AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
You are designing a high-availability solution for a stateless web application running on Azure VMs. The solution must provide automatic failover to another region in the event of a regional outage. Which Azure service should you use to distribute traffic across regions?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Azure Traffic Manager (DNS-based, slower failover) with Azure Front Door (application-layer, faster failover), but the question's emphasis on 'automatic failover' and 'regional outage' points to Front Door's superior health probe and anycast capabilities over Traffic Manager's DNS-dependent routing.
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 the correct choice because it is a global, scalable entry point that uses HTTP/HTTPS traffic to provide cross-region load balancing and automatic failover. It supports path-based routing, SSL offload, and health probes that can detect a regional outage and instantly reroute traffic to a healthy region, meeting the requirement for stateless 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 Application Gateway
Why it's wrong here
Azure Application Gateway operates at Layer 7 as a regional application delivery controller, handling HTTP(S) routing, SSL offloading, and WAF within a single Azure region. It cannot automatically shift traffic between regions because it has no global endpoint or health monitoring across distant deployments, so a regional outage would take the gateway itself down along with the backend. Even with multiple instances in an availability zone, you would need a separate global front-end to drive cross-region failover.
- ✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 regional service that distributes TCP/UDP traffic to healthy VMs or VM scale sets inside a single virtual network. It does not terminate HTTP or make routing decisions based on URL paths, and it has no concept of a primary or secondary region; its health probes only test local backend instances. Because it is bound to one region's data path, it cannot provide the global anycast or DNS-based failover needed for a stateless web app spread across regions.
- ✓
Azure Front Door
Why this is correct
Azure Front Door is a global, layer 7 service that uses anycast to route HTTP(S) traffic to the nearest healthy origin, with automatic failover if a backend region becomes unhealthy. It supports SSL termination, path-based routing, session affinity, and a built-in WAF, making it well-suited for stateless web applications that require both low-latency global access and resiliency. Front Door continuously probes health endpoints in each region and instantly shifts traffic to the next-capable origin without relying on DNS caching clients.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic router that can direct users to different regional endpoints, and it does perform health checks and automatic failover. However, it only resolves a DNS name to an IP address; it does not sit in the data path, so it cannot provide SSL termination, URL rewriting, or a WAF. Clients and intermediate DNS resolvers may cache the DNS records, causing slower failover and less precise control than Front Door, making it a simpler but less feature-rich option for a modern web application.
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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.