Question 1hardmulti select
Full question →hardmulti selectObjective-mapped
A customer-facing service needs to survive a single datacenter outage in a zone-supported region. You do not need cross-region failover, but you do need Azure to spread instances without manual placement errors. Which two deployment choices satisfy that goal? Select two.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Best answer
Place the VMs in different availability zones within the same region.
Spreading the workload across multiple availability zones protects against a datacenter-level failure within the region. It also keeps traffic local to the region, which matches the requirement that cross-region failover is not needed.
B
Distractor review
Use an availability set and expect it to cover a zone outage.
Availability sets protect against host and rack failures through fault and update domains, but they do not span datacenters or zones. A zone outage is outside what an availability set is designed to handle.
C
Best answer
Deploy the workload in a zone-enabled virtual machine scale set.
A zone-enabled VM scale set can place instances across zones automatically, which satisfies the need to avoid manual placement errors. It also gives you a platform-managed way to distribute instances for resilience.
D
Distractor review
Keep all instances in one zone and rely on the load balancer.
A load balancer only distributes traffic among healthy targets; it does not provide zone-level resiliency if every instance lives in the same zone. That design still fails if the zone goes down.
E
Distractor review
Use a paired region for automatic in-region zone balancing.
A paired region is useful for disaster recovery planning, but it is not an in-region zone balancing feature. The requirement calls for surviving a single datacenter outage without adding cross-region failover.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
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More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A route table contains these entries: 10.0.0.0/8 with next hop Virtual appliance, and 10.1.1.0/24 with next hop Virtual network gateway. Which next hop will Azure use for traffic to 10.1.1.5?
Question 2
You are deploying a stateless web application on Azure virtual machines. The solution must automatically add and remove instances based on CPU demand and allow all instances to be managed as one logical group. Which Azure compute feature should you deploy?
Question 3
You are deploying a Windows Server VM for an internal app. The VM must support Secure Boot and vTPM later, its OS disk must survive host moves, and the team wants the lowest-cost managed disk tier that still behaves like a normal writable OS disk. Which two choices should you make? Select two.
Question 4
You need to deploy several identical virtual machines and ensure that the failure of a single Azure host does not affect all of them. Which feature should you use?
Question 5
You need to connect VNet-Hub and VNet-Spoke so that resources in both virtual networks can communicate privately over the Microsoft backbone. Both virtual networks are in the same region. What should you configure?
Question 6
You need to create a storage account that provides the lowest-cost redundant storage for non-critical data and only needs protection against local disk or server failure within a single datacenter. Which redundancy option should you choose?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this AZ-104 question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Place the VMs in different availability zones within the same region. — To survive a datacenter outage in a zone-supported region, you need either explicit placement across different availability zones or a zone-enabled VM scale set that distributes instances for you. Both approaches keep the service in the same region while protecting against the loss of one zone. Availability sets and load balancers do not provide that level of zone resilience, and a paired region is unnecessary for this requirement. Why others are wrong: An availability set protects against host-level maintenance and failures, not a full zone outage. A single-zone design remains vulnerable because all instances share the same failure boundary. A paired region is a disaster recovery pattern, but the scenario explicitly excludes cross-region failover. The correct options are the ones that actually span zones inside the same region.
What should I do if I get this AZ-104 question wrong?
Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.
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