AZ-204 Develop for Azure storage Practice Question
Your company, Contoso Ltd., operates a global e-commerce platform. The platform stores product images in Azure Blob Storage. Currently, the images are stored in a single storage account in the West US region. The application uses HTTP to download images. Users in Europe report slow load times. You need to reduce latency for European users. The solution must minimize costs and administrative overhead. You also need to ensure that images are served over HTTPS. You have the following requirements: 1) Users in Europe must have low-latency access. 2) The solution must be cost-effective. 3) The solution must not require changes to the application code. 4) Images must be served over HTTPS. Which course of action should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Azure CDN with Azure Front Door or geo-replication, where candidates might think a global load balancer or storage replication is needed for latency reduction, but Azure CDN is the simplest and most cost-effective solution for static content caching without code changes.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Create an Azure CDN profile and add a CDN endpoint that points to the storage account. Enable HTTPS on the CDN endpoint.
Azure CDN provides a global, distributed network of edge servers that cache content closer to users, reducing latency for European users without requiring application code changes. Enabling HTTPS on the CDN endpoint ensures images are served securely over HTTPS, meeting the requirement. This solution is cost-effective as it uses a pay-as-you-go model and minimizes administrative overhead by leveraging a managed service.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure Front Door with the storage account as a backend.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is primarily designed for global routing of dynamic web applications, providing advanced features like Web Application Firewall (WAF), URL-based routing, and session affinity. While it can serve static content from a storage account, its sophisticated feature set and higher cost make it an overkill solution for simply caching and delivering static assets. A CDN is a more cost-effective and purpose-built service for this specific requirement.
- ✓
Create an Azure CDN profile and add a CDN endpoint that points to the storage account. Enable HTTPS on the CDN endpoint.
Why this is correct
Creating an Azure CDN profile and endpoint pointing to the storage account is the most effective solution for globally distributing static content. CDN caches content at geographically distributed edge locations, significantly reducing latency for users worldwide by serving data from the nearest point of presence. Enabling HTTPS on the CDN endpoint ensures secure communication, encrypting data in transit and maintaining user trust, which is crucial for an e-commerce platform.
- ✗
Create a secondary storage account in Europe and use asynchronous replication. Update the application to use the secondary endpoint for European users.
Why it's wrong here
This approach requires significant application code changes to implement geo-aware routing logic, directing European users to the new storage account endpoint. Furthermore, it introduces considerable administrative overhead for managing multiple storage accounts and ensuring data consistency through asynchronous replication. This solution lacks the automatic global content distribution and caching benefits of a CDN, leading to higher latency for users not directly served by their designated region.
- ✗
Enable geo-redundant storage (GRS) on the storage account.
Why it's wrong here
Enabling Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) on the storage account primarily provides data durability and high availability by asynchronously replicating data to a secondary region hundreds of miles away. While GRS ensures data resilience in the event of a regional outage, it does not improve content delivery performance or reduce latency for end-users accessing the data. GRS does not offer edge caching capabilities, meaning all requests still originate from the primary or secondary storage account, not from a nearby CDN point of presence.
Quick reference
Azure Blob Storage Tier Comparison
| Tier | Storage Cost | Retrieval Cost | Latency | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot | Highest | Lowest | Immediate | Active data, frequent reads |
| Cool | Lower | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / month |
| Cold | Lower still | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / quarter |
| Archive | Lowest | Highest + rehydration delay | Hours | Long-term compliance retention |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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