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AZ-900 sample questions with answers

10 free practice questions for the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. Try each one, then open the answer to see why the right option wins and every other option loses.

Question 1Describe cloud concepts

Litware spends a steady amount on compute each hour, but the mix keeps changing between virtual machines, Azure App Service, and Azure Container Instances, and between regions. It wants a commitment discount that follows that changing mix. What should it buy?

  1. A.

    Azure Spot Virtual Machines

  2. B.

    An Azure savings plan for compute

  3. C.

    A reservation for each virtual machine size

  4. D.

    Azure Dev/Test pricing

Show answer

Answer: B

A savings plan commits to an hourly spend rather than a specific resource, so the discount follows a changing mix of compute services and regions.

  • A. Spot buys evictable surplus capacity and gives no commitment discount; nothing in the scenario says the workload can be interrupted.
  • B. A savings plan commits to hourly spend, and the discount applies automatically across eligible compute services and regions.
  • C. Reservations lock the discount to a specific resource, size, and region, so a shifting mix leaves the commitment underused.
  • D. Dev/Test pricing is a subscription offer with reduced rates for non-production workloads, not a commitment across production compute.
Question 2Describe cloud concepts

Woodgrove Bank runs its core platform on dedicated hardware it owns for regulatory reasons. Every January its reporting workload triples for three weeks. It must absorb that peak without buying more hardware. Which approach fits?

  1. A.

    Hybrid cloud, bursting into public capacity

  2. B.

    A private cloud sized for the January peak

  3. C.

    Public cloud for the entire platform

  4. D.

    Multicloud across two public providers

Show answer

Answer: A

Hybrid cloud lets the regulated core stay on owned hardware while the January surge is met with temporary public cloud capacity.

  • A. Hybrid keeps the regulated core on owned hardware and surges into rented public capacity only for the three-week peak.
  • B. Sizing the private cloud for the peak means buying hardware that sits idle for most of the year, which the scenario forbids.
  • C. Moving the whole platform to the public cloud breaks the regulatory requirement to keep the core on hardware the bank owns.
  • D. Multicloud adds a second public provider but still leaves the regulated core and the seasonal peak unaddressed.
Question 3Describe cloud concepts

Litware bought a three-year reservation covering eight virtual machines of a given size in West Europe. Two months later the platform team redeployed the same eight machines into North Europe, and the reservation discount stopped appearing on the invoice. What explains this?

  1. A.

    A reservation must be reapplied by an administrator after each redeployment

  2. B.

    A reservation discounts only usage matching the attributes it was bought for, including region

  3. C.

    A reservation discounts only machines created after the reservation was purchased

  4. D.

    A reservation lapses when the machines it covers are deallocated

Show answer

Answer: B

Reservation discounts apply automatically to usage that matches the attributes selected at purchase, including the region, so moving the machines to a different region left no matching usage for the discount to apply to.

  • A. Reservation discounts are applied automatically by the billing system and are never bound to individual resources by an administrator.
  • B. The discount attaches to usage matching the purchased attributes, and region is one of those attributes, so usage in North Europe no longer qualified.
  • C. A reservation discounts any matching usage regardless of when the resource was created; the creation date plays no part in whether the discount applies.
  • D. Deallocating or deleting a covered machine does not end a reservation; the commitment continues and the discount simply finds no matching usage to apply to.
Question 4Describe cloud concepts

A team has deployed its application to Azure App Service and is happy with the platform maintaining the runtime. It now needs to install a third-party agent that requires administrative access to the underlying operating system. Which service type must the team move to?

  1. A.

    Platform as a service

  2. B.

    Software as a service

  3. C.

    A serverless function app

  4. D.

    Infrastructure as a service

Show answer

Answer: D

Administrative access to the operating system exists only in infrastructure as a service, so a requirement for it forces a move down the stack.

  • A. PaaS is what the team already has, and it is precisely the model that withholds administrative access to the operating system.
  • B. SaaS hides the whole stack including the application, so it offers even less operating system access than PaaS.
  • C. A serverless function app abstracts the operating system further still, so no agent can be installed into it.
  • D. Only IaaS gives the customer the operating system to administer, which is what installing the agent requires.
Question 5Describe cloud concepts

Adventure Works runs its order API on one large virtual machine. Every peak trading day the team moves it to the largest size its family offers, and it still saturates for around two hours. No larger size exists in that family. What should the team change?

  1. A.

    Run several instances of the API behind a load balancer and add instances at peak

  2. B.

    Buy a three-year reservation for the largest size to guarantee capacity

  3. C.

    Redeploy the virtual machine into an availability zone in the same region

  4. D.

    Move to the largest size at peak and back down afterwards

Show answer

Answer: A

The team has reached the ceiling of vertical scaling, so the only remaining direction is horizontal: add instances rather than a bigger instance.

  • A. Horizontal scaling adds instances rather than capability, so it has no size ceiling, can follow demand automatically, and removes the single instance as a throughput bottleneck.
  • B. A reservation is a billing discount applied to matching usage; it does not affect the runtime state of a resource and adds no capacity whatsoever.
  • C. An availability zone protects against a datacenter-level failure but does nothing for throughput; one saturated instance in a zone is still one saturated instance.
  • D. This is the vertical scaling the team is already doing, and the scenario states that no larger size exists, so the ceiling has already been reached.
Question 6Describe cloud concepts

Lamna Healthcare's new analytics platform places every component, including its backup copies, inside one Azure region. The programme's non-functional requirements state that the platform must keep serving users if an entire region is lost. Which pillar of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework does this design fail?

  1. A.

    Reliability

  2. B.

    Performance Efficiency

  3. C.

    Cost Optimization

  4. D.

    Operational Excellence

Show answer

Answer: A

Reliability is the ability of a system to recover from failures and keep functioning, and a design confined to one region cannot survive the loss of that region, so it is the reliability pillar the design fails.

  • A. Reliability is the ability to recover from failures and continue to function, and confining both the service and its backups to one region makes recovery from a regional loss impossible.
  • B. Performance Efficiency is about scaling to meet demand efficiently, and nothing in the scenario suggests the platform cannot handle its load.
  • C. Cost Optimization concerns getting value from spend; a single-region design is generally the cheaper option, so it is not the pillar this design breaches.
  • D. Operational Excellence covers the practices that keep an application running in production, and the scenario describes a placement decision rather than an operational process failure.
Question 7Describe cloud concepts

Contoso tightened its internal security baseline, and 340 virtual machines that were deployed before the change no longer meet it. The security team has no capacity to visit each machine individually. Which two benefits of operating in the cloud address this situation directly? (Choose TWO.)

Choose 2.

  1. A.

    Deployed resources can be updated at scale when a standard changes

  2. B.

    Auditing identifies non-compliant machines and suggests a mitigation

  3. C.

    Buying a reservation brings machine configuration under central control

  4. D.

    The provider updates customer workloads to match each internal baseline

  5. E.

    Resources deployed before a standard changes are exempt until rebuilt

Show answer

Answer: A, B

The cloud lets an organisation update deployed resources at scale as standards change, and cloud-based auditing identifies which resources have fallen out of compliance and what to do about each.

  • A. Microsoft states that as standards change you can update resources at scale, which is precisely the capability 340 non-compliant machines require.
  • B. Cloud-based auditing flags resources that are out of compliance with the baseline and provides mitigation strategies, giving the team the list and the remedy.
  • C. A reservation is a billing discount applied to matching usage and has no effect on the runtime state or configuration of a virtual machine.
  • D. Under the shared responsibility model the customer owns its own configuration and baseline; the provider patches the layers it operates, not the customer's internal standard.
  • E. Existing resources are not exempt from a changed standard; surfacing exactly those resources is what compliance auditing exists to do.
Question 8Describe cloud concepts

An engineering team wants Microsoft to own the hardware, the internet connectivity, and the physical security, while the team itself keeps the operating system, the network configuration, and the database software it installs. Which cloud service type is being described?

  1. A.

    Software as a service

  2. B.

    Platform as a service

  3. C.

    A private cloud deployment

  4. D.

    Infrastructure as a service

Show answer

Answer: D

In IaaS the provider maintains the hardware, connectivity, and physical security while the customer owns the operating system, networking, and installed software.

  • A. SaaS delivers a finished application, so the customer would install nothing and configure no operating system.
  • B. In PaaS the provider also maintains the operating system and middleware, so the customer would not be patching a database engine.
  • C. Private cloud is a deployment model, not a service type, and it leaves the hardware and physical security with the organization.
  • D. IaaS gives the provider the hardware, connectivity, and physical security while the customer owns the OS, networking, and installed software.
Question 9Describe cloud concepts

A risk assessment asks why a public cloud platform is inherently more resilient than the same workload running in one company datacenter, even when both run identical software. Which characteristic explains it?

  1. A.

    Virtualization on every physical host

  2. B.

    A management portal reachable from any browser

  3. C.

    Per-second billing of every resource

  4. D.

    Decentralized design across global regions

Show answer

Answer: D

The cloud's decentralized design across many regions is what lets a workload survive a catastrophic event in any one of them.

  • A. Virtualization improves hardware efficiency but does nothing to protect a workload from losing its only datacenter.
  • B. A browser-based portal is management in the cloud, which concerns how you operate resources rather than their resilience.
  • C. Per-second billing is a pricing characteristic and has no bearing on whether a workload survives a failure.
  • D. Decentralized design across many global regions is what Microsoft names as the source of cloud reliability and resilience.
Question 10Describe cloud concepts

An adoption board asks what the cloud adds to the organization's governance position, beyond what its existing change-control process already provides. Which two statements are accurate? (Choose TWO.)

Choose 2.

  1. A.

    Standards can never be changed afterwards

  2. B.

    Compliance obligations no longer apply

  3. C.

    The provider becomes responsible for your data

  4. D.

    Auditing flags resources outside the baseline

  5. E.

    Templates keep new deployments to a standard

Show answer

Answer: D, E

Cloud governance gives you templates that hold new deployments to a standard and auditing that flags resources which fall outside it.

  • A. Standards are expected to change, and updating resources at scale when they do is presented as a benefit, not an impossibility.
  • B. Regulatory obligations follow the organization and its data; the cloud changes how you satisfy them, not whether you must.
  • C. Data is always the customer's responsibility, in every cloud service model, so it never transfers to the provider.
  • D. Cloud-based auditing flags resources that have fallen out of compliance with your baseline and suggests mitigation.
  • E. Templates ensure deployed resources meet your technical standards and regulatory requirements every time they are used.

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