Question 1hardmulti select
Full question →hardmulti selectObjective-mapped
A stateless customer portal runs on Azure VMs and must keep serving traffic if an entire datacenter in the region fails. The operations team also wants the portal to add and remove instances automatically during daily spikes without managing a Kubernetes cluster. Which two Azure compute capabilities should the administrator configure? 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
Deploy the portal instances across availability zones.
Availability zones place instances in separate datacenters, which helps survive a zone-level outage.
B
Best answer
Use a virtual machine scale set with autoscale enabled.
A scale set can increase or reduce instances automatically based on demand or schedules.
C
Distractor review
Place the VMs in an availability set within a single datacenter.
Availability sets protect against host and maintenance issues, but not an entire datacenter outage.
D
Distractor review
Create a proximity placement group for the portal VMs.
This improves latency between resources, but it does not provide resiliency against datacenter loss.
E
Distractor review
Use a single larger VM with premium managed disks.
A single VM becomes a single point of failure and cannot scale out automatically.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
This question should be treated as a scenario, not a definition check. Identify the problem, the constraint and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.
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.
- Use explanations to understand the rule behind the answer.
TExam Day Tips
- Underline the problem statement mentally.
- 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.
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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?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Deploy the portal instances across availability zones. — To satisfy both requirements, the portal needs resilience against a datacenter-level failure and elastic scale-out. Availability zones provide physical separation across datacenters in the same region, so one zone outage does not take down the whole tier. A virtual machine scale set with autoscale handles increasing and decreasing the number of instances based on demand. Together, these choices address both high availability and operational scaling without introducing unnecessary platform complexity. Why others are wrong: An availability set only spreads VMs across fault and update domains inside one datacenter cluster, so it does not meet the zone-failure requirement. A proximity placement group optimizes latency but offers no resiliency benefit. A single VM cannot provide either automatic scaling or fault-tolerant service continuity, so it is unsuitable for this workload.
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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