AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Which TWO of the following Azure services can be used to enable automatic failover of a web application across Azure regions?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Traffic Manager (DNS-based) with Azure Front Door (anycast-based), assuming both provide identical failover speed, but Front Door offers faster, more granular failover due to its anycast architecture and Layer 7 capabilities.
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
✓
Azure Front Door
Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry point that provides built-in automatic failover across regions using anycast-based routing and health probes. When a primary region becomes unhealthy, Front Door instantly routes traffic to the next available healthy backend, enabling seamless multi-region failover for web applications.
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 DNS
Why it's wrong here
Azure DNS is a global name resolution service that hosts your domain's DNS records, but it lacks any health-probing or traffic-routing logic. It simply serves the records you configure—such as an A record pointing to a public IP—and does not automatically alter that response if a regional endpoint becomes unhealthy. To achieve health-based failover, you would need a DNS-based traffic manager or a global anycast service, not Azure DNS itself.
- ✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Azure Load Balancer (standard) is a Layer 4 load balancer that operates within a single Azure region and a single virtual network, distributing traffic to healthy VMs in that region. It cannot route traffic across regions, so if an entire region fails, the Load Balancer has no path to a backup region. Cross-region failover requires a globally oriented service such as Azure Front Door or Azure Traffic Manager.
- ✓
Azure Front Door
Why this is correct
Azure Front Door is a global Layer 7 anycast service that continuously health-checks each backend or origin and uses that status to steer traffic to the nearest healthy region. When a region fails, Front Door quickly removes that origin from its active routing set, causing users to be redirected to another region with minimal disruption. It also provides TLS termination, URL-based routing, and a web application firewall, making it a robust choice for global web applications.
- ✓
Azure Traffic Manager
Why this is correct
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic router that responds to DNS queries by selecting a regional endpoint based on configured routing methods (priority, performance, geography, weighted) and live endpoint health checks. When a health probe fails for a region, Traffic Manager stops returning that region's DNS answer and instead returns another healthy regional endpoint, allowing automatic failover. Because it relies on DNS, failover speed is dependent on the time-to-live (TTL) of the client's cached records.
- ✗
Azure Application Gateway
Why it's wrong here
Azure Application Gateway is a regional Layer 7 load balancer that handles HTTP(S) traffic within a single Azure region using features like URL path–based routing, session affinity, and a web application firewall. It only balances among backends in that same region, so it cannot detect an entire region's outage and send traffic to a failover region. For region-level resilience you must combine it with a global traffic router such as Traffic Manager or Front Door.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every AZ-305 question from scratch — 795 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-305 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-305 exam.