Microsoft AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solution Exam Dumps and Practice Test Questions Set 11 Q151-165

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Question 151

You need to design a solution to ensure high availability for a multi-tier web application deployed in Azure across multiple regions. Which combination should you recommend?

A) Azure Front Door + Virtual Machine Scale Sets
B) Azure Load Balancer + Azure Key Vault
C) Azure Traffic Manager + Azure Policy
D) Azure Application Gateway + Azure Backup

Answer: A) Azure Front Door + Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Explanation:

Azure Front Door is a powerful global Layer 7 load balancing and application delivery service that provides organizations with a comprehensive solution for routing user traffic efficiently and securely across the globe. By directing traffic to the closest healthy backend, Azure Front Door minimizes latency for users regardless of their geographic location. This global traffic management ensures that applications remain responsive even for a widely distributed user base. In addition to its intelligent routing capabilities, Azure Front Door incorporates caching mechanisms, SSL offloading, and Web Application Firewall (WAF) features. Caching improves application performance by storing frequently accessed content closer to users, while SSL offload reduces the computational load on backend servers by handling encryption and decryption at the edge. The integrated WAF further enhances security by protecting applications against common threats and vulnerabilities, ensuring both performance and protection are addressed simultaneously.

Complementing Azure Front Door, Virtual Machine Scale Sets provide automated scaling for compute resources based on predefined metrics such as CPU utilization, memory consumption, or custom telemetry. This capability ensures that applications have sufficient capacity to handle sudden spikes in traffic while avoiding unnecessary costs during periods of low demand. Scale sets allow the dynamic addition or removal of virtual machines in response to real-time workload requirements, thereby maintaining optimal performance and resilience. When combined with Azure Front Door, Virtual Machine Scale Sets create a robust architecture that not only optimizes user traffic routing and global availability but also dynamically adjusts backend resources to meet demand fluctuations, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance across regions.

While Azure Load Balancer can distribute traffic at Layer 4 within a specific region, it lacks the global routing, Layer 7 application-level optimizations, and caching capabilities that Azure Front Door provides. Similarly, Azure Traffic Manager, although capable of global DNS-based routing, does not offer application-level enhancements such as SSL offload, WAF integration, or intelligent traffic distribution based on backend health and load. Azure Application Gateway provides regional Layer 7 features including SSL termination and WAF capabilities, but it cannot manage global traffic or ensure low-latency routing across multiple regions. Services such as Azure Key Vault focus on secure key and secret management, and Azure Backup addresses data protection, but neither contributes directly to traffic optimization, high availability, or scaling of application workloads. Azure Policy enforces governance and compliance but does not improve operational performance or resource scaling.

By integrating Azure Front Door with Virtual Machine Scale Sets, organizations achieve a comprehensive solution that addresses global routing, performance optimization, security, and dynamic resource scaling. This combination ensures traffic is efficiently directed to the nearest healthy backend, applications remain responsive under fluctuating load conditions, and the system is resilient to regional failures. Azure Front Door with VM Scale Sets thus provides a holistic approach to delivering globally distributed applications with low latency, high availability, security, and automated performance management. Other services, while valuable, offer only partial functionality and do not provide the full spectrum of global performance, availability, and scaling capabilities necessary for mission-critical applications.

Question 152

You need to ensure Azure SQL Databases can failover automatically to a secondary region during outages. Which feature should you recommend?

A) Active Geo-Replication
B) Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)
C) Always Encrypted
D) Azure Key Vault

Answer: A) Active Geo-Replication

Explanation:

Active Geo-Replication is a powerful feature provided by Azure SQL Database that plays a crucial role in ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and improved performance for critical database workloads. It enables the creation of readable secondary databases in a different Azure region, which continuously receive replicated transactions from the primary database. This setup ensures that in the event of a regional outage, administrators can initiate a failover to the secondary database, thereby minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity. By having these secondary databases available, organizations can also offload read-only workloads from the primary database, which improves overall system performance and reduces the risk of bottlenecks during periods of high demand.

The replication process in Active Geo-Replication is continuous, meaning that changes made to the primary database are propagated to the secondary databases in near real-time. This ensures that the secondary databases remain as current as possible, reducing potential data loss in the event of a failover. Furthermore, Active Geo-Replication allows for test failovers without impacting production workloads. This feature is essential for validating disaster recovery plans and ensuring that the secondary databases are fully functional and capable of handling traffic if the primary database becomes unavailable. The combination of automated replication and manual or automatic failover options provides organizations with a flexible and reliable disaster recovery strategy.

Other Azure services provide complementary functionality but do not address the same needs as Active Geo-Replication. For example, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) encrypts data at rest to protect sensitive information, ensuring that data remains secure from unauthorized access. While TDE is essential for compliance and data security, it does not replicate databases or provide failover capabilities, so it cannot maintain database availability during regional outages. Similarly, Always Encrypted protects sensitive columns within a database by encrypting data on the client side, preventing unauthorized access by database administrators or other insiders. However, it does not provide replication or disaster recovery capabilities, and therefore cannot serve as a substitute for Active Geo-Replication.

Azure Key Vault is another service that enhances security by managing encryption keys, secrets, and certificates. It allows for centralized key management, access control, and auditing, which are vital for maintaining secure operations. Despite its critical role in security, Azure Key Vault does not replicate databases or orchestrate failover scenarios, and thus cannot address the continuity and high availability requirements that Active Geo-Replication fulfills.

Active Geo-Replication is the optimal solution for organizations seeking to maintain high availability and ensure business continuity for Azure SQL Databases. It provides continuous replication to secondary regions, supports automated and manual failover, allows secondary databases to handle read-only workloads, and facilitates test failovers to validate disaster recovery plans. While other services such as Transparent Data Encryption, Always Encrypted, and Azure Key Vault provide essential security features, they do not offer the replication, failover, or disaster recovery capabilities that are critical for uninterrupted database operations. Active Geo-Replication uniquely combines replication, performance optimization, and failover readiness, making it the correct choice for comprehensive, multi-region SQL database resilience.

Question 153

You need to automate patching and OS updates for Azure VMs across multiple subscriptions. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Automation Update Management
B) Azure Policy
C) Azure Security Center
D) Azure DevOps

Answer: A) Azure Automation Update ManagementExplanation:

Azure Automation Update Management is a comprehensive service that provides administrators with the ability to manage updates for Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) across multiple subscriptions. Its primary function is to automate the scheduling and deployment of operating system updates, ensuring that virtual machines remain up-to-date with the latest security patches and software updates. This is crucial for maintaining operational security, reducing vulnerabilities, and ensuring compliance with organizational policies and industry regulations. By centralizing update management, administrators can reduce the manual effort traditionally associated with patching, improve consistency, and minimize the risk of missed updates that could lead to security breaches or system instability.

One of the key features of Azure Automation Update Management is its integration with Log Analytics, which provides detailed reporting and monitoring of update compliance across all managed VMs. This integration allows administrators to track which systems are missing updates, understand the update status of their environment, and generate reports that can be used for auditing purposes or compliance verification. By providing visibility into update deployment and compliance, Azure Automation Update Management ensures that organizations can proactively manage security risks and maintain system reliability without requiring constant manual oversight.

Administrators can configure both recurring update schedules and one-time deployments to fit organizational needs. Recurring schedules ensure that updates are applied regularly, minimizing the window of vulnerability for each VM, while one-time deployments allow for urgent or critical updates to be applied immediately across targeted systems. Additionally, automated remediation capabilities help to address update failures or exceptions without requiring manual intervention, further streamlining the update process and improving operational efficiency.

While Azure Automation Update Management offers centralized, automated control of updates, other Azure services provide complementary but distinct functionality. For example, Azure Policy can enforce compliance rules that require certain updates to be installed; however, it does not automate the deployment or scheduling of updates, which means administrators would still need to manually ensure updates are applied. Similarly, Azure Security Center can identify missing patches and vulnerabilities, offering recommendations to improve security posture, but it does not provide mechanisms to deploy or automate updates across multiple VMs. Azure DevOps is designed for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) of applications, automating software development pipelines, but it does not handle OS-level patching or compliance management.

Azure Automation Update Management stands out because it combines automated update deployment, compliance tracking, and reporting in a single service. It ensures that all VMs, regardless of location or subscription, receive updates in a controlled and reliable manner, reducing administrative overhead while improving security and operational consistency. Organizations can rely on it to maintain up-to-date systems, reduce exposure to vulnerabilities, and streamline the patch management process. Other services may complement security monitoring, policy enforcement, or application deployment, but they do not provide the comprehensive automated patching capabilities that Azure Automation Update Management delivers. This makes it the ideal solution for organizations seeking to ensure consistent, reliable, and compliant update management for their virtual machine environments.

Question 154

You need to ensure all Azure Storage accounts are encrypted with customer-managed keys and comply with organizational standards. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Policy
B) Azure Key Vault
C) Azure Storage Service Encryption
D) Azure Monitor

Answer: A) Azure Policy

Explanation:

Azure Policy allows creation and enforcement of rules requiring storage accounts to use encryption, including customer-managed keys stored in Azure Key Vault. It evaluates existing and new resources, flags non-compliance, and can automatically remediate resources that do not meet encryption requirements. Compliance dashboards provide visibility across subscriptions, helping organizations meet regulatory and internal standards.

Azure Key Vault stores and manages encryption keys but does not enforce encryption across storage accounts. Azure Storage Service Encryption encrypts data at rest but must be configured manually and does not enforce organization-wide compliance. Azure Monitor collects metrics and logs but does not enforce encryption.

Azure Policy is correct because it enforces encryption automatically across resources, provides auditing, and ensures organization-wide compliance. Other services manage keys, storage encryption, or monitoring without automated enforcement.

Question 155

You need to monitor Azure resources, collect logs, and analyze performance to detect and resolve issues. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Monitor
B) Azure Security Center
C) Azure Key Vault
D) Azure Policy

Answer: A) Azure MonitorExplanation:

Azure Monitor collects telemetry, metrics, and logs from Azure resources, VMs, and applications. It enables performance analysis, operational insights, and troubleshooting. Integrated Application Insights tracks application performance, dependencies, and failures. Alerts and dashboards allow proactive response to anomalies. Log Analytics supports cross-resource queries for root cause analysis and operational optimization.

Azure Security Center focuses on security monitoring, threat detection, and vulnerability management but does not provide comprehensive operational or performance monitoring. Azure Key Vault manages secrets and keys but is not a monitoring solution. Azure Policy enforces compliance rules but does not collect or analyze telemetry for troubleshooting.

Azure Monitor is correct because it provides centralized monitoring, alerting, performance analysis, and log collection, enabling proactive detection and resolution of issues. Other services focus on security, governance, or key management without providing full monitoring capabilities.

Question 156

You need to design a solution that ensures all Azure VMs are deployed in compliance with company standards and automatically remediates non-compliant resources. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Policy
B) Azure Monitor
C) Azure Automation
D) Azure Key Vault

Answer: A) Azure Policy

Explanation:

Azure Policy allows administrators to define rules and standards for Azure resources and automatically enforce compliance. It evaluates resources at creation and for existing resources to ensure configurations align with organizational policies, such as VM sizes, regions, storage encryption, and network security rules. Policies can include remediation tasks to automatically correct non-compliant resources, reducing manual management efforts. Compliance dashboards provide a centralized view of adherence across subscriptions, making it easier to audit and maintain standards.

Azure Monitor collects metrics, logs, and performance data but does not enforce compliance or remediate non-compliant resources. Azure Automation can automate scripts or tasks but does not provide native compliance enforcement and auditing features. Azure Key Vault securely stores secrets, keys, and certificates but does not evaluate or enforce configuration compliance.

Azure Policy is the correct choice because it enforces compliance automatically, provides auditing, and can remediate non-compliant resources, ensuring consistent adherence to organizational standards. Other services focus on monitoring, automation, or secret management without providing full compliance enforcement.

Question 157

You need to design a solution that encrypts sensitive application data at rest and manages the encryption keys with rotation and auditing. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Key Vault
B) Azure Storage Service Encryption
C) Azure Policy
D) Azure Monitor

Answer: A) Azure Key Vault

Explanation:

Azure Key Vault is a comprehensive cloud service designed to securely manage cryptographic keys, secrets, and certificates, providing organizations with a centralized and highly secure environment for handling sensitive information. By using Key Vault, organizations can maintain full control over the lifecycle of encryption keys and secrets, ensuring that critical data remains protected and compliant with regulatory requirements. The service allows administrators to define access policies that specify which users, applications, or services can perform operations on specific keys or secrets. This granular access control ensures that only authorized entities can retrieve or modify sensitive information, thereby reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches. Key Vault also offers extensive auditing capabilities, recording all operations performed on keys and secrets. These audit logs allow organizations to monitor usage patterns, detect anomalies, and demonstrate compliance with internal and external security standards.

A significant advantage of Azure Key Vault is its support for key rotation and lifecycle management. Administrators can set automatic rotation policies for cryptographic keys, reducing the likelihood of keys becoming compromised over time. This capability is crucial for maintaining data security, especially in environments where sensitive information is frequently accessed or stored over long periods. Additionally, Key Vault supports hardware security module (HSM)–backed keys, which provide enhanced protection for highly sensitive data. HSMs are designed to resist tampering and unauthorized extraction of keys, offering an extra layer of security for organizations handling regulated or critical data. Key Vault’s integration with other Azure services, such as storage accounts, databases, virtual machines, and applications, allows organizations to implement customer-managed keys for encryption. This ensures that the organization maintains control over the keys used to protect data, rather than relying solely on platform-managed encryption.

While other Azure services provide encryption or policy enforcement, they do not offer the comprehensive management features that Key Vault provides. For example, Azure Storage Service Encryption automatically encrypts data at rest, ensuring that stored information is protected; however, it does not allow administrators to manage the encryption keys, perform automatic rotation, or audit key usage. Similarly, Azure Policy can enforce encryption requirements and ensure that resources comply with organizational rules, but it does not manage the encryption keys themselves or provide detailed logging and auditing of key operations. Azure Monitor, on the other hand, is designed to collect logs, metrics, and performance data, which is useful for monitoring and troubleshooting, but it does not provide encryption, key management, or secret storage capabilities.

Azure Key Vault stands out because it combines centralized management, strong access controls, auditing, key rotation, and integration with multiple Azure services, offering a complete solution for securing sensitive data. By leveraging Key Vault, organizations can implement robust encryption strategies that ensure data is protected both at rest and in transit, meet compliance and regulatory requirements, and maintain operational control over critical cryptographic assets. Other services either focus on encryption without management capabilities or policy enforcement without handling keys, making Azure Key Vault the definitive solution for centralized key and secret management in Azure.

Question 158

You need to ensure that a multi-region application automatically fails over to a secondary region during an outage. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Site Recovery
B) Azure Backup
C) Azure Policy
D) Azure Monitor

Answer: A) Azure Site Recovery

Explanation:

Azure Site Recovery is a robust disaster recovery service that plays a critical role in maintaining business continuity by replicating virtual machines and applications to a secondary Azure region. This replication ensures that in the event of a regional outage, whether due to planned maintenance, natural disasters, or unexpected failures, organizations can continue operating with minimal disruption. By maintaining continuously updated replicas of virtual machines and applications, Site Recovery ensures that data loss is minimized and critical workloads remain available. The service supports both automated and manual failover, providing flexibility depending on the situation and operational requirements. Automated failover enables rapid recovery without human intervention, which is especially valuable in scenarios where immediate action is needed to maintain uptime. Manual failover, on the other hand, allows administrators to control when and how failover occurs, which can be useful during planned maintenance or testing exercises.

A key feature of Azure Site Recovery is its ability to orchestrate multi-tier application recovery. Many enterprise applications rely on multiple interdependent services and databases, and simple virtual machine replication may not ensure a seamless recovery. Site Recovery provides recovery plans that allow administrators to define the sequence in which resources are brought online, ensuring that dependencies are properly handled and applications become operational in a controlled manner. This orchestration helps avoid potential failures or data corruption that could occur if components were recovered out of order. Additionally, Site Recovery enables test failovers without affecting production workloads, allowing organizations to validate their disaster recovery plans regularly. These test failovers provide confidence that recovery procedures will work as expected during an actual outage and allow administrators to identify and correct any gaps in the plan.

While Azure Backup provides point-in-time recovery for files, folders, and virtual machines, it does not offer continuous replication or automated failover, which are essential for full disaster recovery. Backup is ideal for restoring data after accidental deletion or corruption, but it does not provide the ability to quickly switch operations to a secondary region in the event of a catastrophic failure. Similarly, Azure Policy focuses on enforcing compliance and governance rules within an organization’s environment but does not replicate workloads or manage failover. Azure Monitor offers comprehensive logging, metrics, and monitoring for performance and operational insights but does not replicate workloads or orchestrate recovery during outages.

Azure Site Recovery distinguishes itself by combining replication, failover, and orchestration to deliver a complete disaster recovery solution. It allows organizations to maintain high availability for mission-critical workloads, minimize data loss, and automate recovery processes, thereby reducing downtime and operational risk. By providing multi-region replication, continuous health monitoring, test failovers, and recovery plan orchestration, Site Recovery ensures that organizations can respond effectively to outages and maintain business continuity. Other Azure services, while useful for backup, monitoring, or compliance, do not provide the integrated disaster recovery capabilities that Site Recovery offers, making it the correct choice for ensuring resilient and uninterrupted operations across cloud environments.

Question 159

You need to provide centralized monitoring, log collection, and alerting for Azure resources to detect and resolve performance issues. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Monitor
B) Azure Security Center
C) Azure Policy
D) Azure Key Vault

Answer: A) Azure Monitor

Explanation:

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution designed to collect, analyze, and act upon telemetry from Azure resources, applications, and virtual machines. Its primary function is to provide organizations with deep insights into the performance and health of their cloud infrastructure and applications. By collecting metrics, logs, and diagnostic data, Azure Monitor enables administrators and developers to proactively identify and resolve performance issues, optimize resource utilization, and ensure the smooth operation of critical workloads. Through integration with Application Insights, Azure Monitor can track application dependencies, monitor response times, detect failures, and provide detailed performance analysis for both web and cloud-based applications. This allows organizations to maintain high availability and quickly respond to anomalies that could impact end-user experiences.

Azure Monitor also provides alerting mechanisms and customizable dashboards, which allow teams to define thresholds for specific metrics and receive real-time notifications when anomalies occur. This proactive approach reduces downtime and supports faster troubleshooting by highlighting issues before they escalate into critical failures. Log Analytics, a key component of Azure Monitor, provides advanced query capabilities that allow administrators to analyze logs from multiple resources simultaneously. These queries can be used to identify root causes, monitor trends, and generate insights that support operational decision-making. With these features, Azure Monitor enables both operational and performance analytics in a centralized, consistent manner across the Azure environment.

Other Azure services serve important functions but do not offer the same comprehensive monitoring capabilities. Azure Security Center, for example, focuses primarily on security posture, threat detection, and vulnerability management. It helps organizations identify potential risks and enforce security best practices but does not provide full operational monitoring, performance analysis, or diagnostic capabilities. Azure Policy enforces compliance and governance rules on resources but is limited to auditing and enforcement of configurations; it does not monitor metrics or provide alerting for operational performance. Similarly, Azure Key Vault provides secure storage for secrets, certificates, and encryption keys, ensuring sensitive information is protected and access is controlled. However, Key Vault is not designed to collect performance telemetry, generate alerts, or provide insights into operational health.

The distinguishing factor for Azure Monitor is its ability to centralize the collection and analysis of telemetry from all Azure resources, applications, and virtual machines. It provides a holistic view of performance and operational health, enabling organizations to maintain optimal service levels and respond effectively to performance degradation. By integrating metrics, logs, alerts, dashboards, and analytics in a single platform, Azure Monitor supports both proactive and reactive management strategies, helping teams optimize workloads, ensure availability, and improve user experiences. Other services may focus on security, compliance, or secret management, but they do not offer the comprehensive, centralized monitoring capabilities that Azure Monitor delivers.

Azure Monitor is the correct solution for organizations that require full visibility into resource performance, application health, and operational telemetry. Its combination of real-time metrics, logs, alerts, dashboards, and advanced analytics enables efficient troubleshooting, proactive issue resolution, and overall operational optimization, distinguishing it from other Azure services that are limited to security, compliance, or key management functions.

Question 160

You need to deploy an application globally with low latency and ensure users are directed to the nearest healthy endpoint. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Front Door
B) Azure Traffic Manager
C) Azure Load Balancer
D) Azure Application Gateway

Answer: A) Azure Front Door

Explanation:

Azure Front Door is a comprehensive global Layer 7 load balancing service designed to optimize web traffic for applications and services distributed across multiple regions. Its primary function is to route users to the nearest healthy backend endpoint, ensuring that requests are processed quickly and efficiently, thereby reducing latency and enhancing overall user experience. By operating at the application layer, Front Door is able to make intelligent routing decisions based on URL path, session affinity, and application health. This allows organizations to provide responsive, reliable, and high-performing services to users around the world while maintaining security and operational efficiency.

One of the key capabilities of Azure Front Door is caching. By storing frequently accessed content at the edge, close to users, Front Door reduces the need for repeated requests to the backend, significantly improving performance and reducing the load on origin servers. This edge caching ensures that users experience faster load times regardless of their geographical location. Additionally, Front Door includes SSL offload, which terminates secure connections at the edge. This reduces the processing burden on backend servers, enabling them to focus on serving application logic and content, while Front Door manages encryption and decryption tasks.

Security is another critical feature of Azure Front Door. Integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities allow administrators to protect applications from common web vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. WAF rules can be customized to meet the specific security requirements of an organization, providing both proactive and reactive protection for web applications. Combined with global routing and automated failover, these security features ensure that applications remain accessible and protected even during regional outages or attacks.

When comparing Azure Front Door with other Azure services, the differences in functionality become evident. Azure Traffic Manager provides DNS-based global routing and failover, but it operates primarily at the DNS layer and does not provide application-layer features such as SSL offload, caching, or WAF. Azure Load Balancer is a regional Layer 4 solution that efficiently distributes traffic based on transport-layer information, but it cannot perform application-aware routing or optimize global traffic. Azure Application Gateway provides SSL termination, WAF, and Layer 7 routing capabilities, but it is designed for regional deployments and does not offer the global routing and low-latency benefits provided by Front Door.

Azure Front Door stands out because it combines global traffic optimization, high availability, and performance enhancements with Layer 7 functionality, security, and intelligent routing. It ensures that users are connected to the closest healthy backend while providing caching, SSL offload, and protection against web-based threats. This integrated approach eliminates the need for multiple services to achieve the same level of performance, security, and reliability. By leveraging Azure Front Door, organizations can deliver a superior user experience to a global audience while maintaining high availability, performance optimization, and comprehensive security in a single, unified solution. Other Azure services provide important capabilities individually, but none offer the complete combination of global reach, application-layer optimization, and security that Azure Front Door provides.

Question 161

A company wants to deploy a new web application in Azure that must handle sudden spikes in traffic and provide high availability across multiple regions. Which solution should be implemented?

A) Azure Load Balancer with virtual machines in a single region
B) Azure Application Gateway with a single VM scale set
C) Azure Front Door with VMs deployed in multiple regions
D) Azure Traffic Manager with a single region deployment

Answer: C) Azure Front Door with VMs deployed in multiple regions

Explanation:

Azure Load Balancer with virtual machines in a single region provides internal or external load distribution among virtual machines, but it does not offer multi-region support, which is crucial for disaster recovery and high availability in global scenarios. It effectively balances traffic within a single region, but if a region experiences an outage, the service becomes unavailable, making it unsuitable for applications that require cross-region resilience. Azure Application Gateway with a single VM scale set is designed for application-level load balancing, SSL termination, and web application firewall capabilities. 

However, a single VM scale set in one region still creates a single point of failure. Although it can scale within a region to handle load spikes, it cannot inherently provide high availability across multiple geographic regions. Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry point for web applications that enables high availability by routing traffic to the nearest healthy backend, automatically redirecting traffic in case of regional failure. Deploying VMs in multiple regions behind Front Door ensures that traffic is intelligently routed based on performance and availability, offering both scalability for sudden trafficspikes and cross-region redundancy.

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic routing solution that directs clients to different endpoints based on geographic location, performance, or priority. While it can distribute traffic across regions, deploying resources in a single region undermines the ability to maintain availability if that region experiences downtime. For handling sudden spikes in traffic and ensuring high availability across multiple regions, Azure Front Door combined with multi-region VM deployment provides a comprehensive solution, delivering both resilience and low-latency routing for global users, unlike the other approaches which are either limited to single-region availability or lack intelligent global traffic management.

Question 162

You need to ensure that Azure SQL Databases have minimal downtime during regional outages while maintaining read-only access for reporting. Which feature should you recommend?

A) Active Geo-Replication
B) Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)
C) Azure Backup
D) Azure Key Vault

Answer: A) Active Geo-Replication

Explanation:

Active Geo-Replication is a critical feature in Azure that enables businesses to maintain high availability, disaster recovery, and operational flexibility for their SQL databases. This feature allows a primary database to have one or more readable secondary databases located in different Azure regions. The replication process is continuous, meaning that any changes made to the primary database are automatically and almost instantaneously reflected in the secondary databases. This ensures that, in the event of a regional outage or catastrophic failure affecting the primary site, the secondary database can take over or provide continuity for read operations with minimal data loss and downtime. By replicating data across geographically separate locations, organizations can safeguard their applications and critical workloads against regional disasters, network failures, or unexpected system outages.

One of the significant advantages of Active Geo-Replication is that secondary databases are readable, allowing them to be leveraged for various operational tasks. For instance, reporting, analytics, and read-heavy workloads can be offloaded to the secondary databases, thereby reducing the performance burden on the primary database. This read-scale capability ensures that mission-critical applications remain responsive and performant while simultaneously enabling comprehensive data analysis without impacting the primary database’s operations. Additionally, by providing multiple secondary replicas in different regions, businesses gain enhanced resilience and reliability for applications that require uninterrupted access to data across global locations.

In contrast, other Azure services focus on different aspects of data management but do not address multi-region high availability and read-scale requirements. Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) provides encryption of data at rest, ensuring that sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access. While TDE is vital for security and compliance, it does not offer replication, failover capabilities, or secondary databases for read operations. Similarly, Azure Backup allows organizations to create point-in-time snapshots of databases, enabling recovery in case of accidental deletions or corruption. However, backups are not continuously synchronized, and restoring a database from a backup can involve downtime and potential data loss. Azure Key Vault manages encryption keys, secrets, and certificates, providing secure access to sensitive credentials. Nevertheless, it does not provide database replication, failover, or read-access replicas.

Active Geo-Replication uniquely addresses the requirements of high availability, disaster recovery, and operational flexibility by continuously replicating the primary database to one or more readable secondary databases across different regions. This combination ensures minimal downtime in case of outages, reduces the operational load on the primary database, and allows organizations to perform read-heavy tasks such as reporting or analytics efficiently. By contrast, services like TDE, Azure Backup, and Azure Key Vault focus on encryption, data protection, or secret management, without offering the multi-region failover or read-access secondary database functionality necessary for continuous, high-availability operations.

Active Geo-Replication is the ideal solution for organizations seeking a comprehensive approach to database continuity, global read scalability, and disaster recovery. It combines replication, high availability, minimal downtime, and operational flexibility, enabling businesses to maintain uninterrupted access to critical data while efficiently distributing read workloads across secondary databases. For scenarios requiring multi-region failover with read-access capabilities, Active Geo-Replication is the correct and most effective choice.

Question 163

You need to automate deployment of consistent Azure VM configurations across multiple subscriptions. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Blueprints
B) Azure Policy
C) Azure Automation
D) Azure Resource Manager Templates

Answer: A) Azure Blueprints

Explanation:

Azure Blueprints is a powerful service in Microsoft Azure that enables organizations to define, deploy, and manage a consistent set of resources, configurations, and governance controls across multiple subscriptions in a repeatable and standardized manner. The primary goal of Azure Blueprints is to ensure that deployments adhere to organizational standards while reducing manual configuration errors and administrative overhead. By using Blueprints, administrators can encapsulate a variety of deployment artifacts, including virtual machines, storage accounts, networking components, and other Azure resources, into a single, coherent package. This package can then be deployed across multiple subscriptions or environments, ensuring consistency in configuration and compliance with internal policies.

One of the key features of Azure Blueprints is its ability to integrate resource deployment with governance controls. This includes the inclusion of Azure Policies to enforce compliance rules, role-based access control (RBAC) assignments to define user permissions, and resource groups or templates to organize and deploy resources. By combining these elements, Blueprints allow organizations to implement infrastructure as code while maintaining control over governance and security requirements. This integration ensures that resources are not only deployed consistently but also adhere to the compliance standards that the organization requires, such as ensuring that virtual machines have specific configurations, security settings, or network controls applied automatically upon deployment.

Azure Blueprints also supports versioning, which allows administrators to create updates to existing Blueprints without disrupting current deployments. This makes it easier to manage incremental changes, apply improvements, or enforce updated compliance standards across multiple subscriptions. Administrators can maintain a history of changes, roll back to previous versions if necessary, and ensure that updates are applied systematically and predictably. This versioning and controlled deployment process reduces the risk of configuration drift and ensures that all deployed resources remain aligned with organizational requirements over time.

While other Azure services provide some aspects of what Blueprints offer, they do not provide the same level of integrated functionality. Azure Policy, for instance, is excellent for enforcing compliance rules across resources but does not package resources or configurations for repeatable deployments. Azure Automation allows administrators to orchestrate scripts and automated tasks, which can streamline operational processes, but it does not provide a cohesive framework for standardized, multi-subscription deployments with embedded governance. Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates are a robust mechanism for deploying infrastructure as code, allowing for the creation of repeatable templates for Azure resources, but they do not inherently combine policies, RBAC assignments, and compliance requirements into a single, unified deployment package.

Azure Blueprints is the correct solution when the goal is to deploy standardized, compliant, and repeatable sets of resources across multiple subscriptions. By integrating resource deployment, governance, and access controls into a single package, Blueprints allow organizations to simplify the deployment process, maintain compliance, and enforce consistent configurations across all environments. Other services provide partial functionality but require additional effort and manual coordination to achieve the same level of standardization and compliance that Blueprints offer natively.

Question 164

You need to ensure Azure VMs across multiple regions automatically apply OS updates while tracking compliance. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Automation Update Management
B) Azure Policy
C) Azure Security Center
D) Azure Monitor

Answer: A) Azure Automation Update Management

Explanation:

Azure Automation Update Management enables scheduling and automatic deployment of OS updates for Windows and Linux VMs across regions and subscriptions. It integrates with Log Analytics to track update compliance, missing patches, and deployment history. Administrators can configure recurring schedules or one-time updates, and remediation tasks ensure compliance is maintained.

Azure Policy can enforce that updates are installed but cannot automate deployment. Azure Security Center identifies missing patches and vulnerabilities but does not deploy updates automatically. Azure Monitor collects telemetry and logs but does not manage OS patching.

Azure Automation Update Management is correct because it automates patch deployment, ensures compliance tracking, and reduces administrative overhead. Other services focus on enforcement, monitoring, or security without full automation for updates.

Question 165

You need to provide low-latency global access to a web application and ensure automatic failover during regional outages. Which service should you recommend?

A) Azure Front Door
B) Azure Traffic Manager
C) Azure Load Balancer
D) Azure Application Gateway

Answer: A) Azure Front Door

Explanation:

Azure Front Door is a sophisticated global Layer 7 load balancing service that is designed to optimize application delivery for users located around the world. Its primary function is to route user traffic to the nearest healthy backend, which significantly reduces latency and improves overall performance. By intelligently directing requests based on the health and proximity of backend resources, Azure Front Door ensures that applications remain responsive and highly available, even when users are widely distributed across different regions. This global routing capability allows organizations to provide a consistent and reliable user experience regardless of geographic location, making it ideal for applications that serve an international audience.

In addition to routing traffic efficiently, Azure Front Door provides several key features that enhance application performance and security. Caching is a central feature, allowing frequently accessed content to be stored closer to users at the network edge, reducing the need to retrieve data from origin servers repeatedly. This decreases load times and conserves bandwidth, resulting in faster content delivery and an improved user experience. SSL offload is another important capability, where Front Door terminates SSL connections at the edge of the network. This reduces the processing burden on backend servers, simplifies certificate management, and maintains secure communication between clients and the service. Additionally, Azure Front Door integrates a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which protects applications from common threats such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other web-based vulnerabilities. By providing these security features at the edge, organizations can mitigate risks without negatively affecting application performance.

A critical aspect of Azure Front Door is its support for automatic failover between regions. In the event of a regional outage or a failure of backend resources, traffic can be seamlessly rerouted to another healthy region. This capability ensures business continuity and minimizes downtime, which is essential for mission-critical applications. Administrators can configure health probes to continuously monitor backend endpoints, and Azure Front Door will automatically redirect traffic away from any unhealthy resources. Test failovers can also be performed to validate recovery plans without impacting live production workloads, further enhancing operational reliability.

Other Azure services provide partial functionality but do not match the comprehensive capabilities of Front Door. Azure Traffic Manager offers global DNS-based routing and failover, but it does not provide Layer 7 routing, caching, SSL termination, or WAF protection. Azure Load Balancer operates at Layer 4 and distributes traffic regionally without supporting global routing or application-level optimizations. Azure Application Gateway provides Layer 7 routing, SSL offload, and WAF capabilities but is limited to a single region and does not offer global failover or low-latency routing across multiple regions.

Azure Front Door is therefore the optimal choice for organizations requiring global, high-performance, and secure application delivery. It combines intelligent routing, caching, SSL offload, security, and automatic failover into a single integrated service. By using Front Door, businesses can ensure low-latency access for users worldwide, protect their applications from threats, and maintain high availability even during regional outages. Other services may provide some functionality individually, but none offer the complete, integrated solution that Azure Front Door delivers for globally distributed applications.