MS-900 Describe cloud concepts Practice Question
A company needs to ensure that their cloud data and applications remain available even if an entire Azure region experiences an outage. They also want to minimize latency by hosting resources in multiple geographic locations. Which cloud concept addresses these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse geo-redundancy with high availability within a single region (e.g., Availability Zones) or mistakenly think scalability or resource pooling can provide region-level disaster recovery, but only geo-redundancy ensures data and app availability across entire regions.
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
✓
Geo-redundancy
Geo-redundancy (Option B) is correct because it specifically addresses the requirement for data and application availability during an entire Azure region outage by replicating resources across multiple geographically separated regions, such as Azure paired regions (e.g., East US and West US). This also minimizes latency by allowing traffic to be routed to the nearest available region, leveraging Azure Traffic Manager or Azure Front Door for global load balancing.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Scalability
Why it's wrong here
Scalability is the ability to add or remove resources—virtual machines, app service instances, or database shards—to match changing workload demand. It does nothing to protect data if an entire Azure region fails, and it does not replicate data closer to users for lower latency. A scaled-out deployment still remains confined to the regions where it is deployed unless separate geo-redundancy or geo-replication is enabled.
- ✓
Geo-redundancy
Why this is correct
Geo-redundancy stores synchronous or asynchronous copies of data in a secondary Azure region, commonly a paired region, and automatically fails over or permits customer-triggered failover when the primary region becomes unavailable. Azure Storage geo-redundant storage (GRS) and geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) maintain a second copy hundreds of miles away, while read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) additionally lets applications read from the secondary region, improving availability and lowering latency for nearby users.
- ✗
Measured service
Why it's wrong here
Measured service is a cloud economics term that describes how Microsoft meters and bills consumption—compute hours, storage terabytes, network transfer—and makes it possible for Azure to charge customers only for what they use. It has no effect on where data is placed, how it is replicated, or whether applications remain online during an outage. A service can be precisely metered and still be fully unavailable if its single region goes down.
- ✗
Resource pooling
Why it's wrong here
Resource pooling is the multi-tenant architecture in which Azure combines compute, storage, and network capacity into a shared pool that can be dynamically assigned to many customers, which lowers cost through economies of scale. It does not guarantee geographic dispersion or recovery from regional failure; with pooled infrastructure, customers' resources are still pinned to whichever datacenters their deployment uses. Unless geographic replication is explicitly configured, pooling offers no extra availability benefit.
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Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This MS-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 MS-900 exam.