Azure solutions architects design end-to-end cloud solutions that meet business, security, reliability and cost goals. They define landing zones, network topology, identity strategy, data platforms and disaster recovery, lead migrations and guide engineering teams. They present trade-offs to clients and leadership using the Well-Architected Framework. The role maps to AZ-305 and usually needs eight or more years of experience. Strong communication is essential.
Landing zone design Hybrid networking High availability and DR Cost optimisation Stakeholder communication
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01
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.
02
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.
Serverless is a vCore option in General Purpose and Hyperscale that autoscales between a minimum and maximum vCore range and bills per second for compute used. In General Purpose it can auto-pause after an idle period and charge only for storage, then resume on the next connection with a short delay. It suits dev databases and apps with intermittent use, not steady heavy workloads.
GitOps treats a Git repository as the single source of truth for cluster configuration. An agent in the cluster, such as Flux, which AKS offers as a managed extension, or Argo CD, pulls manifests from Git and reconciles the cluster to match. Changes happen only through pull requests, which gives audit history and easy rollback by reverting commits. It also removes the need to give pipelines cluster admin credentials.
05
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.
06
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.
07
What is the difference between a service endpoint and a private endpoint?
A service endpoint extends the VNet identity to a PaaS service so its firewall can allow your subnet, but the service still uses its public IP. A private endpoint puts a private IP from your subnet on a specific resource instance, so traffic never needs the public endpoint and works from peered networks and on-premises. Private endpoints are preferred for strict security but need private DNS setup.
08
Explain DTU and vCore purchasing models in Azure SQL Database.
DTU bundles CPU, memory and IO into fixed Basic, Standard and Premium sizes and is simple for small apps. The vCore model lets you choose compute and storage separately, with General Purpose, Business Critical and Hyperscale tiers, provisioned or serverless compute, and Azure Hybrid Benefit for existing SQL licences. vCore is recommended for most production workloads because it is transparent and easier to compare with on-premises.
09
Write a Bicep snippet for a custom Azure Policy that denies resources outside India regions.
Define the rule with an allowed list and a deny effect, then assign it at a management group:
resource pol 'Microsoft.Authorization/policyDefinitions@2023-04-01' = {
name: 'allowed-india-regions'
properties: {
policyType: 'Custom'
mode: 'Indexed'
policyRule: {
if: {
field: 'location'
notIn: ['centralindia', 'southindia', 'westindia']
}
then: { effect: 'deny' }
}
}
}
Conditional Access is the Entra ID policy engine that decides how users sign in. Policies combine signals like user or group, app, location, device compliance, client app and sign-in risk, then grant access, require MFA or a compliant device, or block. For example, require MFA for all admins and block legacy authentication. It requires Entra ID P1, and risk-based policies need P2.
11
How do you document and hand over a network design to the operations team?
Situation: I designed a hub-spoke network that a separate operations team would run. Task: make sure they could support it without calling me. Action: I wrote a short design note with diagrams, IP plan, routing and firewall rule ownership, kept everything in Bicep, and ran two walkthrough sessions with troubleshooting exercises using Network Watcher. Result: they handled the first three incidents independently.
12
Should you use Cosmos DB or Azure SQL for a new e-commerce application?
Use Azure SQL for orders, payments and inventory, which need joins, transactions and strong consistency. Use Cosmos DB for high-volume, flexible-schema data such as product catalogue, shopping carts, user activity or session data needing global low latency. Many systems combine both. If the team knows SQL well and scale is moderate, starting with Azure SQL alone is simpler and cheaper.
13
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.
14
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.
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.
16
What deployment strategies can you use for Azure apps?
Rolling updates replace instances in batches, used by VMSS and Kubernetes. Blue-green runs two environments and switches traffic, as with App Service slots. Canary sends a small percentage of traffic to the new version first, using slot traffic routing, Front Door weights or Container Apps revisions. Feature flags in App Configuration let you deploy code dark and enable features gradually without redeploying.
An RU is a normalised measure of the CPU, memory and IO needed for an operation. A point read of a 1 KB item costs about 1 RU, while writes and queries cost more depending on size, indexing and complexity. You pay for provisioned RU/s, autoscale RU/s or serverless consumption. Requests beyond the limit get HTTP 429 and must retry, so measure RU charge from response headers.
18
How do you plan IP address space for VNets in an enterprise?
Allocate from a central IP plan that does not overlap with on-premises, other clouds or future acquisitions, because overlapping ranges cannot be peered or routed. Give each region a large block, for example 10.10.0.0/14, then carve /22 or /24 spokes. Size subnets for growth and remember AKS, App Gateway and private endpoints consume many IPs. Document allocations in an IPAM tool such as Azure Virtual Network Manager IPAM.
19
You run a SaaS app with 300 small tenant databases whose usage peaks at different times. How do you host them cost-effectively?
An elastic pool shares a set of resources, in eDTUs or vCores, among many Azure SQL databases on one logical server. It suits SaaS apps with a database per tenant, where individual usage peaks at different times. Instead of sizing each database for its peak, you size the pool for combined usage and set per-database min and max limits. Too many busy databases at once will contend for resources.
20
How do you migrate an on-premises SQL Server database to Azure SQL Managed Instance?
Assess with Azure Migrate or the Azure SQL migration extension in Azure Data Studio to find compatibility issues and size the target. For minimal downtime, use the Managed Instance link or Log Replay Service to continuously replicate, then cut over in minutes. For smaller databases, an offline native backup to Blob Storage and RESTORE FROM URL works. Test application connectivity and performance before switching.
Strong guarantees linearizable reads but adds latency across regions. Bounded staleness lets reads lag by a set number of versions or time. Session, the default, guarantees read-your-own-writes within a client session. Consistent prefix ensures reads never see writes out of order. Eventual is fastest and cheapest with no ordering guarantee. Most apps use Session; stronger levels cost more RUs and latency.
22
Tell me about a time you led a migration of workloads to Azure.
Situation: our company had to exit a leased datacenter in nine months with 120 VMs. Task: lead the compute migration. Action: I ran Azure Migrate assessments, grouped VMs by dependency into waves, rehosted most with Azure Migrate and moved web apps to App Service, with rollback plans for each wave. Result: we finished a month early and cut monthly run cost by about 25% after right-sizing.
23
How would you protect a public web application from attacks like SQL injection and DDoS?
Put Azure Front Door Premium or Application Gateway with WAF in front of the app, using the managed Default Rule Set based on OWASP plus bot protection and rate limits. Enable Azure DDoS Network Protection on the VNet for layer 3 and 4 attacks on public IPs. Lock the app so it accepts traffic only from Front Door, using access restrictions with the service tag and the Front Door ID header.
24
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.
25
Your Cosmos DB requests are failing with 429 errors. What do you do?
429 means requests exceeded provisioned RU/s. Check Insights for normalized RU consumption per partition. If one partition is hot, the partition key is the problem. If usage is even, enable autoscale or raise RU/s. Reduce RU cost by using point reads instead of queries, excluding unused paths from indexing and smaller documents. SDKs retry 429s automatically, so tune retry options too.
Sentinel is Microsoft's cloud-native SIEM and SOAR built on Log Analytics. It ingests logs through connectors from Entra ID, Defender, Azure activity, firewalls and third-party sources, runs analytics rules written in KQL to raise incidents, and uses playbooks built on Logic Apps to automate responses like disabling a user. Cost depends on data ingestion, so filter noisy logs and use basic or auxiliary log tiers.
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.
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.
The hub VNet holds shared services: Azure Firewall, VPN or ExpressRoute gateways, Bastion and DNS resolvers. Each workload gets its own spoke VNet peered to the hub, with UDRs sending traffic through the firewall. This centralises security and connectivity while isolating workloads. For many regions and branches, Azure Virtual WAN provides a Microsoft-managed hub with automatic transit routing.
30
Your company is choosing between Bicep and Terraform for its Azure estate. What would you recommend?
Bicep is Azure-only, needs no state file, supports new resource features immediately and has native what-if previews. Terraform works across many clouds and SaaS providers, has a huge module ecosystem, and keeps a state file that must be stored securely, for example in a Blob Storage backend with locking. Choose Bicep for Azure-only teams and Terraform for multi-cloud or existing Terraform skills.
31
How do you reference Key Vault secrets in App Service app settings?
Enable a managed identity on the app, grant it Key Vault Secrets User on the vault, then set the app setting value to a Key Vault reference: @Microsoft.KeyVault(SecretUri=https://kv-shop-prod.vault.azure.net/secrets/SqlPassword/). The app reads it as a normal environment variable. Omitting the version makes App Service pick up rotated secrets automatically within about a day, or on restart.
32
Tell me about a time you fixed a networking issue under pressure.
Situation: after a firewall change, payment APIs in our spoke could not reach a partner endpoint. Task: restore traffic quickly. Action: I used Network Watcher next hop and firewall logs in Log Analytics, found the new rule collection had higher priority and denied the partner FQDN, and added an explicit allow. Result: service recovered in 25 minutes, and we added pipeline-based firewall rule reviews.
33
Your company needs a reliable private link from its Pune datacenter to Azure. What do you propose?
Propose ExpressRoute through a provider at the Pune or Mumbai peering location with private peering into a hub VNet in Central India, sized for current and forecast bandwidth. Add a site-to-site VPN as a failover path, or a second ExpressRoute circuit at another peering location for higher resilience. Use BGP for route exchange, and encrypt traffic with MACsec or IPsec if compliance requires.
Azure Arc extends the Azure control plane to servers, Kubernetes clusters and data services running on-premises or in other clouds. Once connected, those machines appear as Azure resources, so you can apply Azure Policy, RBAC, tags, Defender for Cloud, Update Manager and monitoring to them. It suits hybrid companies that keep some servers in their own datacenter but want one governance model.
35
How do you decide between IaaS and PaaS for migrating an on-premises application?
Start with constraints. If the app needs OS-level access, custom drivers or legacy software, a lift-and-shift to VMs is fastest. If it is a standard .NET, Java or Node web app with SQL Server, App Service plus Azure SQL removes patching and gives built-in scaling. Many teams lift and shift first to meet a datacenter exit date, then modernise to PaaS in a later phase.
36
Your Log Analytics bill is very high. How do you reduce it?
Run the usage query on the Usage table to see which tables and resources ingest most. Remove debug or duplicate logs at the source, use data collection rules with transformations to drop columns or filter rows, and move verbose tables to Basic or Auxiliary plans. Set a daily cap for non-production workspaces, shorten interactive retention and use commitment tiers if ingestion is steady above 100 GB per day.
37
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.
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.
39
How would you set up a landing zone for a company moving to Azure?
Follow the Cloud Adoption Framework landing zone design. Create a management group hierarchy (platform, landing zones, sandbox, decommissioned), separate subscriptions for identity, management and connectivity, and a hub-spoke or Virtual WAN network. Apply Azure Policy for allowed regions, tagging and diagnostics, and assign RBAC through Entra groups. Deploy it all as code with Bicep or Terraform so new app subscriptions can be vended consistently.
40
Write a Cosmos DB NoSQL query to get a customer's orders above 5000 rupees.
Filter on the partition key so the query hits one partition and stays cheap:
SELECT c.id, c.orderDate, c.total
FROM c
WHERE c.customerId = @customerId
AND c.total > 5000
ORDER BY c.orderDate DESC
ORDER BY on orderDate needs a range index, which the default indexing policy includes. Check the RU charge in the response headers.
Frequently asked questions
What does a Azure Solutions Architect do?
Azure solutions architects design end-to-end cloud solutions that meet business, security, reliability and cost goals. They define landing zones, network topology, identity strategy, data platforms and disaster recovery, lead migrations and guide engineering teams. They present trade-offs to clients and leadership using the Well-Architected Framework. The role maps to AZ-305 and usually needs eight or more years of experience. Strong communication is essential.
Which skills are tested in a Azure Solutions Architect interview?
Expect questions on Landing zone design, Hybrid networking, High availability and DR, Cost optimisation, Stakeholder communication. Most rounds also ask you to explain a project and solve one practical problem live.
How do I prepare for a Azure Solutions Architect interview?
Revise Azure Fundamentals, Azure Networking, Azure Databases, Identity and Security first using the topic sheets, practise the questions on this page aloud, then do one full mock interview to practise timing.