AZ-305 Design data storage solutions Practice Test 13 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A startup needs a cost-effective data storage solution for its application logs. The logs are accessed infrequently but must be available for audit purposes for up to 3 years. The solution should minimize storage costs while allowing data retrieval within 24 hours when needed. Which Azure storage tier should the company recommend?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Azure Blob Storage Archive tier. The Archive tier is the most cost-effective option for data that is infrequently accessed and requires retrieval times of up to 15 hours (standard) or 24 hours (high-priority). Since the logs must be available within 24 hours and stored for up to 3 years, Archive meets both the cost and retrieval requirements, as it offers the lowest storage cost among Azure Blob Storage tiers.

Answer

Azure Blob Storage Cool tier

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Azure Blob Storage Hot tier

Answer

Azure Blob Storage Premium tier

Question 2

You are designing a data storage solution for a global e-commerce platform that handles millions of transactions per day. The platform uses Azure Cosmos DB for its transactional data. The company wants to implement a real-time analytics pipeline to monitor sales trends and detect anomalies. The analytics must be performed on the transactional data with minimal latency (under 5 seconds). The solution must not impact the transactional workload's performance. The analytics queries involve aggregations over time windows and joins with reference data stored in Azure SQL Database. You need to recommend a solution. Which option should you choose?

Accepted Answer

Use Azure Cosmos DB change feed to stream data to Azure Stream Analytics, which performs the aggregations and joins with reference data from Azure SQL Database.. Azure Cosmos DB change feed enables real-time streaming of transactional data to Azure Stream Analytics, which can perform low-latency aggregations and joins with reference data from Azure SQL Database without impacting the transactional workload. This architecture meets the sub-5-second latency requirement and avoids any direct query load on Cosmos DB.

Answer

Enable Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB and use Synapse serverless SQL to query the transactional data directly.

Answer

Use Azure Data Factory to copy data from Cosmos DB to Azure Synapse Analytics every minute, and run analytics queries in Synapse.

Answer

Use Azure Databricks with Auto Loader to incrementally load data from Cosmos DB into Delta Lake, and then query with Spark SQL.

Question 3

Refer to the exhibit. You are reviewing the configuration of an Azure Blob Storage container used for storing financial audit records. The exhibit shows the container's immutability policy and legal hold settings. You need to ensure that the audit records cannot be deleted or modified for at least 7 years. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Increase the immutability period to 2555 days by updating the policy.. A locked immutability policy on an Azure Blob Storage container can be extended (increased) at any time, even after locking. The exhibit shows a locked policy with 365 days; to enforce a 7-year (2555-day) retention, you simply update the policy to 2555 days. Deleting the container (Option A) is unnecessary and would result in data loss. Option C is misleading because 'modify' implies changing the period to any value, but only increases are allowed. Option D, legal hold tags, are separate from the retention period and do not enforce a minimum duration.

Answer

Delete the container, create a new container, and set the immutability policy to 2555 days before locking.

Answer

Modify the immutability period to 2555 days.

Answer

Add additional legal hold tags for each year.

Question 4

A healthcare company is designing a data storage solution for its electronic health records (EHR) system. The system must store patient data in Azure SQL Database with high availability. The solution must meet the following requirements: - Data must be stored in the East US region with automatic failover to a secondary region in West US in case of a regional outage. - The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be less than 5 seconds. - The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) must be less than 1 hour. - The solution must minimize costs while meeting the RPO and RTO. Which Azure SQL Database configuration should the company recommend?

Accepted Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication to a secondary server in West US. Configure automatic failover using a failover group.. Active geo-replication with a failover group provides automatic, asynchronous replication to a secondary region (West US) with an RPO of less than 5 seconds and an RTO of less than 1 hour. This configuration meets the high-availability and disaster recovery requirements while minimizing costs compared to higher-tier options.

Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database Managed Instance with failover group to a secondary instance in West US.

Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database Business Critical tier with auto-failover group and a secondary replica in a different availability zone within East US.

Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database General Purpose tier with zone-redundant configuration.

Question 5

A company is designing a data storage solution for its IoT devices that generate telemetry data. The data is ingested at high velocity (millions of events per second) and must be stored for real-time dashboards and historical analysis. The solution must also support complex event processing and alerting. Which two Azure services should the company use together? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Azure Event Hubs. Azure Event Hubs is the correct choice because it is a high-throughput data ingestion service designed to handle millions of events per second from IoT devices, providing low-latency, durable event capture for real-time dashboards and historical analysis. Azure Stream Analytics is the correct companion service because it natively integrates with Event Hubs to perform complex event processing (CEP), such as pattern matching, aggregation, and alerting, on the streaming telemetry data in real time.

Answer

Azure IoT Hub

Answer

Azure Synapse Analytics

Answer

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Question 6

A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for its on-premises SQL Server databases that are critical for business operations. The databases are approximately 500 GB each. The solution must meet the following requirements: - Replicate data to Azure with minimal data loss (RPO of 15 minutes). - Automatically failover to Azure in case of an on-premises outage. - Use existing SQL Server licenses to minimize costs. Which Azure service should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Azure SQL Managed Instance with managed instance link. Azure SQL Managed Instance with managed instance link enables near-real-time replication of on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure with an RPO as low as 15 seconds, meeting the 15-minute RPO requirement. It supports automatic failover to Azure during an on-premises outage and allows you to use existing SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance via the Azure Hybrid Benefit, minimizing costs.

Answer

Azure Site Recovery with SQL Server replication

Answer

Azure Database Migration Service (DMS)

Answer

Azure SQL Database Managed Instance with transaction replication

Question 7

A company is designing a storage solution for its backup data. The backups must be stored for 10 years for compliance reasons. The solution should minimize storage costs while ensuring data durability. Which two Azure services should the company consider? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Azure Blob Storage Archive tier. Azure Blob Storage Archive tier is correct because it provides the lowest-cost storage for data that is rarely accessed, with a 10-year retention period meeting compliance requirements. It offers 11 nines of durability (99.999999999%) by storing multiple copies across Azure regions, ensuring data integrity over the long term.

Answer

Azure Files with snapshots

Answer

Azure NetApp Files with cross-region replication

Answer

Azure Disk Storage with incremental snapshots

Question 8

A financial services company is designing a data storage solution for its transaction processing system. The system uses Azure Cosmos DB with the Core (SQL) API. The company needs to implement a change data capture (CDC) pipeline to feed a downstream analytics system in near real-time (under 1 minute). The analytics system uses Azure Synapse Analytics. The data volume is approximately 10,000 transactions per second. The solution must minimize operational complexity and cost. Which approach should the company recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Azure Cosmos DB change feed with Azure Functions to process changes and load them into Azure Synapse Analytics using the COPY command.. Azure Cosmos DB change feed provides a built-in, event-driven mechanism to capture inserts and updates in near real-time. By using Azure Functions to process each batch of changes and the COPY command for efficient bulk loading into Azure Synapse, the solution meets the sub-minute latency requirement while minimizing operational overhead and cost, as it avoids managing additional compute resources.

Answer

Enable Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB and query the transactional data directly from Synapse serverless SQL.

Answer

Use Azure Data Factory to schedule incremental copy from Cosmos DB to Synapse every minute.

Answer

Use Azure Databricks with Spark Structured Streaming to read from Cosmos DB change feed and write to Synapse.

Question 9

A media company is designing a storage solution for its large video files (average 50 GB each) that are edited by multiple users simultaneously. The solution must support SMB protocol for compatibility with existing editing software and provide low-latency access. The files must be stored in a highly available configuration across multiple availability zones in a single region. Which Azure storage solution should the company recommend?

Accepted Answer

Azure Files Premium tier with zone-redundant storage (ZRS). Azure Files Premium tier supports SMB protocol natively, which is required for compatibility with existing editing software. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates data synchronously across three availability zones within a single region, providing high availability and low-latency access for simultaneous editing of large video files.

Answer

Azure Blob Storage Premium tier with geo-redundant storage (GRS)

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Azure Disk Storage with shared disks

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Azure NetApp Files Premium tier with cross-zone replication

Question 10

A company stores sensitive customer data in Azure Blob Storage. They need to ensure that data at rest is encrypted using a customer-managed key stored in Azure Key Vault. Which of the following should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Storage Service Encryption with customer-managed keys in Azure Key Vault. Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) encrypts data at rest in Azure Blob Storage. When configured with customer-managed keys (CMK) stored in Azure Key Vault, the customer controls the encryption key lifecycle, including rotation and revocation, meeting the requirement for customer-managed key control. This is the only option that directly applies to Blob Storage data at rest with CMK support.

Answer

Azure Disk Encryption

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Azure Storage Service Encryption with Microsoft-managed keys

Answer

Azure Information Protection

Question 11

You are designing a disaster recovery solution for an Azure SQL Database. The database is in the West US region. You need to ensure that if the entire West US region becomes unavailable, the database can be failed over to another region within 1 hour with minimal data loss. The solution must be cost-effective for a development environment. What should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

Configure active geo-replication to a secondary database in a paired region. Active geo-replication (Option A) meets the RTO of 1 hour and provides near-zero RPO by asynchronously replicating transactions to a secondary database in a paired region. It is cost-effective for a development environment because active geo-replication allows the secondary database to have a different compute size (e.g., fewer vCores) than the primary, reducing cost for the secondary. Auto-failover groups require the secondary to match the primary's service tier and compute size, increasing cost.

Answer

Configure auto-failover groups with a secondary in a paired region

Answer

Deploy an Always On availability group across two regions using Azure VMs

Answer

Take daily backups and store them in a different region

Question 12

Refer to the exhibit. You have an Azure Storage account with hierarchical namespace enabled. You create this JSON policy to assign to a container. Users report that they can access the container from any IP, not just the specified range. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

IP address conditions are not supported in RBAC for Azure Storage data plane operations. RBAC roles for Azure Storage data plane operations do not support IP address conditions in role assignments. IP address conditions are only supported for Azure Resource Manager (control plane) RBAC roles, not for data plane operations like accessing blob or container data. Since the policy uses RBAC with an IP condition, the condition is ignored, and access is allowed from any IP.

Answer

Hierarchical namespace disables IP-based restrictions

Answer

Anonymous access is enabled on the container

Answer

The resource scope is incorrect; RBAC cannot be assigned at the container level

Question 13

Which TWO options are valid methods to secure access to Azure Cosmos DB?

Accepted Answer

Azure RBAC roles. Azure RBAC roles (Option C) provide fine-grained, role-based access control to Azure Cosmos DB, allowing you to assign permissions to users, groups, or service principals for operations like read, write, or delete on specific resources. Primary and secondary keys (Option D) are the default authentication method, enabling full access to the Cosmos DB account for data plane operations, and are commonly used for application connections.

Answer

X.509 certificate-based authentication

Answer

Azure Storage account keys

Answer

Shared access signatures (SAS)

Question 14

You are a cloud architect at a healthcare company. They have an existing application running on Azure VMs in a single region. The application uses SQL Server on a VM for its database. The company is migrating to Azure SQL Managed Instance for better manageability and compliance. The database is 2 TB and requires point-in-time restore (PITR) capability with a retention period of 35 days. The workload is critical with an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 2 hours. The company wants to minimize costs while meeting these requirements. Which of the following should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Azure SQL Managed Instance with automated backups configured for 35-day retention and a backup storage redundancy of Locally Redundant Storage (LRS). Azure SQL Managed Instance's automated backups with a 35-day retention period and LRS storage meet the PITR requirement while minimizing cost. LRS is the cheapest redundancy option and sufficient for PITR within a single region, as the RPO of 5 minutes is satisfied by the default transaction log backup frequency (every 5-10 minutes). The RTO of 2 hours is achievable by restoring from these backups, and no cross-region replication is needed since the workload is single-region.

Answer

Use Azure SQL Managed Instance with active geo-replication to a secondary region

Answer

Use Azure SQL Managed Instance with long-term retention (LTR) backups

Answer

Use Azure SQL Database with the Hyperscale service tier

Question 15

A multinational company stores large amounts of unstructured data (documents, images) that must be read with low latency from multiple global regions. Data is written primarily in one region but read globally. Cost optimization is a key requirement. Which Azure storage replication option should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Blob Storage with read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS). B is correct because RA-GRS provides geo-redundant storage with read access to the secondary region, enabling low-latency reads from multiple global regions while maintaining cost efficiency. The data is written primarily in one region, but RA-GRS allows read requests to be served from the secondary region without additional compute costs, meeting the global read requirement.

Answer

Azure Blob Storage with geo-redundant storage (GRS)

Answer

Azure Files with premium shares

Answer

Azure NetApp Files