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67 Free Azure AZ-305 Practice Test Questions to Ace Your Exam (2025 Updated)

Achieving the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification is a definitive milestone in a cloud career. This certification, centered on the AZ-305 exam, demands not just technical knowledge but the ability to make strategic architectural decisions across security, compute, networking, and data platforms. To truly validate your readiness and identify critical knowledge gaps, engaging with a high-quality, free Azure AZ-305 practice test is non-negotiable.

Note: The full interactive practice test is available immediately at the bottom of this post.

67 Free Azure AZ-305 Practice Test Questions

Stop Guessing: Why High-Quality AZ-305 Practice is Essential

The AZ-305 exam is application-focused, presenting complex scenario-based questions that test your understanding of trade-offs—cost versus performance, or latency versus security. Unlike poorly curated azure az-305 exam dumps, our practice questions force you to think like a seasoned architect, providing detailed explanations that cover the why behind every design choice.

By working through these 67 expert questions, you are building the strategic foundation needed to successfully design cloud solutions.

Strategic Cost Optimization and Resource Governance

A core responsibility of an architect is ensuring solutions are compliant and fiscally responsible. The AZ-305 exam rigorously tests your ability to select the right governance tools and cost models.

Maximizing VM Cost Savings: Purchasing Options

When designing for stable, predictable workloads—for instance, 24/7 services planned for three years—the architect must recommend the most cost-effective solution. This is where Reserved Instances (RIs) come into play. RIs offer the highest discount (up to 72%) in exchange for a one- or three-year commitment to a specific VM family and region, making them the superior choice for guaranteed long-term savings.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/multitenant/approaches/cost-management-allocation

Enforcing Compliance with Azure Policy

Architects must enforce corporate rules across the entire subscription. If a policy dictates that all new storage accounts must use HTTPS and Geo-redundant storage (GRS), and non-compliance must be blocked, the correct service is Azure Policy. By using a policy definition with the ‘Deny’ effect, you prevent the creation of any resource that fails to meet the specified security and redundancy criteria, ensuring strict governance.

Designing Secure and Scalable Network Solutions

Networking and security integration are cornerstones of the AZ-305. Solutions must be highly available, low-latency, and hardened against threats.

Securing PaaS Resources with Private Endpoints

A fundamental security design principle is keeping traffic off the public internet. If a solution requires secure, private connectivity from an Azure Virtual Network (VNet) to a PaaS service like Azure SQL Database, the required feature is a Private Endpoint. A Private Endpoint creates a network interface within your VNet, giving the PaaS resource a private IP address and ensuring all communication is routed through the Microsoft backbone, never touching the public internet.

Global Scaling and Web Security

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/frontdoor

Building Robust Hybrid and Data Architectures

Modern solutions often span on-premises data centers and multiple clouds. The AZ-305 tests your knowledge of how to unify these environments.

Unifying Governance with Azure Arc

If an organization wants to extend its Azure management plane to on-premises servers and VMware VMs, allowing them to apply Azure Policy and use Azure monitoring tools universally, they need Azure Arc. Azure Arc projects these external resources into the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) control plane, enabling consistent governance and management across hybrid environments. This is crucial for simplifying complex, dispersed infrastructures.

Designing High-Availability Data Platforms

Architects must recommend the right database solution based on availability requirements. If a multi-region application requires a database that can handle large volumes of read and write requests globally with guaranteed low latency and automatic multi-master replication, Azure Cosmos DB is the only service that fits the design. It supports multiple consistency levels and is purpose-built for global-scale applications.

Conclusion: Achieve the Azure Solutions Architect Expert Credential

The Azure AZ-305 exam is the gateway to becoming an expert architect. Your success depends on moving beyond simple memorization and developing a deep, practical understanding of Azure’s services and their architectural trade-offs. By committing to high-quality preparation using verified resources like these free Microsoft Azure practice tests, you will not only pass the exam but gain the confidence to lead complex cloud design projects. Please do not forget to checkout other free Microsoft Azure Practice Tests on CertyBuddy.com: https://certybuddy.com/practice-tests/?vendor=azure

Take action now. Stop waiting for the right moment and solidify your expertise by tackling the full interactive quiz.

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AZ-305 Practice Test 2025

Free Microsoft Azure Architect Design Mock Exam

Consider the Azure feature that provides physically separate locations within the same Azure region.

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1. An organization has a business-critical application running on Azure VMs. They need to ensure that the application can withstand a datacenter-level failure within an Azure region. What is the best high-availability strategy to implement?

Consider the Azure service that provides a managed, global transit network architecture.

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2. An organization wants to simplify its branch office networking by connecting all branches to Azure and enabling branch-to-branch connectivity through the Microsoft global network. They need a managed hub-and-spoke networking service that provides scalable site-to-site VPN and ExpressRoute connectivity. What Azure service is designed for this?

Think of this service as a firewall for your virtual machines and subnets.

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3. What is the primary function of a Network Security Group (NSG) in Azure?

Consider the Azure service specifically designed as a secure store for secrets, keys, and certificates.

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4. A company is designing a system that uses multiple Azure services. They need to securely store and manage application secrets, such as API keys and database connection strings, without hardcoding them in the application code. Which Azure service is the best practice for this requirement?

Think about the Microsoft Entra feature that gives an Azure resource an automatically managed identity.

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5. An application running in Azure needs to access secrets from Azure Key Vault. To follow the principle of least privilege and avoid managing credentials in code, what is the recommended method for the application to authenticate to Key Vault?

Think about which principle focuses on minimizing the level of permissions granted to a user or service.

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6. An architect needs to implement a Zero Trust security model. A key principle is to restrict user access with ‘just-in-time and just-enough-access’ (JIT/JEA). Which Zero Trust principle does this directly support?

Think about the networking feature that allows you to customize and override the default routing behavior of a subnet.

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7. A security team is concerned about unrestricted outbound internet access from VMs in a subnet. They want to force all internet-bound traffic from the subnet to be routed through a central Azure Firewall for inspection before going to the internet. How can this be achieved?

Look for the compute option that explicitly mentions auto-scaling and the ability to pause during inactivity.

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8. A retail company is building a new e-commerce platform on Azure that will experience unpredictable, spiky traffic patterns. The database must automatically scale its compute resources up during sales events and scale down—or even pause—during periods of inactivity to minimize costs. Which Azure SQL Database compute tier is designed for this scenario?

Think about the Azure service that is synonymous with ‘functions as a service’ (FaaS).

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9. A developer needs to implement an event-driven, serverless compute solution that executes a small piece of code in response to an event, such as an HTTP request or a new message in a queue. The solution should minimize infrastructure management and only incur costs when the code is running. Which Azure service is most appropriate?

Think about which service is designed for massive-scale event ingestion and which storage service is purpose-built for big data analytics.

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10. A data engineering team needs to design a solution for ingesting and processing large volumes of streaming data from IoT devices in near real-time. The solution must then store the processed data in a data lake. Which two Azure services are best suited for data ingestion and data storage in this scenario?

Think about the hardware-level security component used for securely storing cryptographic material.

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11. For an Azure Virtual Machine, what is the purpose of the virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) feature provided by Trusted Launch?

Consider the security feature that operates at the application layer (Layer 7) and understands web traffic.

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12. A company wants to protect its web application, hosted behind an Azure Application Gateway, from common attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting. What feature or service should be enabled?

Focus on the redundancy option whose name explicitly mentions both zones and its scope within a single region.

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13. Which type of Azure Storage redundancy option replicates data synchronously across three Azure availability zones within the primary region?

Check the source that discusses the lifecycle of different Azure certifications.

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14. The DP-203: Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure certification is scheduled for retirement. Based on the provided materials, when is the retirement date?

Consider the scope of failure that this feature is designed to mitigate.

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15. What is the primary benefit of using Azure Availability Zones for a virtual machine deployment?

Consider the purchasing option that provides the best discount for a long-term commitment to a specific resource type.

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16. A company is designing a solution for a stable, predictable workload running on Azure VMs that will be active 24/7 for the next three years. They want to achieve the maximum possible cost savings on compute. Which Azure purchasing option is most suitable?

Consider the Azure governance service that enforces rules on resource properties at the time of creation.

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17. A financial services company must ensure that all Azure resources are deployed only in the ‘Canada Central’ and ‘Canada East’ regions to comply with data residency regulations. What is the most effective way to enforce this rule across their entire Azure subscription?

Compare the data storage approaches listed for on-premises versus cloud architectures in the source material.

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18. An architect needs to design a data solution using a mix of storage technologies (polyglot persistence), such as a relational database for transactional data and a NoSQL database for unstructured data. This design pattern is characteristic of which architectural style?

Consider the highest level of the Azure resource hierarchy used for managing multiple subscriptions.

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19. A company is setting up an Azure environment and needs to organize its resources. They have multiple subscriptions for different departments (e.g., IT, Finance, Marketing). They need a way to apply governance policies and access controls consistently across all subscriptions. What should they use to group the subscriptions?

Consider which Azure object is needed to represent the remote, non-Azure side of a VPN connection.

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20. When configuring an Azure VPN Gateway, what is the purpose of the ‘Local Network Gateway’ resource?

Think about the modern boot architecture and the security enhancements it enables.

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21. What is the key advantage of Generation 2 (Gen2) Virtual Machines in Azure compared to Generation 1 (Gen1) VMs?

Consider the feature designed to manage the capacity of the local server by keeping only a subset of data.

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22. An organization is using Azure File Sync to centralize their on-premises file shares in Azure Files. They want to ensure that only the most frequently accessed files are cached locally on their Windows Server to save disk space. What Azure File Sync feature should be enabled?

Look for the solution that places a network interface for the PaaS service directly inside your virtual network.

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23. A company is developing a new web application and needs to provide secure, private connectivity from an Azure Virtual Network (VNet) to an Azure SQL Database. The solution must ensure that traffic to the database never traverses the public internet. Which networking feature should be implemented?

Think about the principles that enable scalability and resilience in a distributed environment.

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24. An architect is comparing typical on-premises design patterns with cloud-native design. Which of the following is a characteristic of a typical cloud design?

Focus on the feature within Azure Virtual Network Manager that creates logical groupings of networks.

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25. A team is managing a complex Azure environment and wants to group several VNets for centralized management of security policies. They need to define conditional statements that dynamically update the group membership based on resource tags. Which feature of Azure Virtual Network Manager should they use?

Focus on the Entra ID service that manages the lifecycle of highly privileged role assignments.

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26. An administrator needs to grant a user just-in-time (JIT) access to the Virtual Machine Contributor role on a specific resource group. The access should require manager approval and be automatically revoked after 4 hours. Which Microsoft Entra ID feature should be used?

Focus on the service whose primary purpose is to host and manage DNS zones and records.

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27. Which Azure service is a hosting service for DNS domains that provides name resolution using Microsoft Azure infrastructure?

Consider the messaging pattern where one sender broadcasts messages to many receivers.

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28. An application is being designed with a microservices architecture. Communication between services must be asynchronous to ensure loose coupling and resilience. One service needs to publish events, and multiple other services need to subscribe to those events independently. Which messaging model and Azure service best fit this requirement?

Think about the storage tier that prioritizes the lowest possible storage cost over fast data retrieval.

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29. You need to design a storage solution for archiving large amounts of data (terabytes) that is rarely accessed but must be retained for 7 years for compliance. The primary goal is to minimize storage costs. Which Azure Storage access tier is the most appropriate?

The name of this topology describes its physical layout, resembling a wheel.

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30. An architect is designing a network topology where a central ‘hub’ VNet contains shared services like Azure Firewall and domain controllers. Multiple ‘spoke’ VNets for different application workloads must connect to this hub to access the shared services. What is this common Azure network topology called?

Think about which Azure service is designed for global application delivery and provides Layer 7 capabilities.

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31. An architect is designing a global web application that requires low-latency content delivery to users worldwide, protection against common web exploits like cross-site scripting, and traffic routing to the nearest healthy backend. Which combination of services provides the best solution?

Look for the diagnostic tool that simulates a five-tuple packet flow to test security rules.

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32. A security team needs to analyze network traffic patterns for a virtual machine to diagnose a potential misconfiguration. They require a tool that can verify if a packet with a specific source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port, and protocol is allowed or denied by the effective Network Security Group rules. Which Network Watcher tool should they use?

Look for the Layer 7 routing feature that inspects the request’s URL.

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33. An organization is using Azure Application Gateway for its web application. It wants to route requests with a URL path starting with `/video/*` to a specific backend pool of servers optimized for streaming, while all other requests go to a general-purpose backend pool. What feature of Application Gateway enables this?

Think of this as the underlying ‘server’ or compute environment that hosts your web applications.

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34. What is the role of an Azure App Service Plan?

Focus on the connectivity service that uses a private link through a third-party provider instead of the public internet.

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35. An architect needs to design a hybrid connectivity solution between an on-premises datacenter and an Azure VNet. The connection must provide a private, dedicated link with guaranteed bandwidth and lower latency than a standard VPN over the public internet. Which service should be recommended?

Consider the two types of resource locks available and which one specifically targets the deletion action.

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36. A company wants to prevent administrators from accidentally deleting a critical production resource group. However, they must still be able to modify the resources within it. What type of resource lock should be applied?

Think about the two main components needed to serve a website from a specific URL securely.

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37. A company is migrating its on-premises web application to Azure App Service. The application must be accessible via a custom domain (e.g., www.contoso.com) and all traffic must be encrypted using HTTPS. What configuration is required on the App Service?

Focus on the service that provides load balancing at the DNS level.

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38. A global company has deployed an application in multiple Azure regions. They need a DNS-based traffic load-balancing service that can route users to the geographically closest endpoint, and in case of an endpoint failure, automatically redirect traffic to the next closest healthy endpoint. Which service should they use?

Consider which Azure load balancing service operates at the TCP/UDP level.

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39. A company is deploying a multi-tier web application to Azure VMs. They need to distribute incoming internet traffic to the web-tier VMs. This load balancing must operate at the transport layer (Layer 4) and use a five-tuple hash to direct traffic. Which Azure service is the most appropriate choice?

Look for the service that provides a managed version of the industry-standard container orchestrator.

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40. A development team is building a microservices application using containers. They need a fully managed orchestration service that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of their containerized applications, including features like auto-scaling, health monitoring, and service discovery. Which Azure compute service is the most appropriate choice?

Focus on the Azure Migrate component that deals with discovery and pre-migration planning.

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41. A company is planning to migrate several on-premises physical servers and VMware VMs to Azure. Before migration, they need to assess the readiness of these machines, estimate the required Azure VM sizes, and understand application dependencies. Which tool within the Azure Migrate service is used for this purpose?

Think about the security practice that shifts security checks to the left, into the development process.

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42. A DevOps team wants to integrate security scanning directly into their CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps. The goal is to detect and fix vulnerabilities in their application code before it is deployed. Which Azure security practice does this align with?

Think about data protection at the individual object level against accidental overwrites.

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43. When designing a storage solution with Azure Storage, what is the purpose of enabling blob versioning?

Consider the Azure service that is purpose-built for orchestrating replication and failover for business continuity.

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44. A company has a set of Azure VMs running a critical application. They need a disaster recovery solution that replicates these VMs to a secondary Azure region. In the event of a primary region outage, they must be able to fail over the application to the secondary region. Which Azure service is designed for this purpose?

Look for the feature within the storage account’s data management settings designed for automating data tiering.

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45. A company needs to implement a policy to automatically move blobs in a storage account from the Hot tier to the Cool tier if they haven’t been modified in 30 days, and then to the Archive tier after 90 days of no modification. What Azure Storage feature should be used to automate this process?

Think about what layers of the technology stack you control when you deploy a virtual machine.

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46. According to the shared responsibility model in Azure, which of the following is the customer’s responsibility in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployment?

Consider the Azure service suite that is dedicated to the software development lifecycle.

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47. A developer needs to create a CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps to deploy a machine learning model that predicts customer license status. The pipeline must be scalable and enable seamless integration and continuous delivery. Which Azure service is central to building this MLOps pipeline?

Consider which storage service is designed to be a cloud replacement for traditional on-premises file servers.

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48. A company is migrating a large on-premises file server to Azure. They need a managed file share service in the cloud that can be accessed using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol from their on-premises Windows clients. Which Azure Storage service should they use?

Look for the Azure service described as a cloud-native SIEM and SOAR solution.

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49. An organization needs to collect, correlate, and analyze security data from various sources, including Azure resources, on-premises systems, and other cloud platforms. They require a cloud-native solution with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) capabilities. Which Azure service fits this description?

Think about how you provide input values to a template when you initiate a deployment.

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50. A developer is creating an ARM template to deploy a storage account. They want to ensure the template can be reused for different environments (dev, test, prod) by specifying a different storage account name for each deployment. What ARM template feature should be used to achieve this?

Consider a mechanism that provides temporary, delegated access to storage resources without sharing primary credentials.

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51. An organization needs to grant a third-party application read-only access to specific blob containers in an Azure Storage account. The access must expire after 30 days and should not expose the account’s primary access keys. What is the most secure and appropriate method to grant this access?

Think about the Azure service designed specifically for resource governance and enforcing rules on resource configurations during deployment.

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52. An architect needs to enforce a corporate policy that all new storage accounts must have HTTPS traffic enabled and Geo-redundant storage (GRS) configured. If a user attempts to create a non-compliant storage account, the deployment must be blocked. Which Azure service should be used to implement this?

Consider the IaaS option that provides the highest level of compatibility with an on-premises SQL Server.

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53. A company has a legacy monolithic application running on-premises. As a first step to moving to the cloud, they want to lift-and-shift this application to an Azure IaaS environment. Which specialized Azure service offering facilitates the migration of existing SQL workloads to the cloud at a reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)?

Consider the governance tool that acts as a package for deploying a full environment, including templates and policies.

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54. An operations team needs to deploy a set of resources (a VNet, a storage account, and a VM) repeatedly for different projects. They want to ensure that every deployment is identical and includes specific tags and RBAC roles. What Azure feature allows them to package these components into a single, deployable artifact?

Look for the Azure Monitor component that provides a tailored, ‘out-of-the-box’ monitoring experience for certain services.

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55. Which Azure Monitor feature offers curated visualizations and monitoring tools for specific Azure services like VMs and Containers, providing deep insights into their health and performance?

Look for the service dedicated to the financial operations (FinOps) aspect of using Azure.

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56. A company wants to analyze the cost of its Azure resources and allocate spending to different departments. Which Azure service provides tools for viewing costs, setting budgets, and receiving alerts when spending exceeds a threshold?

Look for the PaaS service that acts as a secure proxy for remote management connections.

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57. A solutions architect needs to provide secure, browser-based RDP and SSH access to virtual machines in a VNet without exposing any public IP addresses on the VMs themselves. The solution should be a managed PaaS offering. What should be deployed?

Consider how services can dynamically adapt their capacity in response to performance metrics like CPU usage.

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58. What is the primary purpose of enabling autoscaling for a service like an App Service Plan or a Virtual Machine Scale Set?

Look for the Azure database service known for its global distribution and multi-model API support.

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59. A solutions architect is designing a data storage solution. The application requires a NoSQL database that offers guaranteed low latency, global distribution with multi-region write capabilities, and support for multiple APIs (like SQL, MongoDB, and Gremlin). Which Azure database service meets all these requirements?

Consider the Azure service that projects external resources into the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) control plane.

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60. An organization wants to extend its on-premises data center to Azure while maintaining a consistent management and governance plane across both environments. They need to apply Azure policies, monitor, and manage on-premises physical servers and VMware VMs using Azure tools. Which service is designed for this hybrid scenario?

Consider the managed service based on a well-known open-source in-memory key-value store.

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61. An application requires a caching layer to improve performance by storing frequently accessed data in memory. The solution must be a fully managed service, provide low latency, and be based on a popular open-source in-memory data store. Which Azure service is the best fit?

Consider the native Azure feature for connecting virtual networks, and which variant works across regions.

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62. An architect is designing a solution where two VNets in different Azure regions must be able to communicate with each other securely. The VNets belong to the same Azure AD tenant. What is the simplest and most direct way to connect these two VNets?

Think about the Microsoft Entra service that acts as an ‘if-then’ policy engine for user sign-ins.

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63. A security administrator wants to enforce that every time a user with the ‘Owner’ role logs into the Azure portal, they must use multi-factor authentication (MFA), regardless of their location. Which service is best suited to create this policy?

Think about the mechanism a load balancer uses to check if a server is responsive.

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64. Which component of an Azure Standard Load Balancer is used to determine the health of the backend instances and remove unhealthy instances from rotation?

Think about the serverless service that provides a visual designer for creating complex orchestrations with connectors.

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65. A company is building a serverless workflow that orchestrates calls to several different services, including Azure Functions and third-party APIs. The workflow involves conditional logic, loops, and parallel execution branches. Which Azure service is best suited for designing and running this type of stateful workflow?

Consider how cloud architectures handle the inevitability of component failures.

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66. According to the Well-Architected Framework, when designing for reliability in the cloud, what is the philosophical shift from traditional on-premises design?

Think about what raw material a SIEM tool consumes to perform its analysis.

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67. A user on the G2 platform reported a limitation of Microsoft Sentinel where costs can become high and unpredictable. What is the primary driver of Microsoft Sentinel’s cost structure?

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