Azure AZ-204 flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Function trigger binding

A binding that specifies the event or data source that starts a function execution; each function has exactly one trigger.

Orchestrator determinism

Durable orchestrator code must be deterministic, so it must not use DateTime.Now, Guid.NewGuid, random numbers, or direct I/O; use context APIs and activity functions instead.

Consumption plan timeout

In the Azure Functions Consumption plan, a function execution defaults to a 5-minute timeout and can be configured up to a maximum of 10 minutes.

Deployment slot sticky setting

An app setting or connection string marked as a deployment slot setting stays with its slot during a swap instead of moving with the app content.

Fan-out/fan-in pattern

A Durable Functions pattern that runs multiple activity functions in parallel, then aggregates their results after all complete, typically using Task.WhenAll.

Container Instances restart policy

Azure Container Instances restart policies are Always, OnFailure, and Never; Always restarts every container, OnFailure restarts only failed containers, Never never restarts.

Block blob maximum size

A block blob can contain up to 50,000 committed blocks and reach a maximum size of about 190.7 TiB; blocks can be committed in any order.

Page blob use case

Page blobs store 512-byte pages and back Azure managed and unmanaged VHDs; they support random read/write and are not suited for append-only logs.

User delegation SAS

A blob SAS secured with Microsoft Entra ID credentials rather than the storage account key; it is backed by a user delegation key and has a maximum validity of seven days.

Cosmos DB consistency order

From strongest to weakest, Cosmos DB consistency levels are Strong, Bounded staleness, Session, Consistent prefix, and Eventual.

Cosmos DB partition key

The partition key is chosen at container creation and cannot be changed afterward; it should have high cardinality and distribute requests evenly across logical partitions.

Table entity group transaction

An Azure Table storage batch operation can include up to 100 entities in the same partition key, with no duplicate row keys, and is atomic.

System-assigned managed identity

A managed identity created as part of an Azure resource and deleted with it; its credentials are managed by Azure and it can be granted RBAC access to other resources.

User-assigned managed identity

A standalone managed identity created as an Azure resource that can be assigned to multiple Azure resources and has an independent lifecycle.

DefaultAzureCredential chain

A credential type that tries multiple authentication methods in order, including environment variables, managed identity, and developer tools such as Azure CLI, returning the first that succeeds.

Key Vault access model

Key Vault supports two permission models: Azure RBAC roles at vault scope, or vault access policies that grant specific key, secret, and certificate permissions to identities.

App Service Easy Auth

App Service authentication and authorization can require users to authenticate before requests reach app code; it supports Microsoft Entra ID, Google, Facebook, and other identity providers.

Shared key authorization

Storage account shared key authorization uses account keys to sign requests; disabling shared key access forces clients to use Microsoft Entra ID or SAS tokens instead.

Adaptive sampling

Application Insights adaptive sampling automatically reduces telemetry volume to a target rate while preserving a statistically representative sample of requests, dependencies, and exceptions.

App Insights connection string

An Application Insights connection string identifies the resource and ingestion endpoint; it replaces the older instrumentation key and is the recommended configuration value.

KQL summarize operator

The summarize operator in Kusto Query Language groups rows by one or more columns and computes aggregate values such as count, sum, avg, min, and max.

Metrics vs logs

Azure Monitor metrics are numeric time-series values stored for near-real-time alerting, while logs are stored in a Log Analytics workspace and queried with KQL.

Redis eviction policy

Azure Cache for Redis maxmemory-policy values such as volatile-lru and allkeys-lru determine which keys Redis evicts when memory is full.

Exponential backoff

A retry strategy that increases the delay between attempts, often with jitter, to avoid overwhelming a failing dependency and to handle transient faults.

APIM policy pipeline

API Management policies execute in the order inbound, backend, outbound, and on-error; policy scopes include global, product, API, and operation.

Subscription key header

API Management subscriptions identify callers and pass a key in the Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key request header or as a query parameter, depending on configuration.

Service Bus dead-letter queue

A secondary queue that receives messages that cannot be delivered or processed, including expired messages, message lock lost, or filter evaluation exceptions.

Event Hubs consumer group

A consumer group is a view of an Event Hub; each group maintains its own offset and checkpoint state, allowing multiple independent consumers to read the same stream.

Event Grid vs Event Hubs

Event Grid routes discrete events to handlers with filtering and retries; Event Hubs ingests high-throughput streaming telemetry for replay and analytics.

Service Bus topic filters

Service Bus subscriptions can use SQL filters, correlation filters, or boolean true/false filters to select which topic messages are delivered to that subscription.

Microsoft Graph endpoint

Microsoft Graph exposes REST endpoints such as /me and /users and is called with a Microsoft Entra ID access token using the Graph SDK or HTTP.

APIM rate limit policy

The rate-limit policy in API Management caps calls per subscription or key over a time window; rate-limit-by-key supports custom key expressions.