AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
You are designing a solution for a critical application that requires low latency between multiple Azure regions. The application must handle failover automatically if a region becomes unavailable. You need to distribute traffic across regions and ensure that users are directed to the closest healthy endpoint. What should you implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Azure Front Door's priority routing with geographic routing, but priority routing does not direct users to the closest endpoint—it only provides a static failover order, whereas Traffic Manager's geographic routing dynamically selects the nearest healthy region.
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 Traffic Manager with geographic routing and endpoint monitoring
Azure Traffic Manager with geographic routing and endpoint monitoring is the correct choice because it operates at the DNS level, directing users to the closest healthy endpoint based on geographic location. This ensures low latency by routing traffic to the nearest region and provides automatic failover by continuously monitoring endpoint health and rerouting traffic if a region becomes unavailable.
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 Standard Load Balancer with cross-region load balancing
Why it's wrong here
Azure Standard Load Balancer is a regional, layer 4 service and cannot route traffic across regions by itself; the cross-region load balancer is still in preview and requires a regional Standard Load Balancer in each target region, providing only an aggregated frontend with no DNS-level geographic or latency-based steering. It does not perform health-based DNS resolution, so it cannot dynamically direct users to the closest healthy global endpoint.
- ✗
Azure Front Door with priority routing
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door with priority routing relies on configuring an explicit failover order rather than automatically selecting the nearest healthy region; although Front Door uses anycast to bring users to its edge, the backend selection ignores real-time latency and geography, making this a manual active/passive setup. The anycast edge routes to the nearest point of presence, not necessarily the closest origin, so priority routing does not satisfy the requirement for latency-conscious geographic distribution.
- ✓
Azure Traffic Manager with geographic routing and endpoint monitoring
Why this is correct
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based global traffic manager that resolves user queries to the most appropriate endpoint based on routing methods like geographic, priority, weighted, or performance; when combined with geographic routing and endpoint monitoring, it can direct users from specific geographies to their closest configured regional endpoint and automatically fail over if health checks fail. Because it operates at the DNS layer rather than the anycast or network layer, it provides a clean, global routing mechanism that matches the requirement for critical application availability.
- ✗
Azure Application Gateway with autoscaling
Why it's wrong here
Azure Application Gateway is a regional, layer 7 web traffic load balancer that lives inside a single virtual network and region, and autoscaling only changes the number of instances in that one region to handle local load spikes. It has no global DNS, no geographic awareness, and no cross-region endpoint health monitoring, so it cannot direct users to the nearest healthy region across the world.
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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.