A fifteen-year-old accounting application needs a kernel-level driver, a scheduled task that edits the registry, and a runtime version nobody supports any more. The business wants it running in Azure this quarter with as few code changes as possible. Where does it go?
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), objective architecture-and-services. Azure architecture and services medium
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The options
Correct On an Azure virtual machine
Correct. Infrastructure as a service gives you the operating system, so drivers, registry changes and unsupported runtimes are all yours to install. Lift and shift trades operational responsibility for compatibility, and compatibility is the binding constraint here.
Not correct On Azure App Service
Wrong. App Service runs your application on a platform Microsoft patches and constrains; you do not get kernel drivers or arbitrary registry surgery. Prefer the platform when the application fits it, and this one plainly does not.
Not correct As an Azure Function
Wrong. Functions expects short, event-driven code on supported runtimes — the opposite of a long-lived application with system-level dependencies and an obsolete runtime.
Not correct In Azure Container Instances
Wrong. A container shares the host's kernel, so a kernel-level driver requirement is not something you can package into an image and hand to a container runtime.
Why
The more a platform manages for you, the less it lets you change. That single sentence resolves most hosting questions on this exam: read the requirements for anything below the application — a kernel driver, registry access, an unsupported runtime, a specific patch level — and each one is an argument for a virtual machine. Read requirements about scaling, patching and release mechanics instead, and they are arguments for the platform.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Microsoft AZ-900 study guide skill area architecture-and-services.compute-and-networking
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective architecture-and-services and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
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