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.

• ✓

  Availability zone

  Why this is correct

  An availability zone is a physically separate datacenter within an Azure region, with its own power, cooling, and network connectivity. By deploying the VM to a zone, you isolate it from a full datacenter failure elsewhere in the region, so the workload can continue running when another zone's datacenter goes down. To actually keep the VM available you would also need a second VM cross-zone and a load balancer, but the zone placement itself is the foundational resiliency choice.

• ✗

  Availability set

  Why it's wrong here

  An availability set distributes VMs across multiple fault domains and update domains within a single datacenter, protecting against hardware failures and planned maintenance like host reboots. Fault domains share the same power and network infrastructure, so they all reside inside the same datacenter. When an entire datacenter goes down, all fault domains in that availability set are lost together, meaning an availability set offers no resiliency against a full datacenter failure.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the question required high availability for multiple VMs within a single datacenter (e.g., a multi-tier application) and asked for the best placement to avoid single points of failure like rack or update domain failures, an availability set would be correct.

• ✗

  Proximity placement group

  Why it's wrong here

  A proximity placement group is designed to minimize network latency by grouping VMs as close as possible, potentially in the same rack or datacenter. This co-location works against availability because if the underlying datacenter fails, every VM in the group is affected at once — there is no isolation between failure domains. It does not offer any cross-datacenter redundancy or automatic failover, so it cannot satisfy a 'keep running during an entire datacenter outage' requirement.

  When this WOULD be correct

  When the question requires minimizing network latency between multiple VMs in a high-performance computing or tightly coupled workload, and availability is not the primary concern.

• ✗

  Managed disk snapshot

  Why it's wrong here

  A managed disk snapshot captures a point-in-time, read-only copy of a VM's OS or data disk, used mainly for backup and disaster recovery. Restoring from a snapshot requires creating a new managed disk and attaching it to a new VM, which involves manual steps and significant downtime. While snapshots help you recover data after an outage, they do nothing to keep the original VM running through a datacenter failure — high availability is not provided by disk snapshots.

  When this WOULD be correct

  A question asks: 'You need to create a backup of a managed disk that can be used to create a new VM in a different region. Which option should you use?' In that scenario, a managed disk snapshot is correct.

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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