Azure Storage and Data Architecture Flashcards

Your application needs to store petabytes of unstructured data with tiered access: frequently accessed data served quickly and archival data stored cheaply. Which Azure Storage configuration best meets this need?

Answer: Azure Blob Storage with Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers using lifecycle management policies

Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management policies automatically move data between Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive tiers based on last-modified or last-accessed time.

A database workload requires sub-millisecond disk latency with guaranteed IOPS for mission-critical OLTP. Which Azure Disk type should you choose?

Answer: Ultra Disk Managed Disks

Ultra Disks provide sub-millisecond latency and allow you to dynamically configure IOPS and throughput without detaching the disk.

You need to design a shared file system for a legacy Windows application that requires SMB access from Azure VMs and on-premises servers simultaneously. Which solution is appropriate?

Answer: Azure Files with SMB shares

Azure Files provides fully managed SMB file shares accessible from both Azure VMs and on-premises via Azure File Sync or direct SMB over the internet.

Your data engineering team needs a storage account that supports hierarchical namespace for big data analytics workloads using Apache Spark. Which storage type should you enable?

Answer: Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2) with hierarchical namespace enabled

Enabling the hierarchical namespace on an Azure Storage account creates ADLS Gen2, which provides directory semantics and atomic operations optimized for analytics engines.

You need to ensure that a Storage account's data cannot be deleted or modified for 7 years to comply with financial regulations. Which feature should you configure?

Answer: Immutable storage with time-based retention policies (WORM)

Immutable Blob Storage with time-based retention (WORM) policies prevents any deletion or modification of blobs for the specified retention period.

A storage account will be accessed by thousands of clients concurrently. You need to minimize latency for reads of the same data across multiple Azure regions. Which feature should you enable?

Answer: Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS)

RA-GRS replicates data to a secondary region and provides a read-only endpoint in that region, enabling lower-latency reads closer to geographically dispersed clients.