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Why Don’t You Need to Configure NVA Counts for Azure Firewall?
Prepare for AZ-500 exam by learning why Azure Firewall, as a fully managed PaaS service, includes built-in high availability and auto-scaling, eliminating the need to configure or manage Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) counts.
Question
Azure Firewall requires you to specify the number of network virtual appliances according to your expected scale.
A. TRUE
B. FALSE
Answer
B. FALSE
Explanation
The correct answer is B. FALSE. Azure Firewall is a fully managed, cloud-native firewall service that automatically scales to accommodate changing traffic loads and has high availability built-in, removing the need for users to specify or manage the number of underlying instances.
High availability and auto-scale are built into the service. There is no NVA count necessary.
Managed Service vs. Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs)
The core reason the statement is false lies in the difference between Azure Firewall as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering and traditional Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs) which are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
- Traditional NVAs: These are third-party firewalls from vendors like Palo Alto, Check Point, or Fortinet, available in the Azure Marketplace. They are deployed as virtual machines that you must manage. With NVAs, you are responsible for choosing the VM size, deploying multiple instances for high availability, patching the OS and firewall software, and configuring load balancers to distribute traffic and handle scaling.
- Azure Firewall: As a managed service, Azure handles all the underlying infrastructure. You do not provision or see any virtual machines. Microsoft is responsible for patching, availability, and scaling the service automatically.
Built-in High Availability
Azure Firewall is inherently highly available. When you deploy it into a region that supports Availability Zones, it is automatically configured in an active-active deployment across multiple zones. This provides resilience against a datacenter failure within the region without any additional configuration required from the user. If a zone goes down, traffic is automatically handled by the instances in the other zones.
Automatic Scaling
Azure Firewall is designed to scale dynamically based on your network traffic. It can scale up to handle increases in throughput (up to 100 Gbps for the Premium SKU) and then scale down as traffic decreases. This auto-scaling is seamless and transparent. You are billed for the amount of data processed and the time the firewall is deployed, not for a specific number of instances. This a key advantage over traditional NVAs where you might have to overprovision VM resources to handle peak load, leading to higher costs during periods of low traffic.
Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate AZ-500 certification exam assessment practice question and answer (Q&A) dump including multiple choice questions (MCQ) and objective type questions, with detail explanation and reference available free, helpful to pass the Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate AZ-500 exam and earn Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate AZ-500 certification.