AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✓

  Availability Zones for Workload A

  Why this is correct

  Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. By deploying Workload A across two or more zones, you ensure that a failure in one zone does not affect the other, protecting against a complete datacenter outage. This configuration achieves the highest resilience SLA of 99.99% for virtual machines.

• ✓

  Availability Set for Workload B

  Why this is correct

  Availability Sets protect against hardware failures and planned maintenance within a single datacenter by distributing VMs across multiple fault domains and update domains. Fault domains group VMs that share the same power source and network switch, while update domains ensure that not all VMs are rebooted at once during patching. However, an availability set does not protect against a full datacenter failure, making it appropriate for Workload B's lower resilience needs.

• ✗

  Virtual Machine Scale Set without zones

  Why it's wrong here

  A virtual machine scale set without availability zones automatically distributes instances across fault domains and update domains within a single datacenter, but it does not provide cross-datacenter resilience. Since all instances reside in the same datacenter, a datacenter-level outage (like a fire or flood) would take down the entire scale set. Adding more instances does not help because the underlying infrastructure lacks the isolation needed to recover from such an outage.

  When this WOULD be correct

  A question requiring automatic scaling of a stateless web application across multiple VMs without needing high availability against datacenter failures, such as 'Which deployment model should be used for a web app that needs to scale out based on CPU usage and can tolerate a single VM failure?'

• ✗

  Proximity Placement Group

  Why it's wrong here

  A proximity placement group is designed to reduce network latency between VMs by ensuring they are physically close to each other, which is beneficial for performance-sensitive workloads. It deliberately co-locates resources, which increases the risk of a single point of failure affecting multiple workloads simultaneously. This option does not provide any fault isolation or outage protection, so it fails to meet Workload A's resilience requirement.

  When this WOULD be correct

  When the question asks for minimizing inter-VM network latency for a latency-sensitive application (e.g., HPC or real-time data processing) and does not require high availability or fault tolerance.

• ✗

  Single VM with premium SSD

  Why it's wrong here

  Deploying a single VM with premium SSD provides high-performance, low-latency disk storage and a 99.9% SLA for the disk itself, but the VM is still a single point of failure. Any host failure, planned maintenance event, or datacenter outage will cause the workload to be unavailable. The premium SSD does not replicate the VM across physical infrastructure, so it cannot satisfy the requirement for high resilience.

  When this WOULD be correct

  A question that asks for a cost-effective solution for a single, non-critical application that must survive a local disk failure without data loss, and where downtime for maintenance is acceptable.

Option-by-option analysis

Why each answer is right or wrong

Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The AZ-104 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.

Analysis generated from the official AZ-104blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”

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