AZ-305 Question 130
Select 2You are designing a multi-tier e-commerce application that must achieve at least 99.99% availability and continue running even if there is a complete regional outage in Azure. The front-end is hosted on Azure App Service, business logic runs on Azure VMs, and the data resides in an Azure SQL Database. Which two actions should you take to ensure high availability across regions?
- A
Deploy a secondary Azure App Service in another region and configure Azure Traffic Manager for failover.
- B
Move the VM-based business logic to Availability Zones in the same region only.
- C
Configure Azure SQL Database Active Geo-Replication to a secondary region and set up automatic failover groups.
- D
Enable Azure Backup for the VMs in the primary region to restore them in case of a regional failure.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C
Explanation
According to Microsoft best practices, ensuring high availability in the event of a regional outage involves deploying workloads and critical data in a secondary region and configuring failover mechanisms. Azure App Service should be configured in multiple regions behind a traffic-routing service (Traffic Manager or Front Door) for front-end redundancy. Meanwhile, Azure SQL Database Active Geo-Replication and automated failover groups offer near real-time replication and failover capabilities, ensuring minimal downtime and minimal data loss. More information can be found in Microsoft’s official documentation on high availability and disaster recovery for Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database.
- A. Correct.
Option 1 is correct. Deploying the App Service in a second region and using Azure Traffic Manager (or Azure Front Door) for routing allows the service to fail over to another region seamlessly if the primary region experiences an outage.
- B. Incorrect.
Option 2 is incorrect. Although placing VMs in Availability Zones increases availability within the same region, it does not address a complete regional outage. You need a secondary region to provide resilience at the regional level.
- C. Correct.
Option 3 is correct. Active Geo-Replication for Azure SQL Database with an automatic failover group ensures that if the primary region fails, the database can quickly fail over to the secondary region, minimizing downtime and data loss (meeting RTO and RPO requirements).
- D. Incorrect.
Option 4 is incorrect. While Azure Backup is vital for disaster recovery, it does not provide immediate high availability or seamless failover. Restoring from backups is typically a longer process than using an active, replicated setup.