Question

Difficulty: MediumAzure Regions, Availability Zones, and Region Pairs

A system architect is planning the deployment of a new web application in the East US region. The application must be protected against a localized physical datacenter failure (such as a power grid or cooling system outage) within that region, without the overhead of replicating data to a completely different geographical region. Which deployment strategy should the architect use to meet these requirements?

  1. Deploy the application virtual machines across multiple Availability Zones in the East US region.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the application virtual machines in the paired West US region and configure cross-region replication.
  3. C
    Deploy the application virtual machines across Availability Zones that span both the East US and West US regions.
  4. D
    Deploy the application virtual machines in a single Resource Group located in East US to automatically inherit local high availability.

Answer

Deploy the application virtual machines across multiple Availability Zones in the East US region.
Deploying virtual machines across multiple Availability Zones in the East US region is the correct choice. Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within a single Azure region. Each zone has its own independent power, cooling, and networking. By distributing the application virtual machines across these zones, the application is protected against localized datacenter failures (such as a power grid or cooling outage) within East US without needing the overhead of copying or running resources in another region.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the type of resiliency required by the scenario.
The requirement is to protect against a localized physical failure (power/cooling) within the primary region (East US) without cross-region replication overhead.
This establishes that the solution must reside within a single region and target high availability rather than disaster recovery.
2
Evaluate Azure infrastructure components that isolate physical failure domains within a single region.
Availability Zones are independent datacenters with dedicated infrastructure (power, cooling, networking) in a single region.
Distributing VMs across multiple Availability Zones prevents a localized failure in one datacenter from taking down the entire application.

Key Concept

Azure Availability Zones provide physical isolation and redundancy within a single Azure region, protecting workloads from localized datacenter failures through independent power, cooling, and networking.
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