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CV0-004 Practice Question: Migrating its on-premises application to the…
A company is migrating its on-premises application to the cloud and needs to ensure high availability. The application requires a stateless web tier and a stateful database tier. Which design approach BEST meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA often tests the misconception that round-robin DNS or a single read replica provides high availability, but candidates must recognize that DNS-based load balancing lacks health checking and automatic failover, and a read replica cannot handle write failures, making multi-AZ replication essential for database high availability.
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 web servers behind a load balancer and use a managed database with multi-AZ replication.
Deploying web servers behind a load balancer provides horizontal scaling and fault tolerance for the stateless web tier, while using a managed database with multi-AZ replication ensures automatic failover and data durability for the stateful database tier. This combination meets high availability requirements by eliminating single points of failure and providing redundancy across Availability Zones.
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 one large web server and one large database server.
Why it's wrong here
A single large web server and single large database server create two single points of failure, so an outage in either tier takes the application down. It tempts because vertical scaling is straightforward and avoids distributed complexity. High availability requires redundant instances across availability zones behind a load balancer.
- ✓
Deploy web servers behind a load balancer and use a managed database with multi-AZ replication.
Why this is correct
Stateless web servers behind a load balancer can be replaced or scaled horizontally across availability zones, while a managed multi-AZ database handles failover and replication for the stateful tier. This separation directly satisfies the high-availability requirement for both tiers.
- ✗
Use round-robin DNS for web servers and a read replica for the database.
Why it's wrong here
Round-robin DNS provides no health checking, so traffic still routes to failed web servers, and a read replica does not accept writes, leaving the stateful tier unable to serve write operations during a primary failure. This suits read-heavy, latency-focused scaling rather than failover.
- ✗
Use auto-scaling for web servers and a single database instance.
Why it's wrong here
A single database instance is a single point of failure, so a database outage takes the stateful tier offline regardless of web-tier scaling. Auto-scaling suits the stateless web tier, and a single instance would be acceptable only for non-critical workloads tolerating downtime, not high availability.
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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.