure data platforms (e.g. SQL Server to Azure SQL) with minimal downtime, supporting both offline and online migrations.
What is Azure SQL Database and which deployment options does it offer?
A fully managed PaaS relational database engine based on SQL Server. Deployment options: Single Database (isolated, own resources), Elastic Pool (databases sharing a resource pool), and it is distinct from Azure SQL Managed Instance (near-100% SQL Server compatibility).
What is Azure Cosmos DB?
A globally distributed, multi-model, fully managed NoSQL (and relational) database offering single-digit-millisecond latency, elastic scaling, and turnkey global distribution. Supports multiple APIs: NoSQL (Core/SQL), MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin (graph), and Table.
What are the managed open-source relational database services in Azure?
Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and Azure Database for MariaDB — fully managed PaaS offerings handling patching, backups, and high availability for these open-source engines.
What is Azure Synapse Analytics?
An integrated analytics service that combines enterprise data warehousing, big data analytics (Apache Spark), and data integration pipelines in one unified workspace for large-scale data analysis and reporting.
What is Azure Databricks?
A fully managed, Apache Spark-based analytics and machine learning platform (a first-party Azure/Databricks partnership) used for big data processing, data engineering, and collaborative data science.
What is Azure Data Factory?
A cloud-based, serverless data integration (ETL/ELT) service for creating, scheduling, and orchestrating data pipelines that move and transform data between many sources at scale.
What is the difference between Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Central?
IoT Hub is a PaaS message broker enabling secure bidirectional communication between IoT devices and the cloud (you build the solution). IoT Central is a higher-level managed SaaS application platform with dashboards and templates for quickly building IoT solutions with minimal coding.
What is Azure Cognitive Services / Azure AI Services?
A set of prebuilt, cloud-based AI APIs and models that let developers add capabilities — Vision, Speech, Language, Decision, and OpenAI — to apps without machine-learning expertise. Examples include Computer Vision, Translator, and the Speech service. Azure Machine Learning, by contrast, is used to build, train, and deploy custom ML models.
What this deck covers
The Core Azure Services and Workloads deck follows the Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900) Core Azure Services and Workloads syllabus — 4 chapters and 14 topics — so questions land on material that is genuinely examinable rather than trivia around it. That works out to roughly 12.5 cards per chapter.
Answers are written to be recallable, not just readable — averaging about 226 characters, which is long enough to carry the reasoning and short enough to say out loud.
A deck like this earns its keep on the second and third pass. Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then use the cards to find the specific facts that have not stuck.
Core Azure Services and Workloads flashcards FAQ
How many Core Azure Services and Workloads flashcards are in this Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900) deck?
50 cards. This page previews 24 of them, sampled evenly across the deck so you can judge the difficulty before installing anything.
Are these Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900) flashcards free?
Yes. The preview here is free to read with no signup, and the full 50-card deck is free inside the Examius app.
What do the Core Azure Services and Workloads cards cover?
They follow the Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g. AZ-104, AZ-900) Core Azure Services and Workloads syllabus — 4 chapters and 14 topics — so the questions track what is actually examinable.
How should I use these flashcards?
Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then drill the deck. Examius schedules each card with spaced repetition, so cards you keep missing come back sooner and ones you know drift further apart.