Accenture Microsoft Azure Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Accenture hiring for Microsoft Azure roles
Accenture is a global professional services company offering strategy, consulting, technology, operations and digital services. India hosts a large share of its workforce, delivering software engineering, testing, cloud, data and AI projects for clients worldwide. It hires freshers and experienced professionals in India for associate software engineer, test engineer, data analyst and analytics consultant roles.
For Microsoft Azure roles, this Accenture practice set focuses most on Azure Fundamentals (6), DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (6), Azure Networking (4), Identity and Security (4). It has 6 easy, 21 medium, 3 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Consulting
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland
Main India offices
Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Gurugram
Accenture Microsoft Azure interview process
Online assessment (cognitive + technical MCQs)
Coding assessment
Communication assessment
Technical and HR interview
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
Explain the 5 Rs (or 6 Rs) of cloud migration in an Azure context.
Rehost moves VMs as-is using Azure Migrate. Refactor makes small changes, such as moving a web app to App Service. Rearchitect changes the design, for example splitting into microservices on AKS. Rebuild rewrites as cloud-native. Replace swaps the app for SaaS. Some lists add Retire or Retain. Azure Migrate assessments help choose per workload based on dependencies, cost and readiness.
02
What are triggers and bindings in Azure Functions?
A trigger is what starts a function, and each function has exactly one: HTTP, Timer, Blob, Queue, Service Bus, Event Grid, Event Hubs or Cosmos DB change feed. Bindings declaratively connect inputs and outputs, for example reading a blob and writing to a queue without writing SDK code. They reduce boilerplate, but for complex error handling or batching you may still use the SDK directly.
Peering connects two VNets over the Microsoft backbone with low latency, either in the same region or globally. Traffic stays private and is billed per GB. Peering is not transitive: if A peers with B and B peers with C, A cannot reach C. To route through a hub, use a network virtual appliance or Azure Firewall with user-defined routes, or use Azure Virtual WAN.
04
What is the difference between an app registration and a service principal?
An app registration is the global definition of an application in its home tenant, with client ID, redirect URIs, API permissions and credentials. A service principal is the local instance of that app in a tenant, used for sign-in and role assignments. One multi-tenant app registration can have service principals in many tenants. Managed identities are special service principals whose credentials Azure manages.
05
A client wants to move a SQL Server database that uses SQL Agent jobs and cross-database queries. Which Azure SQL option fits, and what are the alternatives?
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed single database or elastic pool, best for new cloud apps. SQL Managed Instance offers near 100% SQL Server compatibility including SQL Agent, cross-database queries and CLR, in a VNet, ideal for lift-and-shift. SQL Server on a VM gives full OS and instance control for unsupported features but you handle patching, HA and backups yourself, although the SQL IaaS extension helps.
06
Your VMs run 24x7, but their sizes and regions change every few months. Would you buy reservations or a savings plan?
Reservations give a big discount, up to about 72% versus pay-as-you-go, when you commit to a specific VM family, region and term of one or three years. Savings plans commit to a fixed hourly spend for one or three years and apply flexibly across VM sizes, regions, App Service and Functions Premium. Use reservations for very stable workloads and savings plans when your sizes or regions change.
07
What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and what does Azure manage for you?
AKS is managed Kubernetes. Azure runs the control plane, including the API server and etcd, and handles upgrades and its availability. You manage node pools, which are VM scale sets, plus workloads, networking choices and add-ons. AKS integrates with Entra ID for cluster login, Azure CNI for pod networking, ACR for images, Key Vault via CSI driver and Azure Monitor Container Insights for logs and metrics.
Azure Backup protects data by taking scheduled backups of VMs, SQL and SAP HANA in VMs, Azure Files, blobs, disks and on-premises servers into Recovery Services or Backup vaults, with retention policies, soft delete and immutability. Azure Site Recovery replicates whole VMs continuously to another region or from on-premises to Azure for disaster recovery, with recovery plans for orchestrated failover. Backup is for restoring data; Site Recovery is for business continuity.
09
How do you enable diagnostic settings at scale for all resources?
Use Azure Policy with deployIfNotExists definitions, such as the built-in initiatives for enabling resource logs to a Log Analytics workspace by category group. Assign them at the management group, create a remediation task for existing resources and let new resources be configured automatically. This avoids teams forgetting to enable logs, which is common when resources are created outside the pipeline.
Incremental mode, the default, adds or updates resources in the template and leaves others untouched. Complete mode deletes resources in the resource group that are not in the template, which is risky. Deployments can target resource group, subscription, management group or tenant scope; for example, policies and resource groups are created at subscription scope. Deployment stacks now offer safer managed cleanup than complete mode.
Export a similar built-in role as JSON, keep only needed Actions and DataActions, set AssignableScopes and create it:
az role definition list --name 'Virtual Machine Contributor' > vm-op.json
# edit: Name 'VM Operator', Actions:
# Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/read
# Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/start/action
# Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/restart/action
# Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/deallocate/action
az role definition create --role-definition vm-op.json
12
Tell me about a time you pushed back on a request that broke security rules.
Situation: a project manager asked me to give a vendor Owner access to production to speed up a fix. Task: unblock the vendor without breaking policy. Action: I explained the risk, then created a time-bound PIM eligible Contributor role on just one resource group with approval, and paired with the vendor during the change. Result: the fix shipped the same day and the audit had no findings.
13
How do you configure autoscale for an App Service plan?
In the plan's Scale out settings, choose rules-based autoscale or automatic scaling. A typical rule set: scale out by 1 instance when average CPU exceeds 70% for 10 minutes, scale in by 1 when below 30% for 10 minutes, minimum 2 and maximum 10 instances. Always pair scale-out with a scale-in rule and a cool-down period so the plan does not flap between sizes.
14
A deployment to production failed halfway. How do you design pipelines to handle this?
Make deployments idempotent so rerunning the same template converges to the right state. Use slot swaps or blue-green so the old version keeps serving until the new one passes health checks, and roll back by swapping back. Keep database migrations backward compatible, using expand and contract, so the old code still works. Add smoke tests and automatic rollback, and alert the team with logs.
15
Write a Bicep file that creates a storage account with parameters.
What-if previews the changes a deployment will make before applying it, showing resources to create, modify, delete or ignore and property-level differences. Run it in pull request pipelines so reviewers see the real impact of a template change. It has some noise for properties set by the platform, but it catches dangerous changes like deleting a subnet or replacing a database.
17
How do you handle a situation where a cloud bill suddenly doubled?
Situation: our monthly Azure bill jumped from about 6 lakh to 12 lakh rupees. Task: find the cause within two days. Action: I used Cost Analysis grouped by resource and meter, found a Log Analytics workspace ingesting verbose debug logs and forgotten premium disks from a test. I fixed log levels, set a daily cap, deleted orphans and added budgets with alerts. Result: costs returned to normal the next month.
18
Your pipeline takes 40 minutes. How do you speed it up?
Profile which stages are slow. Cache dependencies like NuGet or npm packages, run unit tests and linting in parallel jobs, and split slow integration tests to run only on main or nightly. Use self-hosted or Managed DevOps Pools agents with warm caches for big builds, build container images with layer caching, and deploy only changed services in a monorepo using path filters.
19
What are active geo-replication and failover groups?
Active geo-replication creates readable secondary databases in other regions, up to four, with asynchronous replication and manual failover per database. Failover groups manage a group of databases together, provide read-write and read-only listener endpoints that stay the same after failover, and support automatic failover by policy. Applications should use the failover group listener so connection strings do not change during a regional failover.
PIM gives just-in-time, time-bound access to privileged Entra ID roles and Azure RBAC roles. Users are eligible, not permanently assigned, and must activate the role for a few hours with justification, MFA and optionally approval. Every activation is audited and access reviews remove stale eligibility. It reduces standing admin access, which is a key control against compromised accounts. It needs Entra ID P2 or governance licensing.
21
An application on a VM must access a storage account without any keys. How do you set it up?
Enable a system-assigned or user-assigned managed identity on the VM. Assign the identity the least role needed, such as Storage Blob Data Reader on the specific container. In code, use DefaultAzureCredential or ManagedIdentityCredential from the Azure SDK. Then disable shared key access on the account. The token is fetched from the local metadata endpoint and rotated automatically by Azure.
Azure Boards tracks work items, sprints and backlogs. Azure Repos hosts Git repositories with branch policies. Azure Pipelines runs CI/CD on Microsoft-hosted or self-hosted agents. Azure Test Plans manages manual and exploratory testing. Azure Artifacts hosts NuGet, npm, Maven and Python feeds. Many Indian service companies still run client projects on Azure DevOps, while product companies often use GitHub Actions.
23
A VM in a spoke cannot reach a VM in another spoke. What could be wrong?
Peering is not transitive, so spoke to spoke traffic needs a route through the hub. Check that both spokes have UDRs pointing the other spoke's range to the hub firewall, that peerings allow forwarded traffic, and that firewall network rules allow the flow. Then check NSGs on both subnets and NICs and the guest OS firewall. Use Network Watcher next hop and IP flow verify to confirm.
A NAT Gateway provides outbound internet connectivity for a subnet using one or more static public IPs. It gives a large pool of SNAT ports, avoiding the port exhaustion common with default outbound or Load Balancer outbound rules, and gives a fixed IP that partners can allowlist. Since default outbound access is being retired for new VNets, explicit outbound methods like NAT Gateway are recommended.
25
Write a lifecycle management rule to tier and delete log blobs.
Azure DNS hosts public DNS zones on Microsoft's global name servers so you can manage records like A and CNAME with RBAC. Private DNS zones resolve names only inside linked VNets, used for internal names and private endpoints. For hybrid name resolution, Azure DNS Private Resolver lets on-premises DNS forward queries into Azure and Azure forward queries back on-premises without custom DNS VMs.
27
What are RPO and RTO and how do they guide Azure designs?
RPO, recovery point objective, is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. RTO, recovery time objective, is how long recovery may take. A daily backup gives an RPO of up to 24 hours. Site Recovery gives an RPO of seconds to minutes and an RTO of minutes to hours. SQL failover groups give an RPO of seconds. Lower RPO and RTO cost more, so agree targets per application.
28
How do you create a resource group and list resources using Azure CLI?
Log in, select the subscription, create the group with tags, then list its resources in a table:
az login
az account set --subscription 'Prod-Sub'
az group create --name rg-shop-prod --location centralindia --tags env=prod owner=shop
az resource list --resource-group rg-shop-prod --output table
The --query flag with JMESPath filters output, for example --query '[].name'.
29
What are tags and how are they used in real projects?
Tags are name-value pairs such as env=prod, owner=payments, costcenter=CC101 applied to resources, groups and subscriptions. They help filter cost reports, automate shutdown scripts and track ownership. Tags are not inherited by default, so teams use Azure Policy with modify or append effects to inherit tags from the resource group or require them at creation. A resource can carry up to 50 tags.
Security duties are split between Microsoft and the customer. Microsoft always owns physical datacenters, hosts and the network fabric. The customer always owns data, identities, accounts and devices. The middle layers move with the service model: in IaaS you patch the OS and configure firewalls; in PaaS Microsoft patches the OS and runtime; in SaaS you mainly manage users and data.
Tips to crack the Accenture Microsoft Azure interview
Practise the communication assessment, which checks spoken English through reading, listening and repeating sentences in a recorded format.
Revise MS Office, cloud basics, networking and pseudocode, as Accenture technical MCQs often cover these general IT topics.
Read about Accenture's focus on cloud, data and AI and be ready to discuss how you would work in client-facing teams.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Accenture interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Accenture Microsoft Azure interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (cognitive + technical MCQs); Coding assessment; Communication assessment; Technical and HR interview. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Accenture Microsoft Azure interview?
This practice set leans on Azure Fundamentals (6), DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (6), Azure Networking (4), Identity and Security (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Accenture interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Accenture?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in consulting interviews like Accenture's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Accenture hire Microsoft Azure professionals in India?
Accenture has large teams in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Gurugram. Openings and locations change often, so check the Accenture careers page and filter by city and experience.