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.
Exhibit
Business requirement:
- Application must survive a datacenter-level outage
- Azure region supports availability zones
- The workload can run from multiple instances
- The team wants to place instances in separate fault domains if possible
Based on the exhibit, a workload must remain available even if one datacenter in an Azure region becomes unavailable. The region supports zone deployment. What should the administrator configure?
Business requirement:
- Application must survive a datacenter-level outage
- Azure region supports availability zones
- The workload can run from multiple instances
- The team wants to place instances in separate fault domains if possible
A
An availability set.
Why wrong: An availability set protects against host-level failures, but not a whole datacenter outage in the region.
B
Availability zones.
Availability zones place resources in separate physically isolated datacenters within the same region. If one datacenter becomes unavailable, the workload can continue running in another zone. That is the correct resilience option when the requirement explicitly calls for protection from a datacenter-level outage.
C
A resource lock.
Why wrong: A resource lock prevents changes or deletion, but it does not provide any failover or high availability capability.
D
A user-defined route.
Why wrong: A user-defined route changes network path selection, but it does not protect compute resources from datacenter failure.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Availability zones.
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying the workload across two or more zones ensures that if one datacenter fails, the other zones continue to operate, maintaining availability. This directly meets the requirement of surviving a single datacenter outage within a region that supports zone deployment.
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.
Why it's wrong here
An availability set protects against host-level failures, but not a whole datacenter outage in the region.
✓
Availability zones.
Why this is correct
Availability zones place resources in separate physically isolated datacenters within the same region. If one datacenter becomes unavailable, the workload can continue running in another zone. That is the correct resilience option when the requirement explicitly calls for protection from a datacenter-level outage.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
A resource lock.
Why it's wrong here
A resource lock prevents changes or deletion, but it does not provide any failover or high availability capability.
✗
A user-defined route.
Why it's wrong here
A user-defined route changes network path selection, but it does not protect compute resources from datacenter failure.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse availability sets (which protect against rack-level failures) with availability zones (which protect against entire datacenter failures), leading them to select the wrong answer when the question explicitly requires datacenter-level resilience.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Availability zones in Azure are unique physical locations within a region, each with its own independent power source, cooling, and network. To achieve true zone-level resilience, VMs must be deployed with a Standard SKU public IP and Standard Load Balancer (or cross-zone redundancy for other services), and the VMs should be placed in different zones (e.g., Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3). Under the hood, Azure uses a distributed control plane and data plane per zone, so a failure in one zone does not affect the others; this is distinct from availability sets, which only protect against hardware failures within a single datacenter.
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
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
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. — Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying the workload across two or more zones ensures that if one datacenter fails, the other zones continue to operate, maintaining availability. This directly meets the requirement of surviving a single datacenter outage within a region that supports zone deployment.
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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