Microsoft AZ-305  Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam Dumps and Practice Test Questions Set 6 Q101-120

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Question 101

A company is designing a global e-commerce platform that requires high availability, low-latency access, and secure user authentication. Which combination of Azure services is most appropriate?

Answer

A) Azure Front Door, Azure Active Directory B2C, and Azure SQL Database with zone redundancy
B) Azure Load Balancer, VPN Gateway, and SQL Server on VMs
C) Azure Application Gateway with Bastion and PostgreSQL single instance
D) Azure CDN and Table Storage

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Front Door, Azure Active Directory B2C, and Azure SQL Database with zone redundancy.

In global e-commerce scenarios, performance, resiliency, and secure user management are critical. Azure Front Door provides global HTTP/HTTPS load balancing and ensures that user traffic is directed to the nearest healthy backend region, achieving low-latency access. It also supports automatic failover, ensuring high availability even during regional outages.

Azure Active Directory B2C handles secure authentication for external users, providing support for social logins, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and identity management without requiring custom authentication code. B2C integrates seamlessly with Front Door, enabling secure access to distributed applications globally.

Azure SQL Database configured with zone redundancy provides highly available, resilient relational data storage. Zone-redundancy ensures that the database is replicated across multiple availability zones, protecting against zonal failures and providing automatic failover for minimal downtime. Automated backups, geo-replication, and point-in-time restore features further enhance data protection and disaster recovery.

Option B (Load Balancer + VPN + SQL Server on VMs) introduces high operational overhead, as VMs require patching, scaling, and failover orchestration. Option C (Application Gateway + Bastion + PostgreSQL) is limited to regional availability and does not provide global low-latency delivery or integrated authentication. Option D (CDN + Table Storage) only accelerates static content and provides basic key-value storage, making it insufficient for a transactional e-commerce platform.

This architecture demonstrates principles from AZ-305 such as designing globally distributed, highly available, and secure applications. Front Door ensures global load balancing and resiliency, B2C secures user access, and SQL Database with zone redundancy guarantees data integrity and availability. Monitoring via Application Insights and Azure Monitor allows for proactive troubleshooting, performance optimization, and compliance reporting.

In conclusion, this combination ensures a scalable, resilient, and secure e-commerce solution that meets enterprise requirements for performance, availability, and compliance. It aligns perfectly with the AZ-305 exam objectives of designing resilient, secure, and globally distributed application solutions.

Question 102

A company needs a serverless, event-driven processing pipeline that reacts to Blob uploads, queue messages, and HTTP triggers, automatically scaling with demand. Which service is most suitable?

Answer

A) Azure Functions
B) Azure Virtual Machines
C) Azure Kubernetes Service
D) Azure App Service Plan (Dedicated)

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Functions.

Azure Functions is a serverless compute platform designed to execute code in response to events. It supports multiple triggers including Blob storage events, queue messages, and HTTP requests, making it ideal for event-driven workflows. Functions automatically scale based on workload, allowing enterprises to handle spikes in demand without manual intervention.

Operational benefits of using Azure Functions include:

Pay-per-use pricing: Organizations only pay for compute resources consumed during execution, reducing operational costs compared to VMs or dedicated App Service plans.

Integration with other Azure services: Functions can seamlessly integrate with Cosmos DB, Event Grid, Service Bus, and Logic Apps to build complex event-driven workflows.

Security and compliance: Azure Functions integrates with Key Vault and managed identities, ensuring secure handling of secrets and credentials.

Observability: Application Insights provides detailed telemetry on execution times, errors, request rates, and failures, enabling proactive monitoring and optimization.

Option B (VMs) is inefficient for event-driven workloads as it requires manual scaling and infrastructure management. Option C (AKS) introduces unnecessary orchestration complexity for lightweight, serverless scenarios. Option D (Dedicated App Service) lacks true serverless elasticity, limiting responsiveness and cost efficiency.

From an AZ-305 perspective, Azure Functions exemplifies scalable, resilient, and serverless architectures, allowing enterprises to build dynamic, event-driven pipelines that respond in real-time to multiple triggers, while minimizing operational overhead and maintaining secure, observable systems.

Question 103

A company wants to deploy a multi-region, globally distributed database for a financial application requiring low-latency reads and strong consistency. Which service should they choose?

Answer

A) Azure Cosmos DB with strong consistency
B) Azure SQL Database with geo-replication
C) Azure Database for PostgreSQL
D) Azure Table Storage

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Cosmos DB with strong consistency.

For financial applications, transactional integrity, low-latency access, and global availability are crucial. Cosmos DB supports strong consistency, which guarantees linearizability, ensuring that all reads return the most recent committed writes. This is critical for applications such as banking platforms, trading systems, or accounting software where data correctness is non-negotiable.

Cosmos DB also supports multi-region writes, allowing simultaneous write operations in different regions, which reduces latency for global users while maintaining strict consistency. Automatic conflict resolution ensures data integrity across regions, avoiding inconsistencies that could lead to financial errors.

Elastic scaling ensures that the system can handle high transaction volumes during peak usage periods, such as market openings or promotional events. Cosmos DB integrates with Azure Functions, Event Grid, and Stream Analytics to process and react to real-time events, enabling automated workflows such as fraud detection, transaction alerts, and reconciliation.

Option B (SQL Database with geo-replication) provides replication but does not support multi-region writes with strong consistency natively, making it less suitable for highly transactional, global financial applications. Option C (PostgreSQL) lacks built-in global replication with strong consistency. Option D (Table Storage) cannot handle complex queries or strong transactional requirements, making it unsuitable for financial systems.

From an AZ-305 perspective, Cosmos DB with strong consistency aligns with designing highly available, globally distributed, and consistent databases. Enterprises benefit from automatic scaling, operational efficiency, and integration with serverless workflows while meeting regulatory requirements for financial workloads.

Question 104

A company wants to implement a disaster recovery solution for on-premises workloads, ensuring continuous replication, failover orchestration, and minimal downtime. Which service should they use?

Answer

A) Azure Site Recovery
B) Azure Backup
C) Azure Migrate
D) Azure Automation

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

ASR enables enterprises to replicate on-premises virtual machines, physical servers, and workloads to Azure. It supports continuous replication, ensuring that workloads are ready for failover in case of outages. Recovery plans can orchestrate multi-tier applications, maintaining dependencies between services and ensuring orderly startup during failover.

Planned failovers allow IT teams to perform maintenance or upgrades without downtime, while unplanned failovers handle unexpected outages, minimizing business disruption. ASR also supports non-disruptive testing, enabling validation of disaster recovery plans in a sandbox environment without affecting production workloads.

Option B (Azure Backup) protects data but does not provide replication or orchestration. Option C (Azure Migrate) helps with discovery and assessment, but cannot manage live failover. Option D (Azure Automation) provides task automation, but does not replicate or orchestrate disaster recovery.

Integration with Azure Monitor allows monitoring of replication health, RPO, and RTO compliance. Security is enhanced by Key Vault integration, protecting credentials and replication configurations. ASR aligns with AZ-305 objectives for resilient hybrid cloud architectures, enabling minimal downtime, operational efficiency, and compliance-ready disaster recovery workflows.

Question 105

A company wants to implement a serverless workflow that reacts to HTTP requests, queue messages, and database changes, scaling automatically. Which service should they implement?

Answer

A) Azure Functions
B) Azure Virtual Machines
C) Azure Kubernetes Service
D) Azure App Service Plan (Dedicated)

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Functions.

Azure Functions allows enterprises to build serverless, event-driven workflows that react to multiple triggers: HTTP requests (for APIs), queue messages (for asynchronous processing), and database changes (e.g., Cosmos DB or SQL Database triggers). Functions automatically scale to meet demand, ensuring responsiveness during spikes and cost efficiency during low usage.

Security is enforced through managed identities and Key Vault integration, while monitoring and telemetry are provided by Application Insights. Functions can also orchestrate complex, long-running workflows using Durable Functions, supporting fan-out/fan-in patterns and state management without infrastructure overhead.

Option B (VMs) requires manual scaling. Option C (AKS) introduces orchestration complexity for lightweight serverless workflows. Option D (Dedicated App Service) lacks automatic scaling and elasticity, increasing costs.

AZ-305 objectives emphasize designing scalable, resilient, and secure event-driven architectures, which Azure Functions directly addresses, enabling enterprises to deploy dynamic serverless APIs and processing pipelines efficiently.

Question 106

A company wants a globally distributed database for an IoT platform requiring low-latency reads and multi-region writes. Which service is most appropriate?

Answer

A) Azure Cosmos DB
B) Azure SQL Database
C) Azure Database for PostgreSQL
D) Azure Table Storage

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Cosmos DB.

For IoT platforms, devices continuously generate telemetry data that must be processed globally in near real-time. Cosmos DB provides multi-region writes, enabling simultaneous updates across regions without compromising data integrity. Low-latency reads ensure telemetry is available quickly for analytics, dashboards, and alerting systems.

Cosmos DB supports multiple consistency levels, allowing architects to balance performance and data correctness. Integration with Azure Functions, Event Grid, and Stream Analytics allows real-time processing and workflow automation. Security is enforced via Key Vault, encryption, and private endpoints, meeting regulatory and enterprise compliance requirements.

Options B, C, and D lack multi-region write support or low-latency capabilities, making them unsuitable for IoT telemetry scenarios.

AZ-305 design principles emphasize high availability, global distribution, and resilient database architecture, all of which Cosmos DB provides, making it the optimal choice for real-time IoT platforms.

Question 107

A company wants a multi-tier web application with automatic scaling, secure secrets management, and high-availability database layer. Which architecture is best?

Answer

A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant
B) Azure Virtual Machines, SQL Server, and Storage Account
C) Azure Kubernetes Service with PostgreSQL single instance
D) Azure Functions with Cosmos DB

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant.

This architecture ensures:

Automatic scaling at the application layer using App Service.

Secure secret management via Key Vault, avoiding credentials in code.

High availability with SQL Database zone redundancy, providing automatic failover and disaster recovery.

Option B introduces operational overhead. Option C lacks built-in database HA. Option D is serverless, unsuitable for relational multi-tier applications requiring ACID compliance.

This design aligns with AZ-305 by providing scalable, secure, and resilient multi-tier applications, reducing operational complexity while meeting enterprise disaster recovery and compliance requirements.

Question 108

A company wants to migrate on-premises workloads to Azure with continuous replication, automated failover, and minimal downtime. Which service should they implement?

Answer

A) Azure Site Recovery
B) Azure Backup
C) Azure Migrate
D) Azure Automation

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Site Recovery.

ASR enables continuous replication of workloads, supports planned and unplanned failovers, and orchestrates multi-tier application recovery plans. It allows non-disruptive testing and meets enterprise RPO and RTO requirements. Backup, Migrate, and Automation do not provide live failover or orchestration.

From an AZ-305 perspective, ASR exemplifies hybrid cloud disaster recovery design, ensuring high availability, operational efficiency, and compliance.

Question 109

A company wants a serverless workflow that reacts to Blob storage events, queue messages, and HTTP requests, scaling dynamically. Which service is most suitable?

Answer

A) Azure Functions
B) Azure Virtual Machines
C) Azure Kubernetes Service
D) Azure App Service Plan (Dedicated)

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Functions.

Azure Functions provides serverless compute that scales automatically in response to events. It supports multiple triggers, integrates with Key Vault and Application Insights, and allows orchestration via Durable Functions. Options B, C, and D require manual scaling or do not provide true serverless elasticity.

AZ-305 objectives highlight scalable, resilient, and event-driven architectures, which Functions fulfills.

Question 110

A company needs a globally distributed NoSQL database for IoT telemetry with low-latency reads and multi-region writes. Which service should they use?

Answer

A) Azure Cosmos DB
B) Azure SQL Database
C) Azure Database for PostgreSQL
D) Azure Table Storage

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Cosmos DB.

Cosmos DB supports multi-region writes, low-latency reads, multiple consistency levels, elastic scaling, and integration with serverless workflows for IoT telemetry processing. Other options lack multi-region write support or sufficient performance for real-time IoT workloads.

From an AZ-305 perspective, Cosmos DB enables highly available, resilient, and globally distributed database solutions, aligned with enterprise IoT requirements.

Question 111

A company wants a multi-tier application requiring secure secret management, automatic scaling, and highly available database layer. Which architecture is ideal?

Answer

A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant
B) Azure VMs, SQL Server, and Storage Account
C) AKS with PostgreSQL single instance
D) Azure Functions with Cosmos DB

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant.

App Service handles automatic scaling, Key Vault manages secrets securely, and SQL Database zone-redundancy ensures high availability. Options B, C, and D either require manual management or are unsuitable for relational multi-tier applications. This aligns with AZ-305 objectives for resilient, secure, and scalable application design.

The ideal architecture for a company deploying a multi-tier application that requires secure secret management, automatic scaling, and a highly available database layer is a combination of Azure App Service, Azure Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database with zone-redundancy. Azure App Service provides a fully managed hosting platform for web applications and APIs, offering built-in automatic scaling based on demand. This ensures that the application can handle variable workloads efficiently without manual intervention. App Service also supports staging slots, which allow developers to deploy updates in a controlled manner, testing new versions before promoting them to production, thereby minimizing the risk of downtime during deployments.

Azure Key Vault offers centralized management for sensitive information such as secrets, certificates, and encryption keys. By using managed identities, applications can securely access secrets without embedding credentials in code. Key Vault also supports secret versioning, auditing, and rotation, helping organizations comply with regulatory requirements and enhancing the security posture of the application.

The data tier is implemented using Azure SQL Database with zone-redundant configuration, which replicates data across multiple availability zones within a region. This ensures high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, allowing the database to continue operating even during zone-level failures. SQL Database also provides automated backups, patching, monitoring, and an SLA-backed uptime guarantee, reducing administrative overhead while maintaining operational continuity.

Alternative options are less suitable for this scenario. Deploying Azure Virtual Machines with SQL Server and a Storage Account requires manual scaling, patching, and configuration of high-availability features, increasing operational complexity and management burden. Using AKS with a single-instance PostgreSQL database does not provide zone-redundancy or automatic failover, making it less resilient. Azure Functions with Cosmos DB is designed for serverless, event-driven applications and does not provide relational database capabilities, which are necessary for traditional multi-tier applications.

By combining Azure App Service, Key Vault, and zone-redundant SQL Database, organizations can implement a secure, scalable, and highly available multi-tier architecture. This design aligns with AZ-305 best practices for enterprise-grade applications, delivering operational efficiency, resilience, and robust security while minimizing management effort.

Question 112

A company wants to migrate on-premises workloads to Azure with continuous replication, failover orchestration, and minimal downtime. Which service is appropriate?

Answer

A) Azure Site Recovery
B) Azure Backup
C) Azure Migrate
D) Azure Automation

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Site Recovery.

ASR provides continuous replication, failover orchestration, and non-disruptive testing. Backup protects data only, Migrate assesses readiness, and Automation cannot handle failover. ASR aligns with AZ-305 goals for hybrid cloud disaster recovery and business continuity.

Question 113

A company needs a serverless workflow that reacts to HTTP requests, storage events, and queue messages, scaling automatically. Which service should they use?

Answer

A) Azure Functions
B) Azure Virtual Machines
C) Azure Kubernetes Service
D) Azure App Service Plan (Dedicated)

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Functions.

Azure Functions executes code in response to multiple triggers, scales automatically, integrates with Key Vault and Application Insights, and supports orchestration through Durable Functions. This design exemplifies scalable, event-driven architectures aligned with AZ-305.

Question 114

A company wants a globally distributed database for an IoT platform requiring low-latency reads and multi-region writes. Which service should they implement?

Answer

A) Azure Cosmos DB
B) Azure SQL Database
C) Azure Database for PostgreSQL
D) Azure Table Storage

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Cosmos DB.

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed, globally distributed NoSQL database designed for scenarios requiring high availability, low-latency access, and scalability across multiple regions. For an IoT platform, these characteristics are crucial because devices continuously generate massive streams of telemetry data, often from geographically distributed locations, and the system must ingest, process, and analyze this data in near real-time.

Global Distribution and Multi-Region Writes

One of the key features that makes Cosmos DB ideal for IoT platforms is its support for multi-region writes. Multi-region writes allow data to be written simultaneously in multiple Azure regions while maintaining replication and data consistency. This is critical for IoT scenarios where devices in different continents may simultaneously send telemetry updates, and the system cannot afford delays or conflicts.

Cosmos DB automatically replicates data across all configured regions, ensuring low-latency access for reads. Users or processes querying the database from any region experience millisecond-level read latencies, which is essential for real-time IoT dashboards, monitoring systems, and alerting mechanisms. Traditional databases like SQL Database or PostgreSQL, even with geo-replication, usually provide single-write regions or higher latencies for cross-region writes, making them less suitable for high-throughput, globally distributed IoT systems.

Consistency Models

Cosmos DB provides five well-defined consistency levels:

Strong consistency: Ensures that reads always return the most recent committed write globally. This is ideal for scenarios where data correctness is critical, such as financial IoT telemetry or safety-critical applications.

Bounded staleness: Provides a predictable lag between reads and writes, ensuring some tolerance for delayed updates while still maintaining a strong consistency guarantee.

Session consistency: Guarantees consistency for a single session, which is useful for device-specific telemetry tracking.

Consistent prefix: Ensures that reads never see out-of-order writes.

Eventual consistency: Offers the highest performance with minimal latency, with updates propagated to all regions eventually.

These consistency options allow architects to balance the trade-off between latency, availability, and consistency—a core concept in designing distributed systems as emphasized in the AZ-305 exam. For example, in IoT telemetry, devices may prioritize high throughput and low latency for operational analytics, while critical alerts or state changes may require strong consistency. Cosmos DB enables these nuanced designs without requiring complex application-side logic.

Elastic Scalability

IoT platforms are notorious for variable workloads—for example, traffic may spike when millions of sensors transmit data simultaneously or during specific events. Cosmos DB supports elastic throughput scaling, which allows enterprises to increase or decrease the number of request units (RUs) dynamically based on demand. This ensures the database can handle tens of millions of writes per second without throttling or performance degradation.

Additionally, Cosmos DB provides horizontal partitioning, meaning data is distributed across multiple physical partitions automatically. This partitioning ensures that scaling to handle extremely large datasets is seamless. For an IoT platform where devices produce continuous, high-volume telemetry, this is critical to maintain low-latency access and predictable performance.

Integration with Azure Ecosystem

Another reason Cosmos DB is ideal for IoT platforms is its seamless integration with other Azure services, enabling end-to-end telemetry processing:

Azure Event Grid: Can trigger workflows whenever new telemetry data is ingested, enabling automated processing or real-time analytics pipelines.

Azure Functions: Serverless functions can react to database updates, processing incoming data, performing transformations, or triggering alerts based on telemetry thresholds.

Azure Stream Analytics: Allows real-time analytics of IoT data streams directly from Cosmos DB, enabling predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, or operational dashboards.

Azure Synapse Analytics: Provides long-term storage and analytical capabilities for historical telemetry, enabling advanced reporting, trend analysis, and machine learning workflows.

This tight integration allows IoT solutions to be built without complex middleware or manual orchestration, significantly reducing operational overhead and simplifying architecture design—key principles for the AZ-305 exam.

Security and Compliance

For enterprise-grade IoT solutions, security is a paramount concern. Cosmos DB provides encryption at rest and in transit, integration with Azure Key Vault for managing credentials and secrets, and supports private endpoints to isolate traffic within a virtual network. These features ensure telemetry data is protected from unauthorized access and meet regulatory compliance requirements, including GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO certifications.

Additionally, Cosmos DB supports role-based access control (RBAC) via Azure Active Directory, allowing fine-grained permissions management at the container, database, or item level. This is particularly important in IoT scenarios where multiple teams—such as operations, analytics, and security—may access data with differing privileges.

Resilience and High Availability

Cosmos DB offers 99.999% read and write availability for multi-region deployments, which is essential for IoT applications that require continuous ingestion of telemetry data. Combined with automatic failover, the database can sustain regional outages without impacting application performance or data availability. The platform also provides point-in-time restore, enabling recovery in case of accidental deletions or corruption, ensuring business continuity.

Operational Efficiency

Because Cosmos DB is fully managed, enterprises do not need to handle patching, scaling infrastructure, or managing backups manually. This reduces operational complexity, allowing teams to focus on building value from IoT data rather than maintaining database infrastructure. Monitoring is integrated via Azure Monitor and Application Insights, providing metrics for throughput, latency, request rates, and replication health. These tools are critical for operational excellence and for demonstrating compliance during audits.

Comparison with Other Options

Azure SQL Database: Supports geo-replication but only allows single-write regions. This limits low-latency writes for devices distributed globally. It is more suitable for transactional workloads within a single or few regions rather than massive IoT telemetry ingestion.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL: Lacks multi-region write support and low-latency guarantees for global workloads, making it less suitable for large-scale IoT telemetry.

Azure Table Storage: While scalable and low-cost, Table Storage lacks transactional guarantees, rich querying, multi-region writes, and strong consistency models, making it unsuitable for real-time IoT analytics.

AZ-305 Alignment

From an AZ-305 perspective, Cosmos DB illustrates designing highly available, scalable, globally distributed, and resilient data architectures. Key exam-relevant design considerations include:

Selecting the right data storage service based on latency, throughput, and consistency requirements.

Ensuring resiliency and high availability with multi-region replication and automatic failover.

Integrating with serverless and analytics services for event-driven workflows and real-time insights.

Designing for security and compliance, including encryption, RBAC, and network isolation.

Minimizing operational overhead through a fully managed platform with monitoring and telemetry.

For a globally distributed IoT platform requiring low-latency reads, multi-region writes, elastic scalability, and integration with Azure services, Azure Cosmos DB is the optimal solution. Its combination of global distribution, multiple consistency models, high throughput, secure integration, and full management makes it uniquely suited for large-scale IoT deployments. Enterprises can ensure real-time telemetry processing, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance, all while maintaining a scalable, resilient, and highly available infrastructure aligned with AZ-305 design principles.

Question 115

A company wants to implement a multi-tier web application with automatic scaling, secure secret management, and a highly available database layer. Which architecture should they choose?

Answer

A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant
B) Azure Virtual Machines, SQL Server, and Storage Account
C) Azure Kubernetes Service with PostgreSQL single instance
D) Azure Functions with Cosmos DB

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant.

For a multi-tier web application, the architecture must address scalability, security, and high availability across all tiers: presentation, business logic, and database. Azure App Service offers a fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for hosting web apps and APIs. One of its key advantages is automatic scaling based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics, which ensures that the application can handle variable traffic patterns without manual intervention.

Secure secret management is critical for enterprise applications. Azure Key Vault centralizes sensitive information such as database connection strings, API keys, and certificates. By integrating Key Vault with managed identities in App Service, secrets are accessed securely without hardcoding credentials into the application, reducing security risks and simplifying compliance with regulatory requirements.

Azure SQL Database configured with zone redundancy provides high availability and automatic failover across availability zones. This ensures that the database remains resilient in case of zonal failures or outages, minimizing downtime and protecting against data loss. SQL Database also provides automated backups, geo-replication, and point-in-time restore, which are critical for disaster recovery planning.

Option B (VMs + SQL Server + Storage Account) requires extensive operational effort, including patch management, failover configuration, and manual scaling, which increases the risk of misconfiguration and downtime. Option C (AKS + PostgreSQL single instance) introduces complexity in container orchestration and does not provide built-in high availability for the database layer. Option D (Functions + Cosmos DB) is suitable for stateless, serverless workloads but lacks relational data integrity and is less suitable for transactional multi-tier applications.

From an AZ-305 perspective, this architecture aligns with designing resilient, scalable, and secure multi-tier applications, enabling enterprises to reduce operational overhead while meeting availability, scalability, and compliance requirements. Key benefits include:

High Availability: SQL Database zone redundancy and App Service SLA-backed infrastructure ensure minimal downtime.

Automatic Scaling: App Service automatically scales the application tier based on demand, ensuring responsiveness under load.

Secure Secrets Management: Key Vault centralizes secrets management, reducing the risk of credential exposure and simplifying rotation.

Operational Efficiency: Managed services reduce administrative overhead, including patching, monitoring, and disaster recovery.

Observability: Integration with Azure Monitor and Application Insights provides comprehensive insights into application performance, error tracking, and resource utilization.

This architecture ensures that enterprises can deploy robust, compliant, and highly available applications, directly addressing core objectives of the AZ-305 exam.

Question 116

A company wants to migrate on-premises workloads to Azure with continuous replication, automated failover, and minimal downtime. Which service should they implement?

Answer

A) Azure Site Recovery
B) Azure Backup
C) Azure Migrate
D) Azure Automation

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

Azure Site Recovery is a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution that enables enterprises to replicate on-premises virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, ensuring business continuity. ASR provides continuous replication, meaning that data changes on on-premises workloads are replicated to Azure in near real-time. This guarantees minimal data loss in case of a disaster and aligns with enterprise Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements.

ASR supports both planned and unplanned failovers. Planned failovers are useful during maintenance or upgrades, allowing workloads to be moved to Azure with minimal or no downtime. Unplanned failovers handle unexpected outages, automatically bringing workloads online in Azure to maintain operational continuity.

A key feature of ASR is recovery plan orchestration, which allows administrators to define the startup sequence for multi-tier applications. This ensures that dependent services start in the correct order during failover, maintaining application integrity and minimizing errors.

Another critical feature is non-disruptive testing, where failover simulations can be executed without affecting production workloads. This enables IT teams to validate disaster recovery strategies, train staff, and ensure compliance with corporate or regulatory requirements.

Option B (Azure Backup) only provides data protection and cannot perform live failover or orchestrate multi-tier applications. Option C (Azure Migrate) assesses readiness and assists with migration planning but does not replicate live workloads. Option D (Azure Automation) can automate tasks but cannot manage replication or failover.

From an AZ-305 perspective, ASR aligns with designing hybrid cloud disaster recovery solutions, ensuring enterprises meet high availability, RPO, and RTO requirements. Additional benefits include integration with Azure Monitor for replication health, Key Vault for secure configuration management, and compliance-ready reporting. Enterprises achieve operational efficiency, minimal downtime, and predictable recovery, which are critical design considerations for the AZ-305 exam.

Question 117

A company wants to implement a serverless workflow that reacts to HTTP requests, storage events, and queue messages, scaling dynamically with demand. Which service should they use?

Answer

A) Azure Functions
B) Azure Virtual Machines
C) Azure Kubernetes Service
D) Azure App Service Plan (Dedicated)

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Functions.

Azure Functions is a serverless compute platform that executes code in response to triggers or events, including HTTP requests, storage events (Blob storage), and queue messages (Azure Storage Queues or Service Bus). This makes it ideal for event-driven workflows, where applications need to react dynamically to changing conditions without pre-provisioning resources.

One of the major advantages is automatic scaling. Functions automatically scale out to meet demand when the number of events increases and scale in when demand drops, optimizing resource utilization and reducing costs. This is especially relevant for scenarios where workloads are unpredictable or highly variable.

Security is addressed through managed identities and Azure Key Vault integration, allowing Functions to securely access secrets, credentials, or certificates without embedding sensitive information in code. Observability is provided via Application Insights, which tracks performance, latency, errors, and execution metrics, supporting operational efficiency and proactive troubleshooting.

Durable Functions provide additional capabilities to orchestrate long-running workflows, including fan-out/fan-in patterns, timers, and stateful operations. This enables enterprises to implement complex event-driven architectures without managing infrastructure manually.

Option B (VMs) introduces manual scaling and increased operational overhead. Option C (AKS) is overkill for lightweight event-driven workflows and requires orchestration expertise. Option D (Dedicated App Service Plan) lacks true serverless elasticity, resulting in potential underutilization or over-provisioning.

From an AZ-305 perspective, Azure Functions aligns with designing scalable, resilient, and secure event-driven architectures. Enterprises can implement dynamic workflows, automation, and real-time processing, minimizing infrastructure management while ensuring security, compliance, and operational visibility. Functions exemplify how serverless platforms reduce cost and complexity while enabling rapid innovation.

Question 118

A company wants a globally distributed database for an IoT platform with low-latency reads and multi-region writes. Which service is most suitable?

Answer

A) Azure Cosmos DB
B) Azure SQL Database
C) Azure Database for PostgreSQL
D) Azure Table Storage

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Cosmos DB.

Azure Cosmos DB is uniquely suited for IoT workloads due to its multi-region write capabilities, low-latency reads, elastic scalability, multiple consistency models, and integration with serverless workflows. IoT platforms require real-time telemetry ingestion, often from devices across the globe, with minimal delay to support dashboards, alerts, and analytics.

Multi-region writes ensure that telemetry from devices in different continents can be ingested simultaneously without conflicts. Its low-latency reads allow real-time processing and response to incoming data streams, which is critical for operational dashboards or predictive analytics.

Cosmos DB’s five consistency models—strong, bounded staleness, session, consistent prefix, and eventual—allow architects to balance performance and consistency. For instance, device state updates may use session or eventual consistency, while critical alerts or control signals may require strong consistency.

Elastic scaling ensures that Cosmos DB can handle peak telemetry loads, which may spike during events or maintenance cycles. Horizontal partitioning automatically distributes data across partitions for large datasets, ensuring predictable performance and availability.

Integration with Azure Functions, Event Grid, and Stream Analytics enables real-time processing of IoT events. Security is enforced through Key Vault, RBAC, encryption at rest and in transit, and private endpoints, ensuring compliance with enterprise and regulatory standards.

Compared to SQL Database, PostgreSQL, or Table Storage, Cosmos DB uniquely meets the requirements for global, low-latency, multi-region IoT telemetry ingestion. Other services lack multi-region write support, have higher latencies, or cannot handle high throughput at global scale.

From an AZ-305 perspective, Cosmos DB demonstrates resilient, globally distributed, and scalable database design for IoT applications. Enterprises achieve operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and near real-time data processing, fulfilling core exam objectives for distributed, high-performance architectures.

Question 119

A company wants a multi-tier application with automatic scaling, high availability, and secure secrets management. Which architecture is optimal?

Answer

A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant
B) Azure VMs, SQL Server, and Storage Account
C) AKS with PostgreSQL single instance
D) Azure Functions with Cosmos DB

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure App Service, Key Vault, and Azure SQL Database zone-redundant.

App Service provides automatic scaling for the application tier, Key Vault centralizes secret management, and SQL Database with zone redundancy ensures high availability and disaster recovery. Options B, C, and D either require manual management or are unsuitable for relational multi-tier applications.

This design aligns with AZ-305 objectives, providing resilient, scalable, and secure application architectures, reducing operational overhead while maintaining compliance and availability standards.

Question 120

A company wants to deploy a serverless event-driven workflow that reacts to HTTP requests, storage events, and queue messages, scaling automatically. Which service should they implement?

Answer

A) Azure Functions
B) Azure Virtual Machines
C) Azure Kubernetes Service
D) Azure App Service Plan (Dedicated)

Explanation

The correct answer is A) Azure Functions.

Azure Functions provides serverless, event-driven compute that scales automatically. It supports multiple triggers including HTTP requests, storage events, and queue messages. Security is ensured through managed identities and Key Vault integration, while monitoring is available via Application Insights. Durable Functions allow orchestration of long-running workflows, enabling complex serverless applications.

Options B, C, and D require manual scaling, infrastructure management, or lack true serverless elasticity. From an AZ-305 perspective, Functions exemplify dynamic, scalable, resilient, and secure serverless workflows, fulfilling core exam objectives for event-driven application design.

The most suitable service for deploying a serverless, event-driven workflow that reacts to HTTP requests, storage events, and queue messages while scaling automatically is Azure Functions. Azure Functions provides a fully managed, serverless compute platform where code executes in response to specific events without requiring developers to manage infrastructure. The serverless model ensures that applications automatically scale based on incoming workloads, making it highly efficient for scenarios with variable or unpredictable traffic. This eliminates the operational overhead of provisioning servers or configuring scaling policies manually, allowing development teams to focus on building business logic rather than managing resources.

Azure Functions supports a wide variety of triggers, making it highly versatile for event-driven applications. HTTP triggers allow the creation of serverless APIs that respond directly to web or mobile requests, while storage event triggers respond to Blob or Queue Storage changes, enabling automated processing of uploaded files, messages, or other data. Queue triggers facilitate asynchronous processing, decoupling application components and ensuring reliable task execution even during periods of high load. Durable Functions further enhance the capabilities of Azure Functions by enabling the orchestration of long-running workflows, which allows complex serverless applications to maintain state and execute multi-step processes efficiently.

Security and observability are also integral parts of Azure Functions. Applications can securely access secrets, certificates, and encryption keys stored in Azure Key Vault through managed identities, removing the need to store credentials in code. Application Insights provides detailed monitoring, logging, and alerting capabilities, allowing developers to gain real-time insights into the performance and health of serverless workflows.

Alternative options are less suitable for event-driven serverless applications. Virtual Machines require manual scaling, patching, and infrastructure management, which increases operational complexity. Azure Kubernetes Service introduces container orchestration but is unnecessarily complex for simple event-driven workflows. A dedicated App Service Plan does not provide true serverless elasticity and cannot scale dynamically in response to event-driven workloads.

By implementing Azure Functions, organizations can build secure, resilient, and fully managed serverless workflows that respond dynamically to events, automatically scale, and align with AZ-305 best practices for modern event-driven architectures.