Question

Difficulty: HardReliability, Predictability, and Disaster Recovery

A corporate compliance firm hosts its audit processing application on Microsoft Azure. The architecture must satisfy three main requirements:

1. Compute resources must automatically scale out and in during the day to match fluctuating workload demands, keeping performance consistent and costs predictable.
2. The application must remain online even if an entire physical datacenter within the primary Azure region suffers a total power failure.
3. In the event of a catastrophic environmental disaster that disables the entire primary region, the firm must be able to restore operations in a separate geographical region.

Which combination of cloud characteristics and deployment strategies directly aligns with these requirements?

  1. A
    Scalability, Availability Zones, and High Availability
  2. B
    Elasticity, Region Pairs, and High Availability
  3. Elasticity, Availability Zones, and Disaster RecoveryAnswer
  4. D
    Scalability, Region Pairs, and Disaster Recovery

Answer

Elasticity, Availability Zones, and Disaster Recovery
The correct answer combines elasticity, Availability Zones, and disaster recovery. Elasticity allows resources to scale down as well as up automatically to control costs and performance. Availability Zones provide localized fault tolerance within a single region by hosting resources in isolated datacenters. Disaster recovery enables failover to an entirely different geographical region to restore operations during a regional outage.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the scaling requirement.
The requirement to automatically scale out and in based on fluctuating demand to ensure both consistent performance and cost optimization represents elasticity.
Elasticity is the capability to dynamically scale resources up and down to match demand, whereas scalability is the broader ability to handle increased workload.
2
Analyze the datacenter failure requirement.
Surviving a total power failure in a single physical datacenter within the primary region is achieved by distributing components across Availability Zones.
Availability Zones are unique physical locations with independent power, cooling, and networking within an Azure region, providing high availability.
3
Analyze the regional outage requirement.
Restoring operations in a separate geographical region after a catastrophic disaster affects the entire primary region is a disaster recovery strategy.
Disaster recovery involves restoring applications and data in a separate location after a catastrophic regional outage, distinguishing it from local high availability.

Key Concept

Reliability, Predictability, and Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing
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