Azure Files is the correct choice because it offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. This allows users to map a network drive directly to the Azure file share, providing the familiar experience the team needs without any VM management overhead.

Azure Cost Management + Billing is the service that includes budgeting and alerting features. It allows you to set spending budgets for your subscription or resource groups and configure alerts (like email notifications) to be triggered when costs approach or exceed those budgets, helping to prevent cost overruns.

The Contributor role grants full management permissions over all resources within the assigned scope (in this case, the resource group). However, a key limitation is that it does not allow the user to grant access to other users; that permission is reserved for the ‘Owner’ role or specific RBAC roles like ‘User Access Administrator’.

Azure App Service is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering ideal for web apps. Its autoscaling feature can be configured with rules (based on metrics like CPU or schedule) to automatically add or remove instances. This provides the required elasticity to handle variable traffic while minimizing management, as the platform handles the underlying servers and runtime.

To guarantee data residency within one country, you must deploy your resources (like VMs, databases, storage accounts) to a region located within that country. Crucially, you must select storage redundancy options like Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) or Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS), which keep copies within the same region or zone. Geo-redundant options (GRS, GZRS) would automatically replicate data to a paired region in another geography, violating the policy.

For Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings like Azure SQL Database, Microsoft is responsible for the underlying infrastructure and software. This includes physical security of datacenters, maintaining the hardware, and applying patches and updates to the SQL Server software and the underlying OS. The customer is responsible for data, access management (like firewall rules), and application design.

Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across zones protects applications and data from datacenter-level failures (like a rack or switch failure). This provides higher availability than an Availability Set (which protects against hardware faults within a single datacenter) and is less complex/expensive than a full multi-region deployment.

This scenario exemplifies cost-effectiveness, a key benefit of the cloud’s consumption-based model. Because you pay for what you use, you can continuously optimize costs by right-sizing resources to match actual workload demands. Advisor’s recommendation helps avoid paying for excess, unused capacity, which would be common with fixed, on-premises hardware.

Azure Spot VMs allow you to leverage unused Azure capacity at discounts of up to 90% compared to Pay-As-You-Go prices. They are ideal for interruptible, batch-processing jobs like high-performance computing (HPC) simulations, where the workload can be checkpointed and resumed. The research team’s time-flexible, short-duration job is a perfect use case for maximizing savings with Spot VMs.

Azure Files is the correct choice because it offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. This allows users to map a network drive directly to the Azure file share, providing the familiar experience the team needs without any VM management overhead.0