Azure Interview Questions and Answers (25) - Page 1

Azure platform provides several types of Services such as (PaaS) platform as a services and (IaaS) infrastructure as a services, through which you can develop software and deployed on hosted in Microsoft datacenters.

(IaaS) - Its use for creating virtual networking on Cloud. We can setup virtual networking through this services. Availability to create virtual machines and establish connection.

(Paas) - Its provide to develop software and deployed on Azure IIS.

Web role: it's a kind of container, which contain web application code and easily deployed on azure IIS.
Advantages: we don't need to create virtual directory, and not worry about deployment server.

Worker role: it's kind of background services, same as Windows application services.
It's generally use to test business logic continursly and perform some actions.

Ex: send notification message periodically and so on.

Service Bus: / Service bus provides a communication channel between sender and receiver.
Way of communication is depend on types of service bus entities.

Service Bus entity types: Queues, topics-Subscription, relay,Event hub.

Queues communication Process: : A sender sends a message to a service bus queue, and a receiver picks up that message asynchronously.

Sender ------> Queue ----------->Receiver

Topics-Subscription: Topic is also similar in many ways to a queue. Senders submit messages to a topic and topic enable each receiving message to create its own subscription by using a filter.
Each subscriber will see only the messages that match that.


------->Subscription A--------> Receiver A
Sender --------> [ Topic (Filters,ABC) ] ------->Subscription B--------> Receiver A
------->Subscription C--------> Receiver A

Relays: Service Bus relay provides synchronous communication, means two-way communication between applications. Sender and receiver both can send and receive the messages.


Sender <------> Relay <----------->Receiver

Event Hub:: When we track or process millions of events per second, means when application process huge amount of data and top of that perform some analytics to produce useful result using some connected devices and applications.

DocumentDB is a NoSQL document-oriented database and records saves in Key-value pairs.
It's same as the other NoSQL document-oriented databases such as MongoDB.

Features:

a) It's provide rich query API and "SELECT" queries to fetch data.
b) Any type of data such as attachments, binary, can be saved.
c) Quickly find specific records (documents) using "Keys".

What is Session management in .Net application?

Session state is used to store and retrieve values for a user across ASP.NET pages in a web application.

ASP.NET server provides four different session modes:

(a) InProc
(b) StateServer
(c) SQLServer
(d) Custom Provider


Azure, ASP.NET server provides the following new options to manage the state:

(a) Azure TableStorage
(b) SQL Azure
(c) Windows Azure Cache
(d) Azure cache Service

Windows Azure Cache? (OR) what is Redis cache in Azure App Service?

Windows Azure Caching is most preferable option. Redis Cache service is the fastest and simple to use. ASP.NET web app uses session state, then we can achieve this through an external session state provider.

Redis Caching gives good .NET API that enables developers to easily interact with the Caching Service to enable access to saved session.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.
It provides both PaaS and IaaS services and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

In simple words, Web roles are web applications hosted in IIS while Worker roles are processes that can do some background work like automatically compress uploaded images or send push notification if something changes in the database etc.

This service provides the configuration file for the cloud service and it contains settings for the roles. This file contains the information for the number of instances for the service. Whenever we want to increase the number of instances of the role this configuration is required for changing the instances.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<ServiceConfiguration serviceName="AzureCloudService3" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="4" osVersion="*" schemaVersion="2015-04.2.6">

  <Role name="WebRole1">

    <Instances count="1" />

    <ConfigurationSettings>

      <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />

    </ConfigurationSettings>

  </Role>

</ServiceConfiguration>

This service provides the configuration file for the local services. Whenever we want changes in the number of instances for the role in the local services, this file is required for changing the instance.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<ServiceConfiguration serviceName="AzureCloudService3" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="4" osVersion="*" schemaVersion="2015-04.2.6">

  <Role name="WebRole1">

    <Instances count="1" />

    <ConfigurationSettings>

      <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />

    </ConfigurationSettings>

  </Role>

</ServiceConfiguration>

This is definition file for the cloud service. This file contains setting like bindings, settings etc.It also contains the information about the EndPoints and the default port number.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<ServiceDefinition name="AzureCloudService3" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition" schemaVersion="2015-04.2.6">

  <WebRole name="WebRole1" vmsize="Small">

    <Sites>

      <Site name="Web">

        <Bindings>

          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />

        </Bindings>

      </Site>

    </Sites>

    <ConfigurationSettings>

      <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" />

    </ConfigurationSettings>

    <Endpoints>

      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="80" />

    </Endpoints>

  </WebRole>

</ServiceDefinition>

It is a data storage service for storing structured NOSQL data in the cloud. As mentioned that Azure table storage is useful for storing NOSQL data, hencefoth we can figue out that it can store a table which does not have any foreign keys or any other kind of relation. The Azure tables are highly scalable and ideal for handling large amount of data. We can store, query for large amount of data. The relational database can be stored using SQL Data Services, which is a separate service altogether. The service has three main parts

Tables
Entities
Properties

Let's understand the same with a simple example. Let's say Employee is an entity whose properties can be EmployeeID, EmployeeName, Age, Gender, Address, Blood Group etc.

And the Azure table will be a collction of Employee entity.

PartitionKey : This property stores string values which identifies the partition that an entity belongs to. Partitions are integral to the scalability of the table. Entities with the same PartitionKey values are stored in the same partition.

RowKey : It's the primary key within the partition. This property stores string values which uniquely identifies Entities within a partition. A combination of PartitionKey and RowKey form the composite unique key identifier for an entity.

Blobs are ideally suited for unstructured binary and text data.One of the main benefits is that, once stored, the corresponding information can be accessed from anywhere using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols.The items in Blob storage can range up to 100 TB.

Blob storage is ideally suited for the following:

- Images that can be directly viewed in a browser
- Document storage
- Secure backups as part of a disaster recovery plan
- Streaming video and audio

Windows Azure has two distinct categories of blobs:

a)Block Blob : have a 200 gigabyte (GB) size limit
b)Page blob : can store anything up to 1 TB.

In Windows Azure Table Storage, the term "Table" are ideally suited for storing structured but non relational data.Unlike relational databases, the entities inside of a table do not need to have the same structure or schema.

Common uses of the Table service include:

- Storing T Bs of structured data capable of serving web scale applications
- Storing datasets that don't require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures and can be denormalized for fast access
- Quickly querying data using a clustered index
- Accessing data using the OData protocol and LINQ queries with WCF Data Service .NET Libraries

Queues are essentially the Windows Azure equivalents of an MSMQ. A queue is a First In, First Out (FIFO) data structure that can store almost anything that can be serialized. Queues are ideally suited for situations in which delivery of a message or processing of information absolutely must happen. It’s similarly well suited to operations characterized by long-running processes and asynchronous jobs. There is a specific WCF Binding (MSMQ) to use for queues that is the primary way reliable messaging is facilitated with Windows Azure.

NOTE: This is objective type question, Please click question title for correct answer.

Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that orchestrates and automates the movement and transformation of data. In order for this to happen, we need to follow the below steps

a)Create a Data Factory in Azure Portal from click Intelligence + Analytics followed by Data Factory.

b)Create an Azure SQL linked service 

c)Create dataset 

d)Create a pipeline activity 

e)Monitor the pipeline

NOTE: This is objective type question, Please click question title for correct answer.

NOTE: This is objective type question, Please click question title for correct answer.

It is a logical grouping of Activities where the Activities define the logical action on the datasets like whether to use Copy Activity to copy data from a source to destination or Stored Procedure Activity to invoke a stored procedure for inserting records etc. Data Factory supports two types of activities a) data movement activities b)data transformation activities