AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
This AZ-305 practice question tests your understanding of design infrastructure solutions. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. 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 plans to deploy multiple virtual machines (VMs) across two Azure regions for high availability. The VMs will host a stateless web application that must be accessible via a single DNS endpoint. The solution must automatically route traffic to the nearest region with available capacity and provide failover if a region becomes unhealthy. Which Azure service should they use to meet these requirements?
Traffic Manager uses DNS to route users to the nearest or best-performing region and supports automatic failover when an endpoint becomes unhealthy.
B
Azure Front Door
Why wrong: Front Door provides global load balancing and SSL offload but is unnecessary for the stated requirement for this simple requirement; Traffic Manager is simpler and more cost-effective for DNS-based routing.
C
Azure Load Balancer
Why wrong: Load Balancer operates within a single region and cannot route traffic across regions.
D
Azure Application Gateway
Why wrong: Application Gateway is a regional layer-7 load balancer and does not provide multi-region routing.
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 distributes traffic to the nearest region with available capacity using the Performance traffic-routing method, and it automatically fails over to the next healthy endpoint when a region becomes unhealthy. It operates at the DNS level, returning the appropriate endpoint IP based on the client's DNS resolver location and endpoint health probes, making it ideal for stateless web applications requiring a single DNS endpoint across regions.
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.
✓
Azure Traffic Manager
Why this is correct
Traffic Manager uses DNS to route users to the nearest or best-performing region and supports automatic failover when an endpoint becomes unhealthy.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Front Door provides global load balancing and SSL offload but is unnecessary for the stated requirement for this simple requirement; Traffic Manager is simpler and more cost-effective for DNS-based routing.
✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Load Balancer operates within a single region and cannot route traffic across regions.
✗
Azure Application Gateway
Why it's wrong here
Application Gateway is a regional layer-7 load balancer and does not provide multi-region routing.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse Azure Front Door (Layer 7, HTTP/HTTPS) with Traffic Manager (DNS-based, any protocol), but the requirement for a single DNS endpoint and region-level failover without specifying HTTP makes Traffic Manager the correct choice.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Traffic Manager uses DNS responses to direct clients to the nearest healthy endpoint based on the Performance routing method, which leverages the lowest network latency as measured by Azure's global DNS infrastructure. It supports multiple routing methods (e.g., Priority, Weighted, Geographic) and health probes over HTTP/HTTPS/TCP to detect endpoint health, with a default probe interval of 10 seconds and a 2-second timeout. In a real-world scenario, if a primary region's endpoint fails, Traffic Manager's DNS TTL (default 300 seconds) can cause a brief delay before clients receive the failover endpoint, so setting a low TTL is critical for rapid failover.
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
A company's IT admin needs to give a contractor read-only access to production logs without sharing account credentials. Using role-based access control (RBAC) and temporary scoped permissions — not a permanent shared password — is the correct pattern. Questions like this test whether you can apply least-privilege access across cloud identity services.
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 Traffic Manager — Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that distributes traffic to the nearest region with available capacity using the Performance traffic-routing method, and it automatically fails over to the next healthy endpoint when a region becomes unhealthy. It operates at the DNS level, returning the appropriate endpoint IP based on the client's DNS resolver location and endpoint health probes, making it ideal for stateless web applications requiring a single DNS endpoint across regions.
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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