CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Question
A company is designing a highly available architecture for a critical application. The solution must tolerate the failure of an entire availability zone. Which TWO design principles should be implemented? (Choose two.)
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
✓
Use a load balancer with health checks and cross-zone load balancing
To tolerate an AZ failure, deploy across multiple AZs and use active-active or active-passive with failover. So deploying across multiple AZs and using a load balancer with health checks to route traffic away from failed AZ are correct.
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 instances in a single availability zone
Why it's wrong here
Instances confined to one availability zone fail together when that zone fails, defeating the stated requirement. It is tempting because single-zone deployment reduces latency and cross-zone data charges, and it would be correct for a non-critical workload where zone-level resilience is not required.
- ✗
Use RAID 0 for all instance storage
Why it's wrong here
RAID 0 stripes data across disks with no redundancy or parity, so losing one disk destroys the array; it cannot survive an availability zone outage, which requires replicating instances and data across zones. It is tempting because RAID 0 boosts I/O performance for scratch or ephemeral workloads where durability is irrelevant.
- ✗
Use a single load balancer without health checks
Why it's wrong here
A single load balancer without health checks cannot detect or route around failed instances, so it cannot tolerate an availability zone failure. It is tempting because load balancers do distribute traffic, and this would be correct for a non-critical workload where manual failover is acceptable.
- ✓
Use a load balancer with health checks and cross-zone load balancing
Why this is correct
Cross-zone load balancing distributes traffic evenly across healthy targets in every availability zone, and health checks withdraw targets in a failed zone automatically. This satisfies the stem's zone-failure tolerance constraint by removing the failed zone from rotation without manual intervention.
- ✓
Deploy instances across multiple availability zones
Why this is correct
Spreading instances across multiple availability zones ensures that a single zone outage affects only a subset of capacity, leaving the remaining zones serving traffic. This satisfies the stem's requirement to tolerate the failure of an entire availability zone, provided a load balancer fronts those instances.
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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.