Deploy and manage Azure compute resources

AZ-104 · 60 questions

• Cascade Regional Airlines runs its crew-scheduling application on a General Purpose Azure VM. During the summer peak, the operations team wants to resize the VM to a larger size in the same series, but Azure reports the target size isn't available on the hardware cluster currently hosting the VM. What must happen for the resize to succeed?
• The maintenance-records database at Cascade Regional Airlines needs consistently sub-millisecond disk latency and independently configurable IOPS and throughput, separate from the disk's capacity. A junior engineer suggests attaching an Ultra Disk to the VM. What must also be true for that plan to work?
• Cascade Regional Airlines runs two crew-scheduling VMs that must keep serving dispatchers even if a single server rack loses power or a host reboots for maintenance inside the same Azure datacenter. Which deployment option is the correct fit for this specific failure scope?
• Before applying a risky patch to the managed OS disk of the maintenance-records VM, an engineer at Cascade Regional Airlines wants a quick point-in-time copy of the disk's current state that can be used to create a new disk and roll back if the patch goes wrong. What should the engineer create?
• Cascade Regional Airlines has fully configured a Windows VM for its crew-scheduling application and wants to capture it as a reusable image to deploy multiple fresh, identical instances at other regional hubs, each with its own computer name and security identifiers. What must the engineer do to the source VM before capturing the image?
• Cascade Regional Airlines wants to distribute its approved maintenance-records VM image to engineering teams in three separate subscriptions and two Azure regions, keep multiple versions available, and control who can use each version. A single managed image resource in one subscription can't do all of this. What should the airline use instead?
• After a new Windows VM for the maintenance-records app finishes provisioning at Cascade Regional Airlines, an engineer needs it to automatically download a configuration package and run an installer, without connecting over RDP to do it by hand. Which Azure feature is designed for running this kind of post-deployment script directly against the VM?
• An engineer at Cascade Regional Airlines is deploying a Linux VM to monitor seasonal booking-load spikes and wants it to install a monitoring agent and write a configuration file automatically the very first time it boots, using a standard, cloud-platform-agnostic method rather than an Azure-specific tool. Which approach fits this requirement?
• A dispatcher at a Cascade Regional Airlines regional hub shuts down a rarely-used reporting VM from inside the Windows guest OS instead of using the Azure portal's Stop button, then wonders why the compute charges keep appearing on the next invoice. Why does Azure keep billing for compute after this shutdown?
• A compliance auditor asks Cascade Regional Airlines to prove that the maintenance-records VM's OS disk is encrypted at rest, and separately asks whether the guest OS volume itself is encrypted from inside the operating system with a customer-managed key exposed to the OS. What is true about these two encryption layers on a managed disk?
• The maintenance-records VM's OS disk is nearly full from accumulated log files, and an engineer at Cascade Regional Airlines increases the managed disk's size from 128 GiB to 256 GiB through the Azure portal while the VM is still running. After the resize operation reports success, why does the OS still show the original, smaller volume size?
• Cascade Regional Airlines is choosing a VM series for its crew-scheduling database, which keeps a large working set of upcoming rosters cached in RAM and is far more sensitive to available memory than to raw CPU core count. Which category of VM series should the team favor for this workload?
• During disaster-recovery planning, a Cascade Regional Airlines architect reads that the airline's primary Azure region is paired with a specific secondary region, and asks what benefit that Microsoft-defined pairing itself actually provides, apart from whatever the airline configures on its own. What does the region-pair relationship provide?
• A bad configuration change corrupted the maintenance-records VM three days ago, and the airline has nightly Azure Backup recovery points stored in a Recovery Services vault. The team wants to keep the VM's existing resource ID and networking exactly as they are, but swap its disks back to the state from before the corruption. Which restore approach fits that goal?
• Cascade Regional Airlines keeps adding VMs to a single availability set to handle a growing booking-load monitoring fleet, well past the number of fault domains that availability set offers. What happens to the resiliency benefit as the VM count grows beyond the number of available fault domains?
• Cascade Regional Airlines attaches a data disk to a VM that only holds an infrequently-accessed archive of last season's booking-load reports, read a handful of times a month, where minimizing disk cost matters far more than IOPS or latency. Which managed disk type best fits this specific workload?
• A dispatcher accidentally deleted a single configuration file from the maintenance-records VM this morning. The VM itself is healthy and running fine, and Cascade Regional Airlines just needs that one file back from last night's Azure Backup recovery point, without disrupting the running VM or its other data. What is the appropriate restore approach?
• Cascade Regional Airlines wants the crew-scheduling application to survive the complete loss of one entire physical Azure datacenter within its primary region, not just a rack, while still keeping the app's VMs inside that same region for low-latency access to regional storage. What should the team deploy the VMs across?
• Six months after deploying a Linux VM for booking-load monitoring with a cloud-init configuration at first boot, an engineer at Cascade Regional Airlines now needs to push an updated script to that already-running VM to reconfigure the monitoring agent. Why is reapplying the original cloud-init configuration not the right tool for this later, on-demand change?
• To cut costs during the airline's slow off-season, Cascade Regional Airlines properly deallocates a seasonal booking-load-testing VM through the Azure portal rather than shutting it down from inside the guest OS. The finance team is then surprised to see any charge at all for that VM the following month. What is the correct explanation for the remaining charge?
• Cascade Regional Airlines is redesigning the scale set behind its public booking site. The platform team wants to mix General Purpose and Memory Optimized VM sizes in the same scale set and spread instances across multiple availability zones for resilience. Which Virtual Machine Scale Set orchestration mode should they choose?
• An overnight batch job at Cascade Regional Airlines pulls flight-manifest files from a storage queue and processes them on a Virtual Machine Scale Set. The queue backs up heavily right after the last redeye departs, then empties by morning. Which autoscale configuration best matches processing capacity to the workload?
• A support engineer notices that whenever Cascade Regional Airlines' booking-site scale set scales in during a traffic dip, the newest instance is always the one removed — even when an older instance is closer to becoming unhealthy. The team wants the newest instances protected so recently deployed code gets time to prove itself before being torn down. Which scale-in policy should they configure?
• Cascade Regional Airlines wants to stage a new booking-site build in a separate deployment slot, warm it up, then swap it into production with zero downtime. Their App Service plan is currently on the Free tier. What is the minimum tier change required to unlock deployment slots?
• The booking site's App Service is hosted on a Standard S1 plan with a single instance. During a holiday sale, response times degrade because the app is running out of memory processing large itinerary exports, even though CPU usage stays low and only one or two users trigger exports at a time. What is the most appropriate first response?
• A release engineer swaps a newly tested staging slot into production for Cascade Regional Airlines' booking site. Immediately after the swap, the first wave of live users hits slow response times because the app has to finish its startup initialization under real traffic. What App Service feature should the engineer use before the next release to avoid this cold-start delay during swap?
• Cascade Regional Airlines wants to bind a free App Service Managed Certificate to the apex domain cascaderegional.com for the booking site, but the binding keeps failing domain validation. The DNS zone currently has only an A record pointing the apex at the App Service's inbound IP, with no other verification records. What is the most likely reason the App Service Managed Certificate cannot be issued for the apex domain?
• Cascade Regional Airlines' internal crew-scheduling web app runs on a Basic App Service plan and is used sporadically throughout the day. Staff complain that the first request after a period of inactivity takes much longer than normal to load. Which App Service configuration setting most directly addresses this specific complaint?
• A developer at Cascade Regional Airlines needs to run a short-lived container that regenerates a single daily gate-assignment report, then exits. There is no need for orchestration, scaling, or service discovery between multiple services. Which compute option is the simplest fit for this workload?
• Cascade Regional Airlines runs its nightly flight-data reconciliation job in an Azure Container Instances container group. The job should run exactly once per night, and if it fails, the operations team wants to investigate the failure rather than have the platform silently retry it. Which container group restart policy should be configured?
• A container running in Azure Container Instances processes uploaded baggage-tag images for Cascade Regional Airlines and needs those images to persist even after the container instance is deleted and recreated. Which storage approach should be used?
• Cascade Regional Airlines' baggage-tracking service is made up of several small containerized microservices that need to scale independently based on load, communicate with each other, and support rolling updates with minimal manual orchestration effort from the small platform team. Which compute service best fits this requirement without taking on full Kubernetes cluster management?
• Cascade Regional Airlines expects a predictable but sharp spike in booking-site traffic every year during the holiday fare sale, driven by sustained high CPU usage across the web tier. Which autoscale configuration lets the scale set add instances automatically once CPU usage crosses a defined threshold, without requiring an operator to intervene?
• After Cascade Regional Airlines pushes a new VM image to its booking-site scale set, all instances are replaced simultaneously and the site experiences a brief full outage during the rollout. Which scale set upgrade policy is most likely currently configured, and which change would eliminate the simultaneous-replacement behavior?
• Cascade Regional Airlines is deploying a stateless web tier for its flight-status API behind an Azure Load Balancer, where every instance must run the exact same VM image and configuration, and the team wants the platform to manage large-scale identical deployments with minimal per-instance customization. Which Virtual Machine Scale Set orchestration mode fits this requirement?
• The booking site's App Service is on a Standard S2 plan running two instances. During a flash sale, thousands of concurrent users push CPU usage to its ceiling across all instances simultaneously, even though per-request memory usage stays modest. What is the most appropriate first response to relieve the CPU pressure?
• Cascade Regional Airlines wants to swap a staging slot into production for the booking site, but the team wants a chance to run smoke tests against production settings and connection strings applied to the staging slot before traffic actually switches over, with the ability to cancel if something looks wrong. Which App Service feature supports this?
• Cascade Regional Airlines binds a TLS certificate to www.cascaderegional.com on their App Service, but requests to book.cascaderegional.com, a second custom domain on the same app, still show a certificate warning because the browser receives the wrong certificate for that hostname. What is the most likely cause?
• A newly added baggage-tracking microservice at Cascade Regional Airlines receives bursts of requests only when flights are actively boarding, and sits completely idle overnight and between flights. The team wants to avoid paying for idle compute during those quiet periods while still scaling out automatically during boarding bursts. Which compute option best supports scaling down to zero instances during idle periods?
• An architect at Cascade Regional Airlines is documenting the scale-in behavior of the booking site's Virtual Machine Scale Set, which has not had any explicit scale-in policy configured. Which statement correctly describes the behavior that applies by default when the scale set removes instances?
• Cascade Regional Airlines is standing up a new outstation network in Bozeman. The platform engineer wants the same ARM template to deploy either a /24 or /26 VNet address space depending on which airport it lands in, without editing the template body for each site. Which template section should hold that address space value?
• Cascade Regional Airlines deploys the same ARM template to three environments: development, staging, and the production outstation network. Rather than editing the template or typing a long list of inline values on every deployment command, the team wants each environment's input values stored separately and version-controlled alongside the template. What should they use?
• A change-control reviewer at Cascade Regional Airlines asks the platform team to re-run last week's ARM template deployment against the same resource group, unchanged, to confirm it is safe to include in the standard build runbook. After the re-run, the resource group contains the same resources it did before, with no duplicates and no errors. What property of the template deployment does this behavior demonstrate?
• A Cascade Regional Airlines engineer redeploys the outstation network template to an existing resource group without setting a deployment mode. The resource group already contains a diagnostic storage account that was created manually and is not listed in the template. What happens to that storage account when the deployment runs?
• Two weeks after a successful outstation build, a Cascade Regional Airlines engineer reuses the original ARM template to redeploy the same resource group in Complete mode, intending only to refresh the network security group rules. After the deployment finishes, the on-call team reports that a load balancer added by a different team last week, and never added to the template, is gone. What is the most likely explanation?
• A Cascade Regional Airlines engineer authors a new outstation deployment in Bicep instead of raw ARM JSON. When the deployment is submitted to Azure Resource Manager, what actually happens to the Bicep file before the resources are created?
• A Cascade Regional Airlines engineer maintaining a growing library of ARM JSON templates for outstation builds complains that the templates are verbose and hard to read, with heavy nesting and repeated syntax for simple resource declarations. A teammate suggests migrating the authoring to Bicep. What is the main reason Bicep was created to address this complaint?
• Cascade Regional Airlines wants to define its standard outstation virtual network pattern once in Bicep and reuse it across every new airport deployment, rather than copying the same resource block into every template. Which Bicep feature is built for exactly this kind of reuse?
• An engineer runs an ARM template deployment command against Cascade Regional Airlines' outstation subscription without specifying a management group or subscription-level scope flag, targeting an existing resource group by name. At what scope does this deployment run?
• Cascade Regional Airlines' platform team wants a single ARM template to both create a new resource group for an upcoming outstation and assign a subscription-wide policy, in one deployment. Since creating a resource group is not something that can be declared from inside another resource group's deployment, what deployment scope must this template target?
• Cascade Regional Airlines has grown to operate four Azure subscriptions, one per region, and wants a single template deployment to assign the same tagging policy to all four at once rather than repeating the assignment in each subscription individually. Which deployment scope is built for applying a template's effect across multiple subscriptions in one operation?
• Before writing a new ARM template from scratch for a resource group that was built manually through the portal, a Cascade Regional Airlines engineer wants a quick starting point that reflects what is currently deployed. Which built-in capability produces an ARM template based on the resource group's existing resources?
• A Cascade Regional Airlines engineer exports a template from an existing outstation resource group and, before reusing it, redeploys the exported template unmodified against a brand-new resource group to see what happens. The deployment fails on several resources. What is a known limitation of exported templates that most likely explains this?
• A compliance auditor asks Cascade Regional Airlines' platform team to show every ARM template deployment made against a specific outstation resource group over the past quarter, including which template and parameter values were used each time. Where in Azure should the team look first to answer this without needing external logging?
• An ARM template deployment for a new outstation fails partway through, with several resources created successfully and one resource reporting an error. Cascade Regional Airlines' engineer needs to identify exactly which resource failed and why. Where should they look to get that specific, per-resource error detail?
• A Cascade Regional Airlines engineer needs to quickly spin up a single test virtual machine for an afternoon proof-of-concept, with no expectation of repeating the build or handing it to another team. Which approach best fits this one-off, exploratory task?
• A Cascade Regional Airlines engineer writes an Azure CLI script that issues a sequence of az commands to create a virtual network, then a subnet, then a virtual machine, one command after another. Compared to an equivalent ARM or Bicep template deploying the same resources, what is a key difference in how this CLI script behaves?
• Cascade Regional Airlines runs a quarterly disaster-recovery rehearsal that rebuilds an entire outstation's network and compute footprint in a secondary region, and the rebuild must match the production footprint precisely every time. Why is an ARM or Bicep template the best-suited approach for this recurring rebuild, compared to manually recreating resources through the portal each quarter?
• Cascade Regional Airlines requires every production change to go through a scheduled change-control window, and reviewers want to see exactly what an ARM template deployment will add, modify, or delete in the outstation resource group before the window opens and the deployment is actually approved to run. Which capability lets the team preview those effects without making any changes yet?
• After an ARM template deployment creates a new public IP address for an outstation's gateway, a downstream automation script needs that IP address's resource ID to configure DNS immediately afterward, without a separate lookup call. Which template section should return that value so it is available right after the deployment finishes?