AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a web application on Azure App Service with a Standard tier plan. The application uses an Azure SQL Database (DTU-based) for storage. The business requires that the application remain available in the event of a single Azure region outage. Which solution meets the requirement with the least administrative effort?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse availability zones (which protect against datacenter failures within a region) with region pairs (which protect against full regional outages), leading them to choose Option A or B incorrectly.
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 an additional App Service in a secondary region and use Azure SQL Database active geo-replication
Deploying an additional App Service in a secondary region and using Azure SQL Database active geo-replication ensures that both the compute and data tiers can fail over to a different Azure region during a regional outage. Active geo-replication creates readable secondary replicas of the SQL Database in the paired region, and with App Service, you can use Azure Front Door or Traffic Manager to route traffic to the secondary instance. This solution meets the availability requirement with minimal administrative overhead, as geo-replication is managed by Azure and does not require complex manual synchronization.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use an App Service Environment (ASE) in a single region with App Service plans in multiple availability zones
Why it's wrong here
App Service Environment (ASE) with plans spanning availability zones delivers zone-redundant compute within a single Azure region, protecting against datacenter or zone outages. However, it does not address regional failure, such as a natural disaster or widespread service outage, because the entire ASE and its dependencies (including any paired SQL Database) remain in one geography. Since the requirement is disaster recovery across regions, a Zone-redundant ASE alone fails to provide the necessary cross-region failover capability.
- ✗
Use Azure Front Door to route traffic to a secondary App Service in the same region
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global load balancer that routes traffic across backends, but if both App Services are deployed in the same region, they share the same regional failure domain. A regional outage would take down both the primary and secondary instances simultaneously, leaving no available backend to fail over to. For real disaster recovery, the secondary App Service must reside in a different Azure region; Front Door then provides the traffic routing overlay, but geography placement is the critical missing piece here.
- ✗
Configure Azure Backup for the App Service and SQL Database
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is designed for data protection and recovery, not high availability or disaster recovery. While backing up the App Service configuration and SQL Database allows point-in-time restore (e.g., to an earlier database state), a restore operation takes time and introduces downtime, and it does not auto-failover traffic or replicate data continuously for immediate regional failover. In a regional outage, you would need to restore from backup in another region, but the backups themselves may not be geo-redundant or up-to-date enough for a low-RPO, low-RTO DR plan.
- ✓
Deploy an additional App Service in a secondary region and use Azure SQL Database active geo-replication
Why this is correct
Deploying a second App Service in a secondary Azure region and configuring active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database is the standard, simplest disaster recovery pattern. Active geo-replication continuously replicates up to four readable secondary databases to the paired or chosen region, enabling a failover group that can automatically or manually promote the secondary to primary with minimal downtime. The additional App Service in that secondary region can then serve traffic once DNS records are switched (for example, via Azure Traffic Manager or Azure Front Door), meeting a cross-region disaster recovery requirement without needing a full standby environment.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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