AZ-900 - Azure Fundamentals (Module 1)

Which cloud service model requires the user to maintain the operating system and what's installed on the infrastructure?

• IaaS

  (Infrastructure as a Service)

• PaaS

  (Platform as a Service)

• SaaS

  (Software as a Service)

Answer explanation

IaaS requires the user to manage the operating system and what's installed.

PaaS and SaaS are incorrect because in PaaS and SaaS models - the provider takes on more responsibility for managing the OS and platforms.

True or false: In a public cloud model, the infrastructure is private to an individual or company.

• True

• False

Answer explanation

False - Public clouds are not private; infrastructure/hardware is shared.

Public clouds are shared, not private.

Elasticity in cloud computing refers to:

• The ability of cloud providers to monitor the health of VMs

• The ability to automatically scale resources based on usage patterns

• Replicating environments across multiple data centers

Answer explanation

Elasticity enables automatic scaling of resources based on demand.

The ability to monitor health of VMs does not mean automated scaling or Elasticity.

Replicating environments across multiple data centers and or regions is for "Disaster Recovery".

What term describes planning for events like natural disasters by switching to resources in an alternate data center?

• Business Continuity Planning

• Disaster Tolerance

• Disaster Recovery

Answer explanation

Disaster Recovery solutions have alternate facilities during downtime events.

Business Continuity Planning is incorrect as it only involves planning and not actual Disaster Recovery capabilities.

Disaster Tolerance is incorrect as it's not an actual DR concept within Azure.

In a SaaS cloud model, who manages everything in the environment?

• The User

• The Cloud Provider

• It is a Shared Responsibility

Answer explanation

The cloud provider manages everything in SaaS models.

Users do not manage anything in SaaS models nor is the responsibility shared.

What benefit of the cloud helps avoid downtime from power and network outages?

• Elasticity

• Disaster Recovery

• Reliability

Answer explanation

Reliability refers to the Cloud's ability to avoid downtime from power and various infrastructure outages are one of its main benefits. Cloud providers operate robust and redundant data center facilities to mitigate the impacts from outages. They also provide flexible compute capabilities so that workloads can be shifted from affected resources to available resources. This ability to avoid downtime due to underlying infrastructure issues helps highlight a major advantage over on-premises environments, which typically have single points of failure.

What Cloud model involves a mixture of both Public and Private cloud resources?

• IaaS model

• Hybrid Cloud model

• PaaS model

Answer explanation

The Hybrid Cloud model specifically involves a mixture or blend of both on-premises (Private Cloud) and off-premises (Public Cloud) environments and resources. This allows businesses to extend their existing private infrastructure into public cloud resources for various use cases around scalability, availability and more.

The IaaS and PaaS options describe cloud service models, not the overarching deployment methodologies. IaaS defines infrastructure while PaaS defines platform. Neither inherently means a combo of private and public resources which is exclusive to the hybrid model.

In the Shared Responsibility model, who has more control and responsibility in an IaaS cloud?

• The Cloud provider

• Third Party networks

• The User

Answer explanation

The shared responsibility model defines which party handles various cloud environment tasks. With an IaaS model, the cloud provider maintains only the underlying physical infrastructure, while the user/customer assumes responsibility for configuration, security patches, data, and more at the OS level and above. Customers must manage these central components without relying on the provider to do these activities in IaaS deployments. Since the user handles more of the stack, they also have more control and responsibility than the cloud provider within an IaaS cloud service. The 3rd party network choice is not relevant, so the user bearing the most responsibility is correct.

Horizontal scalability refers to scaling by adding more of what resource type?

• Data Centers

• Storage

• Virtual Machines (VMs)

Answer explanation

Horizontal scalability refers to scaling out an application or workload by adding additional instances to spread demand and traffic. In cloud platforms, this is achieved by provisioning and deploying extra virtual machines that run the application components. As more VMs are added, performance improves. Therefore, virtual machines are the resource that allows for horizontal scaling capabilities.

Data centers relate to geographic regions which enable other capabilities like redundancy. And increased storage facilitates vertical scaling, not horizontal scaling specifically.

What PaaS capability automates much of the application deployment process?

• Built-in compliance features

• Automated deployment options

• Virtual Machine maintenance

Answer explanation

A major benefit of PaaS platforms is providing automated deployment options to streamline and simplify the process of releasing new application versions. Features like auto versioning, blue-green deployments, rollback functionality, CI/CD pipelines, and more enable fully automated application deployments. This alleviates many tasks for the IT teams.

While built-in compliance features and virtual machine maintenance may be useful PaaS capabilities, they specifically do not directly automate or simplify deploying application code to production environments which is done through robust DevOps mechanisms.