Question

Difficulty: EasyHigh Availability, Scalability, and Elasticity

A company deploys its web application across multiple virtual machines in Azure and configures a load balancer to distribute user traffic. This setup ensures that if one virtual machine fails due to a hardware malfunction, the website remains accessible to users. Which cloud concept is directly illustrated by this design?

  1. A
    Elasticity
  2. B
    Vertical scaling
  3. High availabilityAnswer
  4. D
    Disaster recovery

Answer

High availability
The correct answer is high availability. High availability is a characteristic of cloud systems that ensures services remain online and accessible with minimal downtime. Deploying multiple virtual machines behind a load balancer ensures that if one virtual machine fails, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to the healthy instances, preserving the application's uptime.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the scenario's goal.
The company wants to prevent application downtime in the event of a single virtual machine failure.
Identifying the target behavior (continuous uptime during hardware failure) helps determine which cloud characteristic is being implemented.
2
Examine the configuration details.
The design uses multiple virtual machines and a load balancer to distribute traffic and handle failures.
Using redundant components to eliminate single points of failure is the standard architectural pattern for achieving high availability.
3
Distinguish between the candidate cloud concepts.
High availability focuses on redundancy to survive local failures. Elasticity and vertical scaling are about adapting to workload changes. Disaster recovery is for major regional failure recovery.
Comparing definitions confirms that keeping the application accessible during a single VM failure is a high availability objective.

Key Concept

High availability vs disaster recovery, scalability, and elasticity
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