AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
You are designing a storage solution for a media company that needs to store large video files (up to 50 GB each) and serve them to a global audience with low latency. The solution must be cost-effective and support resumable uploads. Which Azure storage solution should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is that candidates may assume they need Azure Files (option A) or another service for resumable uploads, but Azure Blob Storage's block blob API natively supports resumable uploads, making it the simplest and most cost-effective choice.
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 Blob Storage with Azure CDN
Azure Blob Storage is optimized for storing large unstructured data like video files, and Azure CDN ensures low-latency global delivery. Blob Storage natively supports resumable uploads via block blob APIs, making additional services like Azure Files unnecessary. This solution is cost-effective due to Blob Storage's tiered pricing and CDN edge caching.
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 Files with Azure File Sync and Azure CDN.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Files with Azure File Sync and Azure CDN is inappropriate for global media distribution because Azure Files exposes SMB/NFS file shares, not an HTTP(S) server that can serve anonymous web content efficiently. Azure File Sync is designed for caching a file share on Windows Server at edge sites, not for CDN-style caching on Azure's anycast PoPs, and Azure CDN cannot natively use an Azure Files share as an origin without a costly custom middleware layer to translate HTTP requests into SMB calls. Additionally, Azure Files costs more per GiB than Blob Storage and lacks the resumable upload API (AzCopy) that is essential for ingesting large media assets over unreliable networks.
- ✗
Azure Disk Storage with Azure Load Balancer.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Disk Storage with Azure Load Balancer is fundamentally a block-storage solution, not a file-serving or content-delivery architecture. A managed disk attaches to a single virtual machine, so distributing media files across many VMs would require copying data to each VM's local disk, creating operational complexity and storage duplication; the load balancer only spreads incoming TCP/UDP traffic across those VMs, it does not aggregate or replicate storage. This approach also has no global edge caching, no native support for resumable uploads, and stateless media assets would be lost when a VM's disk is deallocated, making it unsuitable for a high-availability, cost-effective media storage solution.
- ✓
Azure Blob Storage with Azure CDN
Why this is correct
Azure Blob Storage with Azure CDN is the correct choice for a media company because Blob Storage provides at-scale object storage designed for large binary assets, with support for anonymous read access, SAS tokens, hot/cool/archive tiers, and Azure CDN integration to cache content at edge PoPs for low latency. Blob Storage is considerably more cost-effective for terabytes of media files than any file or block service, and it natively supports AzCopy's resumable uploads, which is critical for transferring very large video assets over intermittent pipelines. The CDN endpoint fronting the blob container offloads origin requests, ensures global low-latency delivery, and can be configured with session affinity, query-string caching, and custom domains, making it the canonical architecture for media distribution in Azure.
- ✗
Azure NetApp Files with Azure Front Door.
Why it's wrong here
Azure NetApp Files with Azure Front Door is an expensive and architecturally mismatched pairing: Azure NetApp Files is a premium SMB/NFS NAS service intended for lift-and-shift enterprise workloads, HPC, and VDI, not as an HTTP origin for publicly delivered media. Front Door is a global load balancer and CDN, but it cannot reference an Azure NetApp Files volume directly as an origin without exposing it through a public endpoint or coupling it to a custom web tier; even then, the per-GiB cost of NetApp Files is orders of magnitude higher than Blob Storage, and it lacks the object-level features like tiering, lifecycle policies, and AzCopy resumable uploads that media storage pipelines require. The combination would burn budget and add latency, not solve the content delivery problem.
Quick reference
Azure Blob Storage Tier Comparison
| Tier | Storage Cost | Retrieval Cost | Latency | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot | Highest | Lowest | Immediate | Active data, frequent reads |
| Cool | Lower | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / month |
| Cold | Lower still | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / quarter |
| Archive | Lowest | Highest + rehydration delay | Hours | Long-term compliance retention |
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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.