easyMultiple Select
CV0-004 Practice Question: A cloud administrator is deploying a new…
A cloud administrator is deploying a new application in a cloud environment. The application requires high availability and fault tolerance. Which two design principles should the administrator implement? (Select TWO).
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to think cost-saving strategies (single instance, single volume) are acceptable for high availability, but the exam requires understanding that fault tolerance demands redundancy at every layer—compute, storage, and network—across multiple failure domains.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Place a load balancer in front of the application.
Option A is correct because placing a load balancer in front of the application distributes incoming traffic across multiple healthy backend instances, eliminating a single point of failure and enabling continued service if one instance fails, which directly supports high availability. Option B is correct because an auto-scaling group spanning multiple availability zones automatically replaces failed instances and balances capacity across physically separate data centers, providing both fault tolerance against an AZ outage and elasticity for demand changes. Option C is incorrect because confining all instances to a single availability zone means an AZ-level failure takes down the entire application, defeating fault tolerance. Option D is incorrect because a single instance is a single point of failure with no redundancy, so any instance or host failure causes an outage. Option E is incorrect because a single unreplicated volume is a single point of failure for data, risking permanent data loss and preventing recovery from storage failure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Place a load balancer in front of the application.
Why this is correct
A load balancer distributes incoming requests across healthy instances and removes failed ones from rotation, eliminating the application tier as a single point of failure. This directly delivers the required high availability and fault tolerance.
- ✓
Use an auto-scaling group across multiple availability zones.
Why this is correct
Distributing instances across multiple availability zones via an auto-scaling group directly satisfies the fault-tolerance constraint: a zone failure cannot take down the application, since remaining zones absorb traffic and the group replaces unhealthy instances automatically. This eliminates single points of failure while maintaining capacity during zone-level outages.
- ✗
Deploy all instances in a single availability zone.
Why it's wrong here
Concentrating every instance in one availability zone means a zone-level failure removes all capacity simultaneously, so neither high availability nor fault tolerance is achieved. It is tempting because single-zone placement avoids cross-zone data transfer charges and latency, which suits workloads with no availability commitment.
- ✗
Use a single instance to reduce costs.
Why it's wrong here
A single instance creates a single point of failure, so any host or zone outage takes the application down, directly contradicting the fault-tolerance requirement. It is tempting because consolidating workloads onto one instance genuinely reduces compute spend, which suits dev, test or non-critical batch workloads where availability targets are absent.
- ✗
Store all data on a single volume without replication.
Why it's wrong here
A single unreplicated volume creates a single point of failure, so a disk outage loses data and halts the application, defeating fault tolerance. It is tempting as a cost-saving simplification, but high availability requires replication across zones or regions, not consolidated storage.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CV0-004 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CV0-004 exam.