AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
This AZ-305 practice question tests your understanding of design infrastructure solutions. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. 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.
A company deploys a web application on multiple Azure VMs in a single region. They need to distribute incoming HTTP and HTTPS traffic across the VMs, offload SSL/TLS termination, and maintain session persistence (sticky sessions) so that all requests from a user session go to the same backend VM. Which Azure load balancing solution should they use?
Why wrong: Incorrect: Azure Load Balancer operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and cannot offload SSL or provide HTTP session persistence.
C
Azure Traffic Manager
Why wrong: Incorrect: Traffic Manager is a DNS-based global traffic router, not for regional load balancing with SSL offload and session persistence.
D
Azure Front Door
Why wrong: Incorrect: While Front Door offers session affinity and SSL termination, it is a global service and not the optimal choice for a single-region deployment behind a single VNet.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway is a Layer 7 load balancer that can distribute HTTP/HTTPS traffic, offload SSL/TLS termination, and support session persistence via cookie-based affinity (sticky sessions). These capabilities directly match the requirements, making it the correct choice.
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.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: Azure Load Balancer operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and cannot offload SSL or provide HTTP session persistence.
✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: Traffic Manager is a DNS-based global traffic router, not for regional load balancing with SSL offload and session persistence.
✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: While Front Door offers session affinity and SSL termination, it is a global service and not the optimal choice for a single-region deployment behind a single VNet.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse Azure Load Balancer (Layer 4) with Application Gateway (Layer 7), assuming that any load balancer can handle SSL termination and sticky sessions, but only Layer 7 solutions like Application Gateway or Front Door provide these features.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Azure Application Gateway uses a Web Application Firewall (WAF) for security and supports end-to-end TLS encryption. Its cookie-based session affinity (Application Gateway Affinity Cookie) ensures that all requests from a client session are routed to the same backend server, which is critical for stateful applications like e-commerce shopping carts. Under the hood, it uses a hash of the client's source IP and port to maintain stickiness, but the cookie overrides this for HTTP traffic.
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-305 question in full detail.
Design infrastructure solutions — This question tests Design infrastructure solutions — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Azure Application Gateway — Azure Application Gateway is a Layer 7 load balancer that can distribute HTTP/HTTPS traffic, offload SSL/TLS termination, and support session persistence via cookie-based affinity (sticky sessions). These capabilities directly match the requirements, making it the correct choice.
What should I do if I get this AZ-305 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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