Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (AZ-204) Practice Exam

In Azure, which resource is crucial for ensuring application deployments are resilient to failures?

1. Load balancer

2. Virtual Network

3. Availability set

4. Network Security Group

The correct answer is: Availability set

In Azure, an availability set is crucial for ensuring that application deployments are resilient to failures. An availability set is a logical grouping of virtual machines that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide high availability. When virtual machines are placed in an availability set, Azure ensures that VMs are distributed across multiple physical servers. This distribution reduces the risk of application downtime, as it minimizes the impact of hardware failures, maintenance events, or other issues that may affect an entire physical server. If one VM experiences an outage, other VMs within the availability set can continue to operate, thereby ensuring that the application remains accessible. This feature is essential for building resilient applications, as it meets the requirements for high availability, particularly in critical applications that need to remain operational during disruptions. By using an availability set, developers can design applications that seamlessly scale and recover from failures, providing a better experience for end-users. The other resources mentioned, while important for specific scenarios, do not directly provide the same level of resiliency against failure. For example, a load balancer helps distribute traffic across resources but doesn’t inherently protect workloads from failing if those resources are on the same physical server. A virtual network is fundamental for connectivity but does not address system resiliency directly