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CV0-004 Practice Question: Which THREE design principles are fundamental to…
Which THREE design principles are fundamental to building a highly available cloud architecture?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA often tests the misconception that vertical scaling (Option D) is a valid high-availability strategy, when in reality it only addresses capacity and not fault tolerance, and that a single powerful database (Option E) can be made highly available through backups alone, ignoring the need for real-time replication and automatic failover.
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
✓
Eliminate single points of failure
Option A (Eliminate single points of failure) is correct because high availability requires that no individual component's failure can take down the whole system, so redundant components (multiple instances, load balancers, redundant network paths) must be designed in. Option B (Deploy across multiple availability zones) is correct because AZs are isolated failure domains within a region; distributing workloads across at least two AZs ensures that the loss of one data center does not cause an outage. Option C (Implement health checks and auto-recovery) is correct because health checks detect unhealthy instances and auto-recovery/auto-scaling mechanisms replace or restart them automatically, maintaining service continuity without manual intervention. Option D (Scale vertically) is not a high-availability principle because increasing the size of a single resource still leaves a single point of failure and often requires downtime to resize. Option E (Use a single, powerful database instance) is not correct because a single database instance is itself a single point of failure; high availability instead calls for replication, multi-AZ failover, or clustering.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Eliminate single points of failure
Why this is correct
Removing single points of failure ensures no individual component outage halts the service, since redundancy lets traffic fail over. This underpins availability by eliminating the components whose failure would cause total loss of the application.
- ✓
Deploy across multiple availability zones
Why this is correct
Spreading workloads across multiple availability zones isolates failures to a single zone, so an outage there does not take down the whole system. This directly satisfies the high-availability requirement by removing single points of failure at the infrastructure level, letting traffic fail over to healthy zones automatically.
- ✓
Implement health checks and auto-recovery
Why this is correct
Health checks detect failed instances and auto-recovery restarts or replaces them without manual intervention, eliminating single points of failure. This directly satisfies the high-availability requirement by ensuring continuous service availability when individual components fail unexpectedly.
- ✗
Scale vertically to increase capacity
Why it's wrong here
Vertical scaling enlarges one node, leaving a single point of failure and requiring downtime to resize; high availability demands horizontal redundancy across zones. It is tempting because it raises capacity quickly, and would be correct for a monolithic workload that cannot be distributed.
- ✗
Use a single, powerful database instance
Why it's wrong here
One database instance creates a single point of failure; availability requires replication, clustering or multi-AZ failover. It is tempting because a large instance performs well under load, and would be correct for development environments where uptime guarantees are not required.
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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.