AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in a single region. The application is stateless and uses an Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication for database DR. They need to ensure the AKS cluster can failover to a secondary region with an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 5 seconds for the database. What should they recommend for the AKS cluster?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Site Recovery as a solution for AKS DR, but Site Recovery only supports IaaS VMs, not managed Kubernetes services, making multi-region AKS clusters with Traffic Manager the correct approach.
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
✓
Deploy AKS clusters in two regions and use Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic.
Deploying AKS clusters in two regions with Azure Traffic Manager enables active-passive or active-active failover. Traffic Manager uses DNS-based routing to direct traffic to the secondary region when the primary fails, meeting the RTO of 15 minutes. The stateless application can be redeployed or scaled in the secondary cluster, while the Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication ensures an RPO of 5 seconds by continuously replicating transactions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Deploy AKS clusters in two regions and use Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic.
Why this is correct
Traffic Manager provides DNS-based global load balancing. With AKS clusters in two regions, Traffic Manager can direct users to the healthy region, achieving the required RTO. The database DR is handled separately by active geo-replication.
- ✗
Deploy a single AKS cluster with pods spread across availability zones within the region.
Why it's wrong here
While spreading pods across availability zones insulates the workload from a single datacenter failure, all zones share the same Azure region and the same AKS control plane. A regional disaster that takes down the entire region would make both the control plane and the node pools unavailable, so this architecture does not provide the regional failover needed to meet the RTO. The requirement explicitly targets protection against a full region outage, not merely zone-level resilience.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the AKS cluster to another region.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery replicates IaaS virtual machines between regions, but AKS is a managed service: the control plane is Microsoft-managed and cannot be failed over with ASR, and replication of worker-node VMs does not cover the orchestrator, load balancers, or Kubernetes state. Even if node VMs were restored, the resulting cluster would be inconsistent and non-functional, and ASR does not handle the container registry, persistent volumes, or networking required for a working AKS deployment. This is not a supported or practical DR path for AKS.
- ✗
Back up the AKS cluster configuration and container images to a geo-redundant storage account.
Why it's wrong here
Backing up AKS manifests and container images to geo-redundant storage provides a recovery point, not a failover environment. To actually serve traffic, you would need to provision a new AKS cluster in the secondary region, apply the manifests, re-create secrets and ingress, and restore application data—a process that almost always exceeds the 15-minute RTO and may also create data drift. Backup is useful for retention and compliance, but it cannot meet the requirement for automated regional failover.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
Key term
BIA and RPO RTO Design
Business Impact Analysis and the design of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective define how much data loss and downtime a business can tolerate after an IT failure, guiding the architecture of backup and disaster recovery systems.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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