AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
You are designing a business continuity solution for a mission-critical Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. The cluster hosts a stateful application that uses Azure Disks for persistent volumes. You need to ensure that the application can be recovered in a secondary region within 1 hour of a regional failure. What should you use to replicate the persistent volumes?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently choose Azure Backup or Disk Backup options because they associate 'backup' with disaster recovery, but these solutions lack the continuous replication and automated failover required to meet a 1-hour RTO for stateful workloads.
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 Site Recovery with replication of the AKS node VMs and attached disks
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) can replicate Azure VMs and their attached managed disks to a secondary region. For an AKS cluster, replicating the node VMs and their attached Azure Disks ensures that the persistent volumes (backed by Azure Disks) are available in the secondary region. Combined with AKS cluster deployment in the secondary region, this meets the 1-hour recovery time objective (RTO) for a stateful application.
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 Disk Backup with geo-redundant storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Disk Backup with geo-redundant storage captures point-in-time snapshots of managed disks in a Backup Vault and copies them to a paired region for durability. However, this is a backup service, not a replication engine: it does not continuously replicate disk writes, nor does it provide automated failover or orchestration of an AKS cluster. For a mission-critical business continuity solution, the absence of an RPO controlled failover path and a manual restore process makes it unsuitable for DR.
- ✗
Azure Backup with disk snapshot policies
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with disk snapshot policies relies on scheduled snapshots of VM disks and can even support cross-region restore, but it never constructs a live, always-synchronized copy of the workload in the secondary region. Failover is fundamentally a manual operation—there is no health monitoring, no automated DNS update, and no recovery plan to spin up an AKS environment. This makes it a backup and recovery tool rather than a true disaster-replication solution, leaving you with extended RTO and no automatic failover.
- ✗
Azure File Sync to replicate the disk content
Why it's wrong here
Azure File Sync is designed to replicate file share contents between on-premises servers or Azure file shares, not to replicate VM disks, operating system state, or application binaries. AKS node VMs rely on managed disks attached to the node, not on file shares, so File Sync cannot capture or reproduce the disk-level changes required for a working cluster. Even if you attempted to sync some data, it would not provide failover, load balancer switching, or the ability to bring a full AKS cluster online in another region.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery with replication of the AKS node VMs and attached disks
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery with replication of the AKS node VMs and attached disks continuously replicates the entire VM and its managed disks to the secondary region, maintaining a ready-to-start copy that can be failed over within a defined RPO and RTO. It provides orchestrated failover, recovery plans, and test failover capabilities, allowing you to safely validate the DR process. While you may need to redeploy or reconfigure the AKS control plane after failover, the replicated node disks ensure your applications' state and data are present, making ASR the only option here that truly delivers a business continuity DR mechanism.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Service Fabric
Key term
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a Microsoft Azure service that keeps your business applications and data running by automatically replicating them to a secondary location and failing over if the primary site goes down.
Key term
Disaster Recovery Design
Disaster Recovery Design is the process of planning and implementing strategies to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime and data loss.
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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.