Answers

1. Websites that use technology such as session state and server-side caching cannot be scaled out easily since the stored data is not synchronized across multiple server instances.
2. Service Bus queues and topics and storage queues.
3. This is horizontal scaling of a database or storage, where data is split across multiple databases or storage providers with the same structure. Data is stored with a partition key, which is used to help you split the data across storage containers.
4. We already have a customer website, so it makes sense to create another website using the same technology as we will need the same development skills and deployment path.
5. Shared.
6. It helps us choose the appropriate service tiers and scalability options for the most critical systems and save cost on less critical or noncritical systems.
7. Table storage as it is a low cost, no SQL alternative to an SQL Server but it still provides structured storage.
8. QA environments are commonly used for user acceptance testing on a system, which closely replicate the production environment. Because of the similarities to the production environment, they are often used for training purposes too.
9. When a slot is swopped from staging to live, the settings are all copied across so if the staging slot has different settings to live, they must be manually updated, and also, they run on the same machine, which may impact performance.
10. Update the staging slot again so that it matches production.
11. NA.
12. NA.