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:
- Three identical web VMs in one Azure region
- The service must survive a datacenter outage
- The environment can use zone-aware resources
- The team wants to spread the VMs across separate physical locations
Based on the exhibit, the workload must keep running if an entire datacenter in the region becomes unavailable. The region supports availability zones. What should you deploy?
Business requirement:
- Three identical web VMs in one Azure region
- The service must survive a datacenter outage
- The environment can use zone-aware resources
- The team wants to spread the VMs across separate physical locations
A
An availability set with one update domain per VM.
Why wrong: An availability set protects against host maintenance and hardware failures, but it does not protect against an entire datacenter becoming unavailable.
B
Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.
Availability zones are the correct choice because they place resources in separate datacenters within the same region. That gives the application resilience if one datacenter or zone becomes unavailable. The scenario explicitly asks for datacenter-level protection, which is what zones are designed to provide.
C
A single VM with a premium SSD data disk.
Why wrong: A single VM is a single point of failure and does not meet the requirement for staying available during a datacenter outage.
D
An Azure proximity placement group.
Why wrong: A proximity placement group improves latency by placing resources close together, but it does not provide fault isolation for a datacenter outage.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across multiple zones ensures that if one entire datacenter fails, the workload continues running in the other zone(s), meeting the requirement for regional datacenter-level resilience.
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 with one update domain per VM.
Why it's wrong here
An availability set protects against host maintenance and hardware failures, but it does not protect against an entire datacenter becoming unavailable.
✓
Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.
Why this is correct
Availability zones are the correct choice because they place resources in separate datacenters within the same region. That gives the application resilience if one datacenter or zone becomes unavailable. The scenario explicitly asks for datacenter-level protection, which is what zones are designed to provide.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
A single VM with a premium SSD data disk.
Why it's wrong here
A single VM is a single point of failure and does not meet the requirement for staying available during a datacenter outage.
✗
An Azure proximity placement group.
Why it's wrong here
A proximity placement group improves latency by placing resources close together, but it does not provide fault isolation for a datacenter outage.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is confusing availability sets (which protect against rack-level failures) with availability zones (which protect against datacenter-level failures), leading candidates to choose an availability set when the question explicitly requires surviving an entire datacenter outage.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Availability zones offer a 99.99% SLA for VMs when two or more instances are deployed across zones, compared to 99.95% for availability sets. Each zone is a unique physical location with independent infrastructure; zone-redundant deployments require no shared dependencies like load balancers or storage accounts unless explicitly configured for zone redundancy. In a real-world scenario, pairing availability zones with a zone-redundant load balancer and managed disks ensures seamless failover during a datacenter outage.
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 with the VMs distributed across zones. — Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across multiple zones ensures that if one entire datacenter fails, the workload continues running in the other zone(s), meeting the requirement for regional datacenter-level resilience.
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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