Persistent Systems Microsoft Azure Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Persistent Systems hiring for Microsoft Azure roles
Persistent Systems is an Indian technology services company focused on software product engineering, digital transformation, cloud and data services. It serves clients in banking, healthcare, life sciences and software. In India it hires for software engineers, quality engineers, data engineers and analysts, often through campus drives with coding-focused assessments.
For Microsoft Azure roles, this Persistent Systems practice set focuses most on Azure Compute (6), Azure Storage (4), Monitoring, Cost and Governance (4), Azure Databases (4). It has 9 easy, 19 medium, 2 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
IT services
Headquarters
Pune, India
Main India offices
Pune, Nagpur, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Goa
Persistent Systems Microsoft Azure interview process
Online assessment (aptitude + coding)
Technical round 1
Technical round 2
HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
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.
A service connection stores how a pipeline authenticates to an external service, such as an Azure subscription, a container registry or Kubernetes. For Azure, the recommended type uses workload identity federation, where the pipeline exchanges an OIDC token for an Entra token with no secret to rotate. Scope it to the right subscription or resource group and restrict which pipelines may use it through approvals and checks.
Managed disks are block storage volumes for VMs that Azure manages as resources, with built-in redundancy. Types are Standard HDD for backups and dev, Standard SSD for light workloads, Premium SSD for production, Premium SSD v2 with independently tunable IOPS and throughput, and Ultra Disk for very high IOPS and low latency such as SAP HANA. Disks can be LRS or ZRS for some types.
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.
05
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.
06
What is the difference between the activity log and resource logs?
The activity log records control-plane operations at subscription level, such as who created, updated or deleted a resource, and service health events. It is kept for 90 days unless exported. Resource logs record data-plane activity inside a resource, such as Key Vault secret reads or SQL audit events, and must be enabled with diagnostic settings to send them to Log Analytics, Storage or Event Hubs.
07
What are resource locks and when would you use them?
Locks protect resources from accidental change. CanNotDelete allows reads and updates but blocks deletion; ReadOnly allows only reads, which can break operations like listing storage keys. Locks apply to a subscription, group or resource and are inherited. Teams put CanNotDelete on production resource groups, DNS zones and ExpressRoute circuits. Only Owner or User Access Administrator roles can remove locks by default.
08
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.
09
How do you explain a technical storage decision to a non-technical stakeholder?
Situation: finance asked why we needed GZRS instead of cheaper LRS. Task: justify the cost clearly. Action: I compared the options in business terms: LRS survives a disk failure, GZRS survives losing a whole region, and I showed the cost of downtime per hour for our app versus the extra monthly charge. Result: they approved GZRS only for critical data and LRS for the rest.
Azure Advisor analyses your resource configuration and usage and gives free recommendations in five categories: reliability, security, performance, cost and operational excellence. Examples include resizing underused VMs, buying reservations, enabling zone redundancy and adding backups. It provides an Advisor score per category. Review it weekly, suppress items that are not relevant, and use its alerts to notify owners of new cost recommendations.
11
You are setting up Azure DNS for a new domain. What are the steps?
Create a public DNS zone in Azure DNS for the domain, note the four Azure name servers it shows, and update the NS records at your domain registrar to those servers. Add records such as an A alias record pointing to the Front Door or public IP and CNAME for www. Verify with nslookup. Apply a lock on the zone so records cannot be deleted accidentally.
12
How do Azure SLAs work and how do you calculate a composite SLA?
An SLA is Microsoft's uptime commitment per service, with service credits if it is missed. When services depend on each other in series, multiply their SLAs. An App Service at 99.95% calling Azure SQL at 99.99% gives about 0.9995 x 0.9999 = 99.94%. Adding redundancy, such as a second region behind Front Door, raises the combined figure because both paths must fail together.
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.
Slots are live copies of an app with their own hostname, available from the Standard tier. You deploy to a staging slot, warm it up and test, then swap it with production. The swap redirects traffic with near-zero downtime and can be reversed by swapping back. Slot-specific settings, such as a staging database connection string, stay with the slot instead of moving during the swap.
15
What compute options does Azure offer and when do you choose each?
Virtual Machines give full OS control for legacy or custom software. Virtual Machine Scale Sets add autoscaling of identical VMs. App Service hosts web apps and APIs as PaaS. Azure Functions runs event-driven code serverlessly. AKS runs Kubernetes for container microservices, and Container Apps runs containers without managing Kubernetes. Batch handles large parallel jobs. Choose based on control needed, scaling pattern and team skills.
16
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.
17
What is Durable Functions and what patterns does it support?
Durable Functions is an extension that lets you write stateful workflows in code. An orchestrator function calls activity functions, and the framework checkpoints state to storage so it survives restarts. Patterns include function chaining, fan-out/fan-in, async HTTP APIs with status polling, monitors and human interaction with timeouts. Orchestrator code must be deterministic, so avoid DateTime.Now or random values inside it.
18
Write a simple HTTP-triggered Azure Function in Python (v2 programming model).
The v2 model uses decorators in function_app.py, so no function.json is needed:
import azure.functions as func
app = func.FunctionApp(http_auth_level=func.AuthLevel.FUNCTION)
@app.route(route='hello', methods=['GET'])
def hello(req: func.HttpRequest) -> func.HttpResponse:
name = req.params.get('name', 'world')
return func.HttpResponse(f'Hello, {name}', status_code=200)
Callers pass the function key in the code query parameter or x-functions-key header.
Relational options are Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on VMs, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL and MySQL flexible servers. Azure Cosmos DB is the globally distributed NoSQL and vector database. Azure Cache for Redis and Azure Managed Redis provide in-memory caching. For analytics there are Synapse, Fabric and Azure Data Explorer. Choose by data model, compatibility and how much operations you want to manage.
20
An order system needs reliable, ordered messaging between services. Would you pick Queue Storage or Service Bus, and why?
Queue Storage is cheap and simple, holds millions of messages up to 64 KB each, and suits basic background work. Service Bus is an enterprise broker with queues and topics, FIFO through sessions, duplicate detection, dead-lettering, transactions and messages up to 100 MB on Premium. Choose Service Bus for ordered or business-critical messaging like orders and payments, and Storage queues for simple, high-volume job queues.
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.
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.
23
Why do you want to build a career in Microsoft Azure?
Situation: during my internship I saw most clients running Microsoft workloads like Windows Server, SQL Server and Active Directory. Task: I wanted skills that match that demand. Action: I cleared AZ-900, then studied AZ-104 and built labs with VNets, App Service and Bicep. Result: I can now deploy and troubleshoot real environments, and I want to grow toward an Azure architect role over the next few years.
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.
Metric alerts evaluate metrics such as CPU above 80% and can be dynamic with machine-learned thresholds. Log search alerts run KQL queries on a schedule. Activity log alerts fire on control-plane events or Service Health incidents. Smart detection in Application Insights finds anomalies. Alerts trigger action groups that send emails, SMS, Teams messages, webhooks or run Functions, Logic Apps and Automation runbooks.
26
How do you manage Terraform state securely on Azure?
Store state in an Azure Storage backend with a dedicated container per environment. Blob leases provide state locking so two runs cannot write at once. Use Entra ID authentication instead of access keys, enable versioning and soft delete to recover from corruption, restrict access to the pipeline identity, and use private endpoints. Never commit state files, because they can contain secrets in plain text.
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.
ADLS Gen2 is a storage account with hierarchical namespace enabled, adding real directories, atomic renames and POSIX-style ACLs on top of Blob Storage. It is the storage layer for analytics engines such as Azure Databricks, Synapse and Microsoft Fabric. Directory operations become fast, which matters for Spark jobs. You keep Blob pricing and tiers but must plan ACLs and RBAC together.
29
Tell me about a time you automated a manual process.
Situation: our team created test environments by hand, taking two days each. Task: make it self-service. Action: I wrote Bicep modules for the app, database and networking and a pipeline with parameters for environment name, plus an auto-delete tag cleaned up nightly by an Automation runbook. Result: environments took 20 minutes, and idle test cost dropped by about 30%.
30
How do you create a budget with alerts for a subscription?
In Cost Management, choose Budgets, set the scope to the subscription or a resource group, a monthly amount and alert conditions such as 50%, 80% and 100% of actual cost and 100% of forecast. Add email recipients and an action group that can notify Teams or run an automation. Budgets do not stop spending on their own, so pair them with automation or policy if needed.
Tips to crack the Persistent Systems Microsoft Azure interview
Practise coding problems of easy to medium difficulty, as Persistent assessments usually focus more on programming than service peers.
Revise data structures, OOP, DBMS and operating system basics for the technical rounds.
Read about Persistent's product engineering background and its partnerships with major cloud providers.
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; Persistent Systems interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Persistent Systems Microsoft Azure interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (aptitude + coding); Technical round 1; Technical round 2; 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 Persistent Systems Microsoft Azure interview?
This practice set leans on Azure Compute (6), Azure Storage (4), Monitoring, Cost and Governance (4), Azure Databases (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Persistent Systems interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Persistent Systems?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in it services interviews like Persistent Systems's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Persistent Systems hire Microsoft Azure professionals in India?
Persistent Systems has large teams in Pune, Nagpur, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Goa. Openings and locations change often, so check the Persistent Systems careers page and filter by city and experience.