AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A company deploys a web application in two Azure regions for high availability. They need to automatically direct users to the nearest healthy region based on geographic location and endpoint health. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Azure Front Door with Traffic Manager because both can route traffic globally, but Front Door is an application delivery controller with integrated WAF and SSL offload, whereas Traffic Manager is a simpler DNS-based load balancer focused solely on geographic and health-based routing.
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 Traffic Manager
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that directs users to the nearest healthy region based on geographic location and endpoint health. It uses DNS resolution to route traffic to the closest available endpoint, making it ideal for global high-availability scenarios where users need automatic failover across regions.
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 Traffic Manager
Why this is correct
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based global load balancer that routes user requests to the most appropriate region based on routing methods like performance, priority, or geographic, and continuous health probes. Because it operates at the DNS layer, it simply returns the endpoint's IP address and does not proxy or terminate traffic, making it suitable for any application protocol. This enables simple, multi-region failover and geographic distribution as required by the company's two-region web application deployment.
- ✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) load balancer that distributes traffic only within a single Azure region and a single backend pool, such as virtual machines in one virtual network. It cannot perform geographic or DNS-based routing across two regions, nor can it make decisions based on application-layer attributes like URL or host header. Therefore, it is an incorrect choice for directing users to the nearest of two regional web application deployments.
- ✗
Azure Application Gateway
Why it's wrong here
Azure Application Gateway is a regional, Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) load balancer that offers capabilities like SSL termination, cookie affinity, URL path–based routing, and a Web Application Firewall inside a single region. While it provides rich application-layer control, it is deployed as one resource within a specific region and has no global DNS or cross-region routing logic to balance traffic between two Azure regions. It would only be a component within each regional deployment, not the global routing service needed here.
- ✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is tempting as it provides global HTTP/S load balancing, directing web traffic to the nearest healthy backend based on geographic location and health probes. However, it is specifically designed for Layer 7 (HTTP/S) traffic and acts as a reverse proxy, terminating user connections at the edge. If the web application requires directing users based on DNS resolution for non-HTTP/S protocols or a broader range of services, Azure Traffic Manager would be the appropriate choice, as it operates at the DNS layer to distribute traffic.
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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.