AZ-900 Describe cloud concepts Practice Question
Which term describes the practice of deploying resources across multiple Azure availability zones to protect against datacenter-level failures?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse 'zone-redundant deployment' with 'geo-redundancy,' mistakenly thinking both protect against datacenter failures, but geo-redundancy is for region-level failures and involves higher latency, while zone-redundancy is for datacenter-level failures within the same 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
✓
Zone-redundant deployment
Zone-redundant deployment (B) is the correct term because it specifically refers to replicating resources across multiple Azure availability zones within a single Azure region. Availability zones are physically separate datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking, so deploying across them protects against a single datacenter-level failure while keeping the application within the same low-latency region.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Geo-redundancy
Why it's wrong here
Geo-redundancy replicates resources or data across geographically separate Azure regions, protecting against an entire region becoming unavailable. That is a different scope from zone redundancy, which confines resilience to multiple availability zones inside one region. Zone redundancy handles datacenter failures, whereas geo-redundancy handles regional disasters, so geo-redundancy is not the correct label for the described within-region strategy.
- ✓
Zone-redundant deployment
Why this is correct
Zone-redundant deployment deliberately places resources, such as virtual machines or storage replicas, across multiple availability zones within an Azure region. Each availability zone is an isolated datacenter with independent power, cooling, and networking, so if one zone fails the remaining zones continue serving traffic. This design offers high availability against datacenter-level failures, matching the scenario described in the question.
- ✗
Horizontal scaling
Why it's wrong here
Horizontal scaling adds more instances or virtual machines to distribute workload, primarily addressing performance and capacity needs. However, it does not automatically spread those instances across different availability zones; you could scale within a single datacenter, leaving a single point of failure. Therefore, horizontal scaling alone does not ensure zone-level resiliency, which is the question's focus.
- ✗
Disaster recovery
Why it's wrong here
Disaster recovery focuses on restoring services and data after a major outage, typically by replicating to a secondary Azure region and using failover procedures. This strategy is designed for region-wide catastrophes, not for localized datacenter failures. Zone-redundant deployment, by contrast, operates within a single region across multiple availability zones, providing high availability rather than recovery from a distant backup.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
High Availability and Scalability
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
Key term
Region
A region is a distinct geographic location where a cloud provider operates multiple data centers that are connected by low-latency networks and provide cloud services.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every AZ-900 question from scratch — 981 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-900 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-900 exam.