Deloitte Microsoft Azure Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Deloitte hiring for Microsoft Azure roles
Deloitte is one of the Big Four professional services networks, offering audit, tax, consulting, risk advisory and financial advisory services. Its Indian entities, including Deloitte USI, support global clients with technology consulting, analytics, cyber and testing work. It hires in India for analyst and consultant roles in data analytics, business intelligence, QA, ERP and risk advisory.
For Microsoft Azure roles, this Deloitte practice set focuses most on Azure Fundamentals (7), Identity and Security (5), Azure Compute (5), Azure Networking (3). It has 5 easy, 22 medium, 3 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Consulting
Headquarters
London, United Kingdom
Main India offices
Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Gurugram, Pune
Deloitte Microsoft Azure interview process
Online assessment (aptitude + technical)
Group discussion or case discussion
Technical interview
Partner or HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
Create a VNet with two subnets and an NSG rule using Azure CLI.
Disable shared key access where possible and use Entra ID with RBAC roles like Storage Blob Data Reader. Use managed identities for apps. Disable public blob access, require TLS 1.2, restrict the firewall to selected VNets, or use private endpoints and disable public network access. Enable soft delete, versioning and Defender for Storage, and keep keys, if any, in Key Vault with rotation.
03
What are regions, region pairs and availability zones?
A region is a set of datacenters in one geography, such as Central India in Pune. Availability zones are physically separate datacenter groups inside a region with independent power, cooling and network; supported regions have three. Many regions are paired with another region in the same geography for platform updates and geo-replication. Use zones for datacenter failure and a second region for regional disasters.
04
Write a GitHub Actions job that logs in to Azure with OIDC.
Grant id-token write permission and use a federated credential on the app registration, so no secret is stored:
permissions:
id-token: write
contents: read
jobs:
deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
environment: prod
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- uses: azure/login@v2
with:
client-id: ${{ vars.AZURE_CLIENT_ID }}
tenant-id: ${{ vars.AZURE_TENANT_ID }}
subscription-id: ${{ vars.AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID }}
- run: az group list -o table
05
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.
Application Insights is the APM feature of Azure Monitor. It collects requests, dependencies, exceptions, traces and custom events from apps through OpenTelemetry-based SDKs or auto-instrumentation in App Service, Functions and AKS. Features include the application map, live metrics, failure and performance analysis, availability tests and distributed tracing. Workspace-based resources store data in Log Analytics so you can join it with infrastructure logs.
07
How does encryption at rest and in transit work in Azure?
All Azure Storage, managed disks and Azure SQL data is encrypted at rest with AES-256 by default using Microsoft-managed keys. You can switch to customer-managed keys in Key Vault for control over rotation and revocation, and use double encryption or confidential computing for stricter needs. In transit, services use TLS 1.2 or higher, and you should enforce HTTPS only and minimum TLS version settings.
08
Compare Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Front Door and Traffic Manager.
Load Balancer works at layer 4 (TCP/UDP) inside a region. Application Gateway is a regional layer 7 load balancer with path routing, TLS termination and an optional WAF. Front Door is a global layer 7 entry point with anycast, CDN caching and WAF. Traffic Manager is DNS-based global routing for any protocol. Use Front Door for global web apps and Load Balancer for non-HTTP traffic.
09
What is Azure Policy and how is it different from RBAC?
RBAC controls who can do actions. Azure Policy controls what resources and settings are allowed, whoever deploys them. Policies use effects such as deny, audit, append, modify, deployIfNotExists and auditIfNotExists. For example, deny public IPs on VMs or deploy diagnostic settings automatically. Group policies into initiatives, assign them at management groups and view compliance on the dashboard.
10
Users report the website on App Service is slow every morning at 9 AM. How do you investigate?
Check Application Insights for response times, failed requests and dependency calls around 9 AM, and App Service plan metrics for CPU, memory and instance count. A morning spike often means traffic surge with autoscale reacting too slowly, cold start after idle, or a slow SQL query under load. Fixes include scheduled scale-out before 9 AM, Always On, a higher tier, caching with Redis or query tuning.
Flex Consumption is the recommended serverless plan: it scales to zero, bills per execution and memory, supports VNet integration and always-ready instances. The older Consumption plan scales to zero with a default 5-minute timeout. Premium keeps pre-warmed instances to avoid cold starts and supports long runs. Dedicated runs on an App Service plan. Container Apps hosting runs functions as containers. Choose by cold start tolerance, networking and run duration.
12
What is a resource group and what rules apply to it?
A resource group is a logical container for resources that share a lifecycle, for example everything for one app environment. A resource belongs to exactly one group, groups cannot be nested, and deleting a group deletes everything inside it. The group has a location that stores metadata, but resources inside can live in other regions. Resources can be moved between groups for most resource types.
13
How do you handle a failed release that affected customers?
Situation: a release broke login for some mobile users on a Friday evening. Task: restore service fast and prevent repeats. Action: I swapped the App Service slot back to the previous version within ten minutes, informed support, then reproduced the bug in staging and found a missing config value. Result: we added config validation and smoke tests on login to the pipeline, and wrote a blameless postmortem.
14
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.
15
What are Virtual Machine Scale Sets and their orchestration modes?
VMSS manages a group of load-balanced VMs that scale in or out automatically on metrics or schedules. Flexible orchestration, now the default, lets you mix VM sizes, spread across zones and fault domains, and manage instances like normal VMs. Uniform mode uses identical instances from one model and is optimised for large stateless fleets. Use VMSS for stateless web tiers, batch workers and custom container hosts.
16
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.
17
Write a KQL query to find who deleted resources in the last 7 days.
Use the AzureActivity table, filtering on successful delete operations:
AzureActivity
| where TimeGenerated > ago(7d)
| where OperationNameValue endswith '/DELETE'
| where ActivityStatusValue == 'Success'
| project TimeGenerated, Caller, OperationNameValue,
ResourceGroup, _ResourceId
| order by TimeGenerated desc
18
How do you design an Azure subscription strategy for a large enterprise with many business units?
Use management groups that mirror governance needs rather than the org chart, for example Platform, Corp landing zones, Online landing zones and Sandbox. Give each application or business unit its own subscriptions per environment to isolate quotas, cost and blast radius. Automate subscription vending with pre-wired networking, policy and RBAC. Keep the hierarchy shallow, ideally three or four levels, to avoid policy confusion.
Azure Resource Graph is a fast query service over resource metadata across all subscriptions you can access, using KQL. It is used for inventory, compliance checks and finding orphaned resources, such as unattached disks or public IPs, much faster than looping through APIs. The portal's All resources view and Azure Policy compliance use it. Results reflect configuration, not performance metrics.
20
Generate a user delegation SAS for one blob with Azure CLI.
Log in with Entra ID, then create a short-lived read-only SAS signed with your identity:
az storage blob generate-sas \
--account-name stshopprod --container-name invoices \
--name inv-1001.pdf --permissions r \
--expiry 2026-11-12T18:00Z --https-only \
--auth-mode login --as-user --full-uri
The caller needs a role that allows generating user delegation keys.
21
Your secure score in Defender for Cloud is low. How do you improve it?
Sort recommendations by the score increase and effort. Typical quick wins are enabling MFA for all privileged accounts, restricting management ports with just-in-time access, enabling endpoint protection and vulnerability assessment on VMs, and turning on diagnostic logs. Use Azure Policy to enforce fixes so new resources stay compliant. Assign owners and due dates through governance rules and track progress weekly.
Situation: three freshers joined my team without pipeline experience. Task: make them productive in a month. Action: I created a small sample repo with a Bicep template and YAML pipeline, paired with each one on their first pull request, set review checklists and let them own one non-production pipeline each. Result: within five weeks all three were shipping changes independently and one improved our caching.
23
What is Azure Cosmos DB and which APIs does it support?
Cosmos DB is a fully managed, globally distributed NoSQL database with single-digit millisecond latency and SLAs for availability, throughput and latency. It supports the native NoSQL API, MongoDB (RU and vCore), Apache Cassandra, Gremlin graph and Table APIs, and PostgreSQL through Citus. It also offers integrated vector search, used for AI and retrieval-augmented generation apps.
Defender for Cloud is a cloud security posture management and workload protection platform. The free foundational tier gives a secure score and recommendations based on the Microsoft cloud security benchmark. Paid Defender plans add threat detection for servers, storage, SQL, containers, Key Vault and App Service, vulnerability scanning and attack path analysis. It also covers AWS and GCP accounts and on-premises servers through Arc.
It is Microsoft's guidance for building quality workloads, organised into five pillars: reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence and performance efficiency. Each pillar has design principles, checklists and trade-offs. Azure Advisor and the Well-Architected Review tool score workloads against it. In design interviews, structure answers by pillar to show you considered failure, security and cost, not only features.
26
What is the difference between an availability set and an availability zone?
An availability set spreads VMs across fault domains (separate racks, power and switches) and update domains (rebooted at different times) inside one datacenter, giving a 99.95% SLA. Availability zones place VMs in physically separate datacenters within a region, giving 99.99%. Zones protect against a full datacenter outage; availability sets only protect against rack and maintenance failures. New designs prefer zones where the region supports them.
27
An App Service cannot connect to an Azure SQL database behind a private endpoint. How do you troubleshoot?
Confirm the app has regional VNet integration into a subnet that can reach the private endpoint subnet. Check DNS first: from the Kudu console, nslookup the SQL server name; it must resolve to the private IP through privatelink.database.windows.net linked to the VNet. Then check NSGs, UDRs sending traffic to a firewall that blocks port 1433, and whether SQL public access is disabled as expected.
28
Your Azure Function has slow first responses after idle periods. What can you do?
That is cold start: the plan scaled to zero and must load a new instance. Options are moving to Flex Consumption with always-ready instances or the Premium plan with pre-warmed instances, reducing package size and dependencies, and choosing a faster-starting runtime. A timer ping is a hack that is not reliable. For strict latency APIs, a dedicated plan or Container Apps with minimum replicas is better.
Pick a property with high cardinality that spreads requests and storage evenly and that most queries filter on, such as userId or tenantId. Each logical partition is limited to 20 GB, so avoid keys like country or status that create hot partitions. If no single property works, use a synthetic key or hierarchical partition keys. The partition key cannot be changed later without migrating data.
30
A team accidentally deleted a production resource group. How do you prevent this in future?
First recover what is possible: soft delete or backups for storage, Key Vault, SQL and VMs. Then add CanNotDelete locks on production groups, remove Owner and Contributor rights from individual users, and grant access through Entra groups with Privileged Identity Management for just-in-time elevation. Deploy infrastructure through pipelines only, and set activity log alerts on delete operations so the team is notified instantly.
Tips to crack the Deloitte Microsoft Azure interview
Practise guesstimates and simple business cases, since consulting interviews often test structured thinking alongside technical skills.
Be ready to explain dashboards or analyses you built in Excel, SQL, Power BI or Tableau and the business decisions they supported.
Read about Deloitte's service lines such as Risk Advisory and Consulting so you can say which practice suits you.
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; Deloitte interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Deloitte Microsoft Azure interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (aptitude + technical); Group discussion or case discussion; Technical interview; Partner or HR round. 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 Deloitte Microsoft Azure interview?
This practice set leans on Azure Fundamentals (7), Identity and Security (5), Azure Compute (5), Azure Networking (3). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Deloitte interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Deloitte?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in consulting interviews like Deloitte's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Deloitte hire Microsoft Azure professionals in India?
Deloitte has large teams in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Gurugram, Pune. Openings and locations change often, so check the Deloitte careers page and filter by city and experience.