CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Question
A cloud architect is designing a stateless containerized workload that must remain available even if an entire data center fails. The workload has no persistent local state and must be able to scale horizontally across regions. Which design decision BEST meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that multi-AZ deployment within a single region is sufficient for data center failure, when a regional outage requires a multi-region design.
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
✓
Deploy identical container clusters in two or more regions and use a global load balancer with health checks to route traffic to healthy regions.
The workload is stateless, so it can be replicated across regions without data consistency concerns. Running identical clusters in multiple regions behind a global load balancer with health checks ensures that traffic is automatically redirected away from a failed region, meeting the requirement to survive a full data center failure. This design also supports horizontal scaling by adding capacity in any region.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy the containers on a single large virtual machine with a snapshot-based backup taken every hour.
Why it's wrong here
A single virtual machine is a single point of failure, and an hourly snapshot does not provide continuous availability. If the host or its data center fails, the workload is unavailable until the snapshot is restored, which likely exceeds any reasonable recovery time. This approach also does not scale horizontally, so it cannot handle increased load across regions.
- ✓
Deploy identical container clusters in two or more regions and use a global load balancer with health checks to route traffic to healthy regions.
Why this is correct
This directly satisfies the requirement to survive a full data center failure. A global load balancer continuously probes regional endpoints and redirects user traffic to a healthy region when one fails. Because the workload is stateless and horizontally scalable, identical clusters can run in parallel without data synchronization concerns, providing both high availability and geographic redundancy.
- ✗
Deploy the containers in a single region across multiple availability zones and rely on the orchestrator to reschedule failed tasks.
Why it's wrong here
This protects against an availability zone failure but not a full data center or region outage. Because the workload must survive the loss of an entire data center, placing all replicas in one region leaves a single point of failure. The orchestrator can reschedule tasks only onto surviving nodes within that same region, so a regional outage would still take the workload offline.
- ✗
Deploy the containers in one region and configure a DNS failover record that points to a cold standby environment in another region.
Why it's wrong here
A cold standby environment is not running and must be provisioned and started before it can serve traffic, which introduces significant recovery time. DNS failover also depends on client DNS caching and time-to-live values, so failover is not immediate. This does not provide the continuous availability expected when an entire data center fails.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CompTIA exam blueprint
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