A stateless web service runs on identical VMs and must keep serving traffic if Microsoft takes one datacenter out of service in the region. The load must also scale out automatically during peak hours, and instances should be spread across independent zone boundaries. Which two configurations should the administrator use? 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.
Best answer
Virtual machine scale set
This supports automatic scale-out and simplifies running multiple identical VM instances.
Best answer
Availability zones
These provide protection from a single datacenter outage by placing workloads in separate zones.
Distractor review
Availability set
Availability sets protect against host and maintenance issues, but not an entire zone outage.
Distractor review
Proximity placement group
This improves latency by placing resources close together and does not provide zone-level resilience.
Distractor review
Dedicated host
A dedicated host isolates placement on physical hardware, but it is not the requested scaling or zone design.
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: Virtual machine scale set — A virtual machine scale set gives the team a way to add or remove identical VM instances automatically based on demand. Availability zones add resilience against a datacenter-level failure by distributing resources across physically separate zones in a region. Together, they meet both business needs: horizontal scaling during spikes and continued service if one zone becomes unavailable. That combination is the most appropriate compute design for a stateless workload with both elasticity and zone resilience. Why others are wrong: An availability set only protects against host and planned maintenance events inside one datacenter boundary, so it does not meet the requirement for a zone outage. A proximity placement group is about latency, not resiliency, and a dedicated host is about hardware isolation, not autoscaling across zones. These distractors are common misunderstandings because they sound like placement controls, but they do not provide the required failure-domain coverage.
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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