Containerized Solutions on Azure
20-25%of exam
AI Solutions with Data Services
25-30%of exam
Connect and Consume Azure Services
20-25%of exam
Secure, Monitor, Troubleshoot
20-25%of exam
Quick Facts
- Exam
- AI-200
- Credential
- Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate
- Time
- 120 min
- Pass
- 700 of 1000
- Score type
- Scaled, not 70%
- Questions
- Not published by Microsoft
- Level
- Associate
- Language
- English only
- Fee
- Varies by country
- Renewal
- Free yearly assessment
- Retake
- 24 hours, then 14 days
- Blueprint
- Apr 15 2026
Container Apps Defaults
No rule: HTTP, 0 to 10
10 concurrent requestsPoll every 30 secondsCooldown 300 secondsNo ingress? minReplicas 1
Container Apps vs AKS
Container Apps
- Serverless, no cluster
- KEDA built in
- Scales to zero
AKS
- Full Kubernetes control
- Manifests and kubectl
- You manage nodes
Managed vs full control
Compute Picker
- Need full cluster control→AKS(Manifests, kubectl)
- Containers without Kubernetes→Container Apps(Serverless)
- Single web container→App Service(PaaS)
- Event-driven code only→Azure Functions(Serverless)
- Run to completion→Container Apps job(Batch)
- Build without local Docker→az acr build(ACR Tasks)
- Blue-green or canary→Multiple revision mode(Traffic split)
- Scale on queue depth→KEDA custom rule(Service Bus)
Container Registry
- ACR
- Private image registry
- az acr build
- Builds image in cloudNo Docker
- ACR Tasks
- Automated cloud builds
- Base image trigger
- Rebuilds on patch
- AcrPull
- Role that pulls images
- Admin account
- Shared password, keep disabled
- Premium tier
- Geo-replication, private endpoints
- Image digest
- Immutable content hash
- Image tag
- Mutable pointer
Single vs Multiple Revision
Single
- Default mode
- New revision takes all
- No traffic split
Multiple
- Several revisions active
- Weighted traffic split
- Blue-green and canary
Splitting traffic needs multiple
App Service Containers
- WEBSITES_PORT
- Port the container listens
- App settings
- Injected as environment variables
- Key Vault reference
- Secret resolved at startup
- Managed identity pull
- Keyless registry access
- Deployment slot
- Stage, then swap
- Slot setting
- Stays with its slot
- Always On
- Stops idle unload
- Health check
- Removes unhealthy instances
Template vs Configuration Scope
Template
- Image, env, resources
- Scale rules
- Creates new revision
Configuration
- Ingress, secrets, registry
- Revision mode
- Applies to all
New revision vs global
Container Apps
- Environment
- Network and logging boundary
- Revision
- Immutable app snapshot
- Template change
- Creates a new revision
- Configuration change
- Applies to all revisions
- Ingress
- External or internal
- Dapr sidecar
- Pub/sub, state, bindings
- Jobs
- Run to completion
- Secrets
- Referenced by environment variables
- Workload profile
- Dedicated or consumption compute
Scaling and KEDA
- KEDA
- Event-driven autoscaler
- Default rule
- HTTP, 0-10 replicasDefault
- concurrentRequests
- Default 10 per replica
- minReplicas 0
- Scales to zero
- No ingress risk
- Set minReplicas to 1
- Custom scaler
- Service Bus, Kafka, Redis
- Polling interval
- 30 seconds
- Cooldown period
- 300 seconds
- Scale formula
- ceil(current / target)
AKS Essentials
- kubectl apply -f
- Deploys a manifest
- Deployment
- Manages replica pods
- Service
- Stable network endpoint
- Ingress
- HTTP routing layer
- ConfigMap
- Non-secret configuration
- Secret
- Base64 encoded, not encrypted
- kubectl logs
- Container stdout output
- kubectl describe
- Events and failure reasons
- Workload identity
- Pod-level Entra token
- az aks update --attach-acr
- Grants AcrPull to cluster
Domain Weights
Data leads; other three tie
Containers: 20-25%Data services: 25-30%Connect: 20-25%Secure: 20-25%
Cosmos Vector vs pgvector
Cosmos NoSQL
- JSON with embeddings
- VectorDistance function
- diskANN at scale
PostgreSQL
- Relational joins and filters
- <-> and <=> operators
- HNSW or IVFFlat
Documents vs relational
Data Store Picker
- Relational plus vectors→PostgreSQL + pgvector(SQL joins)
- Schema-free JSON documents→Cosmos DB NoSQL(Global scale)
- Sub-millisecond lookups→Azure Managed Redis(In-memory)
- Millions of vectors→diskANN index(Cosmos DB)
- Exact recall, small set→flat index(505 dimensions)
- Under 50,000 vectors→quantizedFlat index(Lower RU)
- Best recall in Postgres→HNSW index(Slower build)
- Faster build in Postgres→IVFFlat index(Tune probes)
- React to item changes→Change feed processor(Cosmos DB)
Cosmos DB for NoSQL
- RU/s
- Throughput currency
- Partition key
- Spreads logical partitions
- Autoscale
- Ranges max/10 to max
- Session
- Default consistency levelDefault
- Strong
- Highest RU cost
- Indexing policy
- Include or exclude paths
- TTL
- Automatic item expiry
- Change feed
- Ordered record of changes
- _ts
- Modification timestamp
- _etag
- Optimistic concurrency token
pgvector Operators
<-> L2, <=> cosine, <#> inner
<-> Euclidean distance<=> cosine distance<#> negative inner product
HNSW vs IVFFlat
HNSW
- Graph based
- Best recall
- Slower, larger build
IVFFlat
- Cluster lists
- Faster build
- Needs representative data
Recall vs build cost
Cosmos Vector Search
- Container vector policy
- path, dataType, dimensions, distance
- VectorDistance()
- Similarity system function
- flat
- Exact search, 505 dimensions
- quantizedFlat
- Compressed, up to 4096
- diskANN
- Approximate, above 50,000 vectors
- distanceFunction
- cosine, dotproduct, euclidean
- TOP N
- Always cap vector queries
- 1,000 vector floor
- Needed by quantized indexes
- Default dimensions
- 1536
Vector Index Limits
flat 505, quantizedFlat 4096, diskANN 4096
flat: exact, small setsquantizedFlat: under 50,000diskANN: over 50,000Quantized needs 1,000 vectors
flat vs diskANN
flat
- Brute force scan
- 100% recall
- Max 505 dimensions
diskANN
- Approximate search
- Max 4096 dimensions
- Needs 1,000 vectors
Exact vs scalable
pgvector on PostgreSQL
- azure.extensions
- Allowlist before creating
- CREATE EXTENSION vector
- Extension name is vector
- vector(n)
- Column type, n dimensions
- <->
- Euclidean L2 distance
- <=>
- Cosine distance
- <#>
- Negative inner product
- HNSW
- Graph index, best recall
- IVFFlat
- List index, faster build
- hnsw.ef_search
- Recall versus latency knob
- ivfflat.probes
- Lists scanned per query
- Metadata filter
- WHERE clause narrows RAG
Consistency Ladder
Strong > Bounded > Session > Prefix > Eventual
Session is defaultStrong costs most RUsEventual is cheapest
Azure Managed Redis
- Cache-aside
- Load on cache miss
- EXPIRE
- Time-based invalidation
- Eviction policy
- What drops when full
- FT.CREATE
- Builds a search index
- Vector index types
- FLAT or HNSW
- Tiers
- Memory, Balanced, Compute, Flash
- Flash Optimized
- No search or vector
- Entra ID auth
- Keyless Redis access
- Redis version
- 7.4.x
- Semantic cache
- Vector-matched response reuse
Event Grid Retry
10s, 30s, 1m, 5m, then hours
TTL default 1440 minutes30 attempts defaultDead-letter needs storage
Service Bus vs Event Grid
Service Bus
- Carries commands and work
- Ordering, sessions, DLQ
- Consumer pulls
Event Grid
- Announces facts
- Pushes with filters
- At-least-once, unordered
Work queue vs notification
Messaging Picker
- Ordered transactional work→Service Bus queue(Sessions)
- Fan-out with filters→Service Bus topic(Subscriptions)
- Reactive discrete events→Event Grid(CloudEvents)
- Poison message handling→Dead-letter queue(MaxDeliveryCount)
- Serverless HTTP API→Functions HTTP trigger(Binding)
- Multi-step workflow state→Durable Functions(Orchestrator)
- Delay a message→Scheduled enqueue time(Service Bus)
Service Bus
- Queue
- Point-to-point work
- Topic
- Publish to many subscriptions
- Subscription filter
- SQL or correlation rule
- DLQ
- Holds undeliverable messages
- MaxDeliveryCount
- Moves message to DLQ
- Peek-lock
- Receive, process, then complete
- Sessions
- FIFO by session ID
- Duplicate detection
- Ignores repeated MessageId
- Standard size
- 256 KB message
- Premium size
- Up to 100 MB
Function Timeouts
Consumption 5/10; Flex and Premium 30
Consumption: 5 then 10Flex: 30, then unboundedHTTP capped 230 seconds
Event Grid vs Event Hubs
Event Grid
- Discrete events
- Per-event delivery
- Reactive handlers
Event Hubs
- High-volume streams
- Partitions and offsets
- Telemetry ingestion
Discrete vs stream
Event Grid
- CloudEvents 1.0
- Standard event schema
- Subject filter
- Prefix or suffix match
- Advanced filter
- Match on data fields
- At-least-once
- Duplicates possible, order not guaranteed
- Retry policy
- Exponential backoff, best effort
- Event TTL
- Default 1440 minutes
- Max attempts
- Default 30 tries
- Dead-letter
- Storage container required
- Success codes
- 200 through 204 only
- Never retried
- 400, 403, 413
Trigger vs Binding
Trigger
- Starts execution
- Exactly one
- Carries payload
Binding
- Input or output
- Zero or many
- Cannot start function
Starts vs connects
Azure Functions
- Trigger
- Starts the function
- Input binding
- Reads data declaratively
- Output binding
- Writes data declaratively
- host.json
- App-wide runtime settings
- local.settings.json
- Local development only
- Flex Consumption
- Current serverless planDefault
- Consumption timeout
- 5 default, 10 max
- Flex and Premium
- 30 default, unbounded max
- HTTP response cap
- 230 seconds regardless
- Durable Functions
- Stateful orchestration patterns
Keyless Access Recipe
Identity, role, scope, credential
Enable managed identityAssign least-privilege roleScope to the resourceUse DefaultAzureCredential
Key Vault vs App Configuration
Key Vault
- Secrets, keys, certificates
- Audited and rotated
- Near-expiry events
App Configuration
- Non-secret settings
- Labels and snapshots
- Feature flags
Secrets vs settings
Troubleshoot Picker
- Slow end-to-end request→Distributed trace(App Insights)
- Which service failed→Application Map(Dependencies)
- Search logs at scale→KQL query(Log Analytics)
- Container keeps restarting→Container console logs(System logs)
- Secret will not resolve→Check identity role(RBAC)
- Traffic right now→Live Metrics(Streaming)
- Traces not correlating→traceparent header(W3C context)
Key Vault + App Config
- Secret
- Password, token, connection string
- Soft delete
- Recoverable, cannot be disabled
- Purge protection
- Blocks early permanent delete
- RBAC data plane
- Preferred over access policies
- Rotation
- Near-expiry event triggers function
- Key Vault reference
- App setting resolves secret
- App Configuration
- Central non-secret settings
- Label
- Per-environment key variant
- Sentinel key
- Signals refresh of all
- Feature flag
- Runtime on/off toggle
System vs User Assigned
System-assigned
- One resource only
- Deleted with resource
- Simplest single app
User-assigned
- Standalone resource
- Shared by many
- Survives redeploys
Lifecycle tied vs independent
Identity and Access
- Managed identity
- Azure-managed, no secrets
- System-assigned
- Tied to one resource
- User-assigned
- Shared across resources
- DefaultAzureCredential
- Chained credential lookup
- Workload identity
- Federated token for pods
- OIDC federation
- GitHub Actions without secrets
- AcrPull
- Pulls container images
- Key Vault Secrets User
- Reads secret values
- Cosmos DB Built-in Data Reader
- Data plane read role
- Private endpoint
- Private IP, no internet
Tracing and App Insights
- OpenTelemetry
- Vendor-neutral telemetry standard
- Azure Monitor Distro
- Microsoft OpenTelemetry package
- Connection string
- Routes telemetry to resource
- traceparent
- W3C trace context header
- Span
- One unit of work
- Cloud role name
- Names service on map
- Application Map
- Service dependency topology
- requests
- Incoming operation telemetry
- dependencies
- Outbound call telemetry
- exceptions
- Captured error telemetry
- Live Metrics
- Real-time streaming view
KQL Query Basics
- where
- Filters rows
- project
- Selects columns
- extend
- Adds computed column
- summarize
- Aggregates by group
- bin()
- Buckets into time intervals
- ago()
- Relative time filter
- top
- Highest N rows
- join
- Combines two tables
- union
- Stacks multiple tables
- render
- Charts the result
- let
- Names a variable
Common Traps
Scaled score
700 of 1000 scaled ≠ Not 70% correct
Identity vs role
Managed identity authenticates ≠ RBAC role authorizes
Work vs notification
Service Bus carries work ≠ Event Grid announces facts
Policy vs index
Vector policy defines shape ≠ Vector index speeds search
Secret vs setting
Key Vault holds secrets ≠ App Config holds settings
Revision vs configuration
Template edits create revisions ≠ Configuration edits do not
Zero replica dead end
No ingress, no rule ≠ App cannot wake up
Distance vs similarity
Lower distance is closer ≠ Cosine distance, not similarity
Flash tier limit
Flash Optimized uses NVMe ≠ No search or vector
Extension name
Docs say pgvector ≠ SQL says CREATE EXTENSION vector
Last Minute
- 1.Pass = 700 scaled, not 70%
- 2.120 minutes, English only
- 3.Data services is biggest domain
- 4.Container Apps default: 0-10 replicas
- 5.No ingress? Set minReplicas 1
- 6.Multiple revision mode splits traffic
- 7.az acr build needs no Docker
- 8.flat 505 dims; diskANN 4096
- 9.VectorDistance queries need TOP N
- 10.pgvector: <-> L2, <=> cosine
- 11.HNSW = recall; IVFFlat = speed
- 12.Service Bus = work; Event Grid = events
- 13.Event Grid TTL 1440 minutes
- 14.DLQ triggered by MaxDeliveryCount
- 15.Consumption timeout 5, max 10
- 16.Key Vault secrets; App Config settings
- 17.Managed identity first, then RBAC
- 18.traceparent carries W3C trace context
- 19.KQL: where, summarize, project, render
- 20.Flash Optimized has no vector
- 21.Renew free every 12 months
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