hardMultiple Choice
CV0-004 Practice Question: A company runs a critical application on a cloud…
A company runs a critical application on a cloud VM that must achieve a 99.99% monthly uptime SLA. The VM is deployed in a single availability zone. The current architecture has no redundancy. What is the most effective design change to meet the SLA requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA often tests the distinction between high availability (redundancy across zones) and disaster recovery (backups to another region), leading candidates to mistakenly choose backup solutions for uptime requirements.
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 the application across two availability zones with a load balancer
Deploying the application across two availability zones with a load balancer provides high availability by eliminating a single point of failure. A 99.99% monthly uptime SLA requires a design that can withstand an entire availability zone failure, which a single-zone deployment cannot achieve. The load balancer distributes traffic to healthy VMs, automatically failing over if one zone becomes unavailable, thus meeting the SLA target.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Schedule daily backups to a different region
Why it's wrong here
Daily backups to another region only enable recovery after an outage, with data loss and lengthy restore time, so they cannot sustain 99.99% monthly uptime. Cross-region backup suits disaster recovery and compliance retention, whereas continuous availability demands live redundant instances across availability zones.
- ✓
Deploy the application across two availability zones with a load balancer
Why this is correct
A single-zone VM cannot reach 99.99% monthly uptime because any zone failure causes total outage. Spreading the application across two availability zones behind a load balancer removes that single point of failure, satisfying the redundancy the SLA demands.
- ✗
Upgrade the VM to a larger instance type for better reliability
Why it's wrong here
A larger instance type does not remove the single availability zone as a failure domain; zone outages still cause full downtime, so 99.99% remains unreachable. Vertical scaling addresses capacity or performance constraints, and would be the right change when the workload is resource-bound rather than requiring fault tolerance.
- ✗
Add a second VM in the same availability zone with a load balancer
Why it's wrong here
A second VM in the same availability zone shares that zone's failure domain, so a zone outage still takes down both instances and cannot deliver 99.99%. Load-balanced pairs within one zone suit horizontal scaling or instance-level faults, whereas the SLA requires distributing instances across multiple availability zones.
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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.