20 free AZ-900 practice questions with answers and explanations, covering cloud concepts, Azure architecture and services, and management and governance. AZ-900 is a common first step into cloud careers, and these questions test the vocabulary the exam relies on.
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Question 1. Under the shared responsibility model, which is ALWAYS the customer's responsibility, regardless of service type?
Answer: D, Data and identities/accounts. Data, devices, and accounts/identities are always the customer's responsibility; physical infrastructure is always the provider's.
Question 2. All requests to create or manage Azure resources — via portal, CLI, or templates — are processed by which layer?
Answer: D, Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is Azure's management layer; every create/update/delete request goes through it for consistent auth and management.
Question 3. An e-commerce site automatically adds web instances during a flash sale and removes them afterward, in near real time. Which cloud benefit is this?
Answer: A, Elasticity. Automatic, dynamic, real-time scaling to match demand is elasticity.
Question 4. Which benefit refers to a system's ability to recover from failures and keep functioning?
Answer: C, Reliability. Reliability is recovering from failure and continuing to operate, via redundant design.
Question 5. Adding or removing whole VM instances behind a load balancer to match demand is…
Answer: B, Horizontal scaling (scaling out/in). Changing the number of instances is horizontal scaling (out/in).
Question 6. An organisation needs full control of the OS to run custom software and perform a lift-and-shift migration. Which service type gives the most control?
Answer: D, IaaS. IaaS gives the most control — the customer manages the OS and everything above it.
Question 7. Across all cloud service types, who is responsible for managing user accounts and access?
Answer: C, The customer. Accounts and identities are always the customer's responsibility regardless of service type.
Question 8. An application must stay available even if one datacentre within a region fails. What should you deploy across?
Answer: B, Availability zones. Availability zones are physically separate datacentres within a region, protecting against datacentre-level failure.
Question 9. A developer wants to run event-driven code billed per execution with no servers to manage. Which service?
Answer: C, Azure Functions. Azure Functions is serverless, event-driven compute billed per execution.
Question 10. You want to deploy a group of identical, load-balanced VMs that automatically scale with demand. What do you use?
Answer: D, A virtual machine scale set. Scale sets deploy identical, load-balanced, autoscaling VMs.
Question 11. An Azure SQL database holding customer records must be reachable from the application's virtual network and nowhere else, with no exposure on the internet. What should you give it?
Answer: D, A private endpoint. A private endpoint gives the service a private IP address from the virtual network's own address space, so it is reached from inside that network. A firewall rule narrows who may use a public endpoint, but the endpoint is still on the internet.
Question 12. Which redundancy option replicates your data to the paired region to survive a full regional outage?
Answer: A, GRS (geo-redundant storage). GRS replicates to the paired region; LRS only keeps copies in one datacentre.
Question 13. You want to require MFA only when users sign in from outside the corporate network. Which feature enforces this?
Answer: A, Conditional Access. Conditional Access applies access controls (like requiring MFA) based on signals such as location.
Question 14. Determining what an authenticated user is allowed to do is called…
Answer: B, Authorisation. Authorisation grants permissions after authentication establishes identity.
Question 15. You want to compare the cost of running workloads on-premises versus in Azure to justify migration. Which tool?
Answer: D, The TCO calculator. The TCO calculator compares on-prem vs Azure costs to build a migration case.
Question 16. Inbound (ingress) data transfer to Azure is generally…
Answer: A, Free, while outbound (egress) is often charged. Ingress is typically free; egress (outbound) data transfer is commonly billed.
Question 17. Where can an auditor obtain Microsoft's compliance certifications and audit reports for Azure?
Answer: A, The Service Trust Portal. The Service Trust Portal publishes Microsoft's compliance and audit documentation.
Question 18. You want every resource to be required to have an 'Owner' tag, enforced automatically. What do you use?
Answer: C, Azure Policy to require the tag. Azure Policy can require (and enforce) tags such as Owner on all resources.
Question 19. Which is a simpler, more readable Infrastructure-as-Code language that compiles down to ARM JSON?
Answer: C, Bicep. Bicep is Microsoft's concise IaC language that transpiles to ARM templates.
Question 20. Where do you get a personalised view of outages and planned maintenance affecting the Azure services you use?
Answer: A, Azure Service Health. Service Health shows the status of the specific Azure services and regions you use.
It's a fundamentals exam, so it tests whether you can describe Azure services and when to use them, not whether you can configure them. The trickiest questions pair two similar-sounding services, such as the Pricing calculator and the TCO calculator.
Most people studying part-time plan two to four weeks at 20 to 30 minutes a day. Give the most time to Azure architecture and services, which carries the largest weighting.
No. Microsoft exam questions are confidential, and sharing them breaks the agreement every candidate accepts. These are original questions written to the published skills outline, so they test the same knowledge in the same style.
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Answer each one before you look at the explanation, and keep a list of the ones you get wrong. That list is your study plan: it's made of exactly the things you don't know yet.
CertBuddi is an independent study aid, not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft. These are original practice questions, not real exam questions.