AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A company deploys a stateless web application on Azure VMs in a single region. They need to distribute incoming HTTP traffic across multiple VMs and perform health checks. The solution should be highly available within the region. Which Azure load balancing solution should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers choose Azure Application Gateway v2 because they assume HTTP traffic requires a Layer 7 load balancer, but Azure Load Balancer can handle HTTP traffic at Layer 4 with HTTP health probes, making it the simpler and more cost-effective choice for a stateless web application within a single region.
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
✓
Azure Load Balancer (Standard) with HTTP health probe.
Azure Load Balancer (Standard) operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and can distribute HTTP traffic across VMs in a single region while performing health checks via HTTP health probes. It provides high availability within a region by distributing traffic across availability zones or availability sets, meeting the requirement for a stateless web application without needing Layer 7 features.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Azure Load Balancer (Standard) with HTTP health probe.
Why this is correct
The Standard Load Balancer is a regional Layer 4 load balancer that distributes TCP/UDP traffic across backend VM instances. Its HTTP health probe periodically sends HTTP GET requests to the configured path and removes any VM that does not return a 2xx status, enabling automatic failover. Being zone-redundant, it provides high availability within a region, and because the app is stateless, no session persistence or Layer 7 routing is needed. This makes it the simplest, most cost-effective choice.
- ✗
Azure Application Gateway v2.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Application Gateway v2 is a Layer 7 load balancer featuring SSL termination, URL path-based routing, and cookie-based session affinity. Those capabilities are extraneous for a stateless HTTP workload that simply needs to distribute raw TCP connections across VMs. It also adds operational complexity and higher per-hour cost than a Standard Load Balancer because it runs a dedicated gateway tier. Therefore it is not the recommended regional HA solution here.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic router that maps domain names to endpoints across different Azure regions, such as scale sets or regional load balancers. It decides which endpoint receives traffic based on DNS resolution using routing methods like priority or performance, but it does not load-balance individual TCP/HTTP connections within a region. Its health checks are coarse endpoint-level probes, not VM-level or port-level monitoring, and it cannot replace a regional load balancer to keep VMs available within one region.
- ✗
Azure Front Door.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global HTTP(S) delivery and protection service that accelerates requests through Microsoft's edge network by routing to the closest healthy origin. It operates at the DNS/anycast level with features like caching, SSL offload, and WAF policies, all of which are excessive for a single-region stateless web app. Equally important, it does not perform L4 load balancing inside a region; it expects an origin load balancer to handle that. For a deployment that only needs regional high availability, Front Door adds extra latency and cost without tangible benefit.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-305 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-305 exam.