Azure Misc Flashcards
What is Azure Marketplace?
Azure Marketplace = Microsoft online store for VMs, SaaS, AI, security, and dev tools on Azure.
What is the purpose of Azure IoT Hub?
Azure IoT Hub = A cloud service for connecting and managing IoT devices securely.
What is Azure IoT Central?
Azure IoT Central = an extension of Azure IoT Hub, providing a customizable dashboard (GUI) for IoT solutions.
What is Azure Sphere?
Azure Sphere = security platform for building and managing secure IoT devices.
It combines hardware, software, and cloud services to ensure end-to-end security for IoT.
What is a Data Sink?
A data sink/data receiver + storer is the endpoint in a data pipeline where data is collected, stored, or processed. E.g. databases, cloud storage, logging systems, and backup servers.
What are Azure Data Services?
Azure Data Services are cloud-based solutions for storing, managing, and analyzing data. Key data services include:
Storage: Blob Storage, File Storage, Table Storage
Databases: Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL
Analytics: Synapse Analytics, Data Factory, Data Lake
AI & ML: Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services
These services help businesses handle data efficiently in the cloud.
What does ETL stand for in the movement, processing and storage of data?
Extract Transform Load (ETL)
A process used for moving and processing data:
Extract: Retrieve data from various sources (e.g., databases, APIs).
Transform: Clean, filter, and format the data.
Load: Store the transformed data in a destination (e.g., database, data warehouse).
What is Azure Data Factory (ADF)?
Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a cloud-based ETL (Extraction>Transform>Load) service that helps move, transform, and manage/combine data across various sources and destinations.
ADF combines data from various different sources to make it accessible for analysis and reporting.
What is Azure HDInsight?
Azure HDInsight = powerful tool for transforming large amounts of data during processing.
Azure HDInsight is a fully managed cloud service for big data analytics and transformation. It supports open-source frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, Hive, and Kafka for processing and analyzing large datasets.
What is Synapse Analytics?
Azure Synapse Analytics = cloud service that organises, combines, stores and analyses large data sets.
What are Azure AI Services?
Azure AI Services are cloud-based tools that help build and deploy AI applications. Key services include:
Azure Machine Learning: Build, train, and deploy ML models.
Cognitive Services: Pre-built APIs for tasks like computer vision, speech recognition, and text analytics.
Bot Services: Create intelligent bots.
Azure OpenAI: Access to OpenAI’s powerful models (e.g., GPT-3).
Form Recognizer: Extract data from documents.
Personalizer: Build personalized recommendations.
What is Machine Learning (ML)?
Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows systems to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed.
Supervised Learning: Model is trained on labeled data to make predictions.
Unsupervised Learning: Model finds patterns in unlabeled data.
Reinforcement Learning: Model learns by interacting with the environment and receiving feedback.
How are Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning (AML) different?
Azure Cognitive Services provides pre-built AI models (e.g., speech, vision, language), while Azure Machine Learning (AML) allows you to build and train custom models.
What is Azure Cognitive Services (ACS)?
Azure Cognitive Services (ACS) is a set of pre-built APIs that provide AI capabilities for applications, such as:
-Computer Vision: Image and video analysis (e.g., object detection, OCR).
-Speech: Convert speech to text and vice versa.
-Text Analytics: Sentiment analysis, language detection, and key phrase extraction.
-Language Understanding (LUIS): Build natural language processing models.
-Translator: Real-time text translation between multiple languages.
What is Azure Bot Services?
Azure Bot Services is a cloud service for building, deploying, and managing intelligent chatbots. It integrates with Azure Cognitive Services for natural language understanding and can be used across multiple platforms (e.g., websites, Microsoft Teams, Slack).
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the combination of software development and IT operations (IT support, maintenance, management in an org.) to speed up software delivery/production through automation, collaboration, and continuous integration (CI/CD).
What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is a cloud-based platform offering a set of tools to implement DevOps practices. It helps teams manage the entire software development lifecycle using tools like:
Azure Boards: Project tracking and work management.
Azure Repos: Source code management (Git).
Azure Pipelines: Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD).
Azure Test Plans: Test management and automation.
What is the practice of Continuous Integration (CI)?
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of automatically integrating code changes into a shared codebase multiple times a day and testing it automatically to catch errors early.
What is the practice of Continuous Delivery (CD)?
Continuous Delivery (CD) is the practice of automatically preparing code for deployment, making it ready to be released to users at any time.
What is an Azure SKU?
Azure SKUs are predefined feature combinations with a set price. Each SKU determines:
✅ Performance (CPU, RAM, speed)
✅ Capacity (Storage, scaling limits)
✅ Redundancy (Backups, availability zones)
✅ Cost (Higher features = higher price)
Think of them like subscription tiers—you pick the one that fits your needs and budget.
What are Azure Reservations?
Azure Reservations = prepaid Azure resources for 1 or 3 years to get big discounts compared to pay-as-you-go pricing.
What is the Azure Pricing Calculator?
Azure Pricing Calculator = a free tool that helps estimate the cost of Azure services based on selected SKUs, usage, and reservation options.
What is the Azure TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator?
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator is a savings calculator of moving your network to the Azure cloud. It estimates cost savings when migrating from on-premises to Azure, factoring in (making assumptions about) hardware, software, and operational costs.
What is Azure Advisor?
Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that provides best practice recommendations to optimize cost, performance, security, and reliability in your Azure environment.
What is Azure Monitor used for?
Azure Monitor is a cloud-based service used to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data (automatically collected data ) from Azure and on-premises environments. It monitors performance, logs, network traffic, and applications, providing insights and alerts.
What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud used for?
Microsoft Defender for Cloud = toolset of cloud security features to help users keep resources/networks secure and compliant.
It provides security posture (overall security status) management, real-time threat protection, and advanced workload protection for Azure and hybrid environments. It includes security recommendations, threat detection, and compliance tracking with GDPR, etc, to ensure resources are secure and compliant.
What is Microsoft Sentinel?
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud bouncer/SIEM tool that helps monitor, detect and respond to security threats. It collects data from Azure and on-premises, diagnoses suspicious activity using AI, and automates responses/actions to keep your environment safe.
What is Power Automate?
Power Automate= enables users to create automated workflows between various apps and services to automate repetitive tasks without needing to write code, such as, sending emails or auto-approving documents on a trigger/event.
What is Azure Automation?
Azure Automation is a service that helps you automate azure resource management, like starting/stopping VMs or applying updates, without doing them manually.
It’s all about reducing manual work for cloud management and improving consistency and efficiency in your Azure environment.
🟢 Azure Monitor
📊 Purpose: Observability & monitoring
📂 Data Type: Logs, metrics, alerts
🎯 Use Case: Performance tracking, alerts
🔍 Processing: Query & analyze logs
🔗 Integration: Works with Azure Alerts, Defender, Log Analytics
🛠️ Example: Alert when a VM’s CPU is too high
📊 Purpose: Observability & monitoring
📂 Data Type: Logs, metrics, alerts
🎯 Use Case: Performance tracking, alerts
🔍 Processing: Query & analyze logs
🔗 Integration: Works with Azure Alerts, Defender, Log Analytics
🛠️ Example: Alert when a VM’s CPU is too high
🔵 Azure Event Hubs
🚀 Purpose: Big data streaming & ingestion
📡 Data Type: High-volume event data
🎯 Use Case: Telemetry, log forwarding
⚡ Processing: Real-time event processing
🔗 Integration: Connects to SIEMs, Kafka, analytics tools
🛠️ Example: Ingest IoT sensor data for real-time analysis
Event Hub = gathers and forwards large volumes of data to Azure Functions or a SIEM.
Where in Azure do you configure Conditional Access policies?
In the Microsoft Entra/Azure AD admin center under Protect & Secure > Conditional Access.
What is Azure Policy used for?
Azure Policy is used to define and enforce rules on Azure resources, ensuring they comply with organizational standards and automatically correcting non-compliance where possible.
What is an Azure Initiative?
Azure Initiative = group of Azure Policy definitions combined to simplify the management and enforcement of policies across resources, ensuring compliance with regulations or internal standards.
What is data lineage?
Data lineage is the tracking and visualization of the flow of data from its origin to its final destination, showing how it is processed, transformed, and used across systems. It ensures data quality, compliance, and transparency.
Data lineage can be thought of as a log or map of the history of data, tracking its movement and transformation across different systems, databases, or applications. It provides a traceable record of how data was created, modified, and used, helping to ensure data quality, security, and compliance.
What is Azure Purview?
Azure Purview is a data governance/management service that helps organizations discover, track, catalog, classify, and manage their data across various environments, ensuring compliance, security, and data lineage.
What is the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC)?
Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) is a website that provides detailed guidance and documents from Microsoft on data privacy, security, and compliance.
What are Azure Sovereign Regions?
Azure Sovereign Regions are special isolated Azure cloud regions for governments and organizations with strict security and compliance needs, such as Azure Government (US) and Azure China (21Vianet).
