Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →hardmultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A stateless web app runs on two Ubuntu VMs behind an Azure Load Balancer. The region supports availability zones. The business wants the app to survive a full datacenter outage and also avoid having both VMs on the same maintenance boundary. Which deployment should you choose?
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
Distractor review
Place both VMs in a single availability set.
An availability set improves resilience against host maintenance and failures, but it does not protect against a full datacenter or zone outage.
B
Distractor review
Deploy one VM and rely on Azure Backup for recovery.
Backup helps restore data after a failure, but it does not keep the application online during an outage.
C
Best answer
Place the VMs in separate availability zones in the same region.
Availability zones place workloads in physically separate datacenters within the same region. That design protects against a full zone or datacenter outage and also gives you a stronger isolation boundary than an availability set. Because the app has two VMs behind a load balancer, you can distribute them across zones and maintain service if one zone becomes unavailable.
D
Distractor review
Deploy both VMs without any fault-domain configuration.
A plain deployment leaves both VMs exposed to the same underlying infrastructure failures and maintenance events.
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: Place the VMs in separate availability zones in the same region. — Availability zones are the right choice when the requirement is to survive a datacenter-level outage in a region that supports zones. They place VMs in separate physical locations, so one zone failure does not take down the entire application tier. An availability set only protects against host and update domain issues inside one datacenter boundary, and a single VM offers no meaningful high availability. Why others are wrong: An availability set is useful for host maintenance and fault-domain spreading, but it cannot survive a zone outage. Backup is for restore, not continuous availability. A plain deployment has no redundancy and no failure isolation, so it does not satisfy either requirement.
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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