AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✓

  Place the VMs in different availability zones within the same region.

  Why this is correct

  Availability zones are physically separate groups of datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and network connectivity. Placing VMs in different availability zones ensures that if an entire datacenter (or zone) suffers an outage, the service remains available in other zones. Because all zones are in the same region, traffic stays local, which satisfies the requirement to avoid cross-region failover and keeps latency low. This is the foundational pattern for zone-level resilience when you need explicit control over VM placement.

• ✗

  Use an availability set and expect it to cover a zone outage.

  Why it's wrong here

  An availability set uses fault domains and update domains to protect against hardware failures or patching events within a single datacenter, but it does not span across datacenters or availability zones. In Azure, fault domains in an availability set share the same power and network switch, so they remain within one zone. A zone outage or datacenter-level event (such as a fire or cooling failure) is far beyond what an availability set is designed to mitigate, leaving the entire set vulnerable. Therefore, using an availability set incorrectly assumes it can handle an outage that affects the whole building.

  When this WOULD be correct

  This option would be correct if the question asked for protection against hardware failures within a single datacenter (e.g., rack or chassis failure) and did not require zone-level resilience.

• ✓

  Deploy the workload in a zone-enabled virtual machine scale set.

  Why this is correct

  A zone-enabled virtual machine scale set distributes instances across availability zones automatically, using a platform-managed algorithm to balance instances and avoid manual placement errors. You can specify zone balance mode, and the scale set will maintain capacity across zones even during scaling operations, making it the preferred choice for stateless or autoscaled workloads. This approach also integrates with Azure Load Balancer Standard for health checking and traffic distribution, providing a resilient and operationally simple deployment. It meets the same datacenter-survival requirement while reducing administrative overhead compared to manually placing individual VMs.

• ✗

  Keep all instances in one zone and rely on the load balancer.

  Why it's wrong here

  A load balancer only distributes incoming traffic among healthy instances that are registered as backend targets, but it cannot create resilience against a failure at the infrastructure level. If all VM instances reside in the same availability zone, that zone's failure takes the entire backend down, and the load balancer will have no valid targets to route to, regardless of its own health. The load balancer itself may be zone-redundant (Standard SKU), but that only protects the front-end; the actual service still depends on a single zone for compute. Thus, relying on a load balancer without cross-zone instance placement does not satisfy the datacenter-failure requirement.

  When this WOULD be correct

  This option would be correct if the question required cost optimization and allowed manual recovery, or if the region did not support availability zones and you were using a single datacenter with a load balancer for high availability within that datacenter.

• ✗

  Use a paired region for automatic in-region zone balancing.

  Why it's wrong here

  A paired region is a separate Azure region approximately 300 miles away that is used for disaster recovery during region-wide failures, not for balancing workloads within the same region. It provides asynchronous replication for some services and is a planned failover target, but invoking it introduces cross-region latency and requires a failover process. The requirement explicitly states that cross-region failover is not needed, so relying on a paired region would unnecessarily complicate the solution and does not address the immediate single-datacenter outage scenario. Azure's paired regions are not designed to automatically balance load across zones; they are for regional disaster recovery.

  When this WOULD be correct

  When the requirement is to survive a region-wide outage and you need automatic replication across geographically separated regions for disaster recovery, such as for compliance or high availability across regions.

Option-by-option analysis

Why each answer is right or wrong

Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The AZ-104 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.

Analysis generated from the official AZ-104blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”

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