AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question
This AZ-104 practice question tests your understanding of deploy and manage azure compute. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A line-of-business web tier consists of two Azure VMs in a region that supports availability zones. The business requirement is to survive a full datacenter outage in that region without deploying to a second region. What should the administrator use?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Availability zones with the VMs placed in different zones
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Placing the two VMs in different zones ensures that if one entire datacenter fails, the other VM remains operational, meeting the requirement to survive a full datacenter outage without deploying to a second region.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
An availability set with multiple update domains
Why it's wrong here
Availability sets protect against host and maintenance issues, not a full datacenter failure.
✓
Availability zones with the VMs placed in different zones
Why this is correct
Zones are isolated datacenter locations within a region, which protects against one datacenter becoming unavailable.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
A proximity placement group for both VMs
Why it's wrong here
Proximity placement groups improve latency but do not add datacenter-level resilience.
✗
A single-zone virtual machine scale set
Why it's wrong here
A single zone still depends on one datacenter and cannot meet the outage tolerance requirement.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse availability sets (which protect within a datacenter) with availability zones (which protect across datacenters), leading them to choose an availability set despite the explicit requirement to survive a full datacenter outage.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Azure availability zones offer a 99.99% SLA for VMs when two or more instances are deployed across two or more zones, compared to 99.95% for an availability set. Each zone is a unique physical location with independent power, cooling, and network infrastructure, and zone-to-zone latency is typically under 2 ms within a region. In a real-world scenario, if a regional disaster affects one zone, traffic must be redirected to the surviving zone, which requires a load balancer or traffic manager configured for zone-redundant routing.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this AZ-104 question in full detail.
Deploy and Manage Azure Compute — This question tests Deploy and Manage Azure Compute — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Availability zones with the VMs placed in different zones — Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Placing the two VMs in different zones ensures that if one entire datacenter fails, the other VM remains operational, meeting the requirement to survive a full datacenter outage without deploying to a second region.
What should I do if I get this AZ-104 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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