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

Which Azure compute resource is specifically designed to manage a collection of identical virtual machines?

1. Virtual machine availability sets

2. Virtual machine scale sets

3. Azure virtual networks

4. Azure Container Instances

The correct answer is: Virtual machine scale sets

The choice of virtual machine scale sets is appropriate because this Azure compute resource is designed to automatically deploy, manage, and scale a set of identical virtual machines. Scale sets allow for the easy creation of a group of VMs that can be managed as a single entity, simplifying the process of deploying large numbers of identical machines. They provide built-in load balancing and autoscaling capabilities, meaning that as demand on your application increases or decreases, the scale set can automatically adjust the number of running instances to match that demand. This ensures that applications can handle varying loads efficiently while also allowing for high availability. In contrast, virtual machine availability sets are primarily focused on providing redundancy and high availability for VMs by distributing them across physical hardware in Azure’s data centers. They do not inherently manage scaling as effectively as scale sets do. Azure virtual networks pertain to networking resources that connect various services securely but are not specifically about managing a collection of VMs. Azure Container Instances allow for the deployment of containerized workloads without the need to manage underlying servers, which is a different concept from managing a set of VMs. Thus, virtual machine scale sets stand out as the optimal solution for managing a collection of identical virtual machines.