HashiCorp Vault Associate (003) Question 204
Single answer8 Vault deployment architectureA company is deploying Vault for production across three availability zones in a single cloud region. They want Vault to remain available if one node fails, automatically elect a new leader if needed, and avoid adding an external storage dependency just to support high availability. Which deployment architecture best meets these requirements?
- A
Deploy a 3-node Vault cluster using integrated storage (Raft), with one active node and follower nodes participating in leader election
- B
Deploy a single Vault server using the file storage backend, and rely on the cloud provider to restart the VM if it fails
- C
Deploy 3 Vault servers using the file storage backend on shared NFS storage, so all nodes can read and write the same data
- D
Deploy a 3-node Vault cluster with in-memory storage, and use a load balancer to redirect traffic if the active node fails
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
For production Vault deployments, high availability requires both durable storage and a mechanism for coordinating active/standby behavior or leader election. Vault integrated storage uses the Raft consensus protocol to provide this natively, eliminating the need for an additional external storage dependency solely for HA. In a 3-node Raft cluster, Vault can tolerate one node failure and still maintain quorum, which makes it a practical deployment architecture across three availability zones. By contrast, file storage is not an HA backend for clustered Vault nodes, and in-memory storage is non-durable and intended only for development or testing. This aligns with HashiCorp guidance that integrated storage is a supported production architecture and a common choice for Vault HA deployments.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Integrated storage with Raft is the recommended way to run Vault in production when you want built-in high availability without introducing a separate external storage system such as Consul. In a Raft cluster, nodes replicate data among themselves and can elect a new leader automatically if the current leader becomes unavailable. A 3-node deployment across availability zones is a common architecture because it can tolerate the loss of one node while maintaining quorum.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A single Vault server with file storage is a single point of failure and does not provide high availability. Restarting the VM may restore service eventually, but it does not meet the requirement for continued availability or automatic leader election. This option reflects a common misconception that infrastructure restart capabilities are equivalent to an HA application architecture.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. The file storage backend is intended for local storage on a single Vault node and is not an HA shared storage mechanism for multiple Vault servers. Using shared NFS for the file backend is not the correct architecture for Vault HA and can introduce consistency and locking problems. This distractor targets the mistaken idea that any shared filesystem can be used to make a single-node storage backend highly available.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. In-memory storage is not suitable for production because data is lost when the process stops or the node fails. A load balancer alone does not create a highly available storage or leader election mechanism. Even if traffic is redirected, the surviving nodes would not have durable shared state needed for Vault to function correctly.