AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company wants to ensure that their Azure SQL Database can continue to serve read-write traffic if the primary region becomes unavailable. They require minimal data loss. What should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse high availability within a region (Availability Zones) with disaster recovery across regions (geo-replication), or they mistakenly think read-scale replicas can handle write traffic during failover.
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
✓
Configure an auto-failover group with a secondary in another region
An auto-failover group with a secondary in another region provides continuous read-write traffic capability during a regional outage with minimal data loss. The failover group uses asynchronous replication with a configurable grace period (default 1 hour) to balance performance and data loss, and upon failover, the secondary becomes the new primary with the same connection string, ensuring application transparency.
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 Azure Backup with cross-region restore
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with cross-region restore provides point-in-time database or backup file restores into another region from a geo-redundant Recovery Services vault. It is a backup and recovery mechanism, not an availability or failover solution: there is no continuous replication, no health monitoring, and no automatic role promotion between primary and secondary. Restores are manual operations with meaningful RTO, so this option cannot satisfy a requirement for automated failover during a regional disruption.
- ✗
Deploy the database across two Availability Zones
Why it's wrong here
Making the database zone-redundant across two Availability Zones protects against failure of a single datacenter within one Azure region, but all zones share the same regional boundary and accompanying dependencies. If the entire region experiences an outage, both zones are affected and the database remains unavailable. This design does not create a secondary replica in a different geography, so it provides no true cross-region disaster recovery capability.
- ✓
Configure an auto-failover group with a secondary in another region
Why this is correct
An auto-failover group pairs a read-write primary database with a readable secondary server in another Azure region and exposes a single listener endpoint that automatically points to the current primary. The service continuously replicates data via active geo-replication and can automatically initiate failover when the primary becomes unhealthy, with a configurationurable grace period and forced/failover options. Because the secondary can be promoted to primary, this option preserves database availability even during a full regional outage.
- ✗
Read-scale replicas in the same region
Why it's wrong here
Read-scale replicas in the same region are read-only copies of the database used to offload reporting or analytical queries from the primary workload. They do not accept write operations and cannot be promoted or failed over to become the primary database, so they are not a disaster recovery replica. Since they are deployed in the same region, they also fail if that entire region goes down, leaving the application without a cross-region failover path.
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