AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Your company runs a stateless web application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). You need to design a disaster recovery solution that ensures the application is available in another Azure region within 30 minutes of a regional failure. The solution must balance cost and complexity. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse high availability within a region (availability zones) with disaster recovery across regions, leading them to choose Option D, which only protects against zonal failures, not regional outages.
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
✓
Use Azure Traffic Manager to distribute traffic across two AKS clusters in different regions.
Azure Traffic Manager can distribute traffic across two AKS clusters in different regions using DNS-based routing, such as priority or performance routing, enabling failover within the required 30-minute RTO. This approach balances cost and complexity by avoiding the need for active-active replication or complex multi-region pod configurations, while still meeting the stateless application's DR requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure SQL Database active geo-replication for the application's database.
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication is a database-level disaster recovery feature that asynchronously replicates transactions to a secondary readable database, but the web tier in this scenario is stateless and has no database dependency mentioned; therefore it cannot contribute to keeping the application reachable if the primary AKS region goes down. Even if a database existed, it would only address data availability, not compute or ingress failover.
- ✗
Use Azure Front Door to route traffic to a single AKS cluster with pods running in multiple regions.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global HTTP/S load balancer, but routing to a single AKS cluster with pods in multiple regions is an invalid architecture because AKS clusters are scoped to one region and cannot have pod replicas running across regional boundaries; a regional outage would still take down the cluster and all its pods. To use Front Door for regional failover, you must register separate AKS clusters in each region as distinct backends.
- ✓
Use Azure Traffic Manager to distribute traffic across two AKS clusters in different regions.
Why this is correct
Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS level and can use priority routing to direct all traffic to the primary-region AKS cluster while continuously health-checking its endpoint; when the primary fails, Traffic Manager automatically fails over to the secondary-region cluster, meeting the RTO by keeping the stateless service available. Both clusters should be configured identically and expose the application through a load balancer or ingress service so users are seamlessly redirected.
- ✗
Deploy a single AKS cluster with nodes in multiple availability zones.
Why it's wrong here
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within a single Azure region, so they provide redundancy against rack or building failure, not against an entire regional outage; the single AKS cluster's control plane and API server still reside in that one region, and if the region becomes unavailable the whole cluster is unreachable despite nodes being spread across zones. This design fails to satisfy the requirement for cross-region disaster recovery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cost Optimization Architecture Patterns
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
BIA and RPO RTO Design
Business Impact Analysis and the design of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective define how much data loss and downtime a business can tolerate after an IT failure, guiding the architecture of backup and disaster recovery systems.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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