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Difficulty: MediumCompute Virtualization Solutions

A company is designing the compute infrastructure on Azure for a legacy background processing application. The application has the following characteristics and requirements:
- It processes long-running batch jobs that take up to 45 minutes to complete.
- It must run continuously 24/7 and cannot tolerate unexpected interruptions or evictions.
- The solution must be highly available and resilient to datacenter outages within an Azure region.

Which compute solution should you recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. Azure Virtual Machines deployed in a Virtual Machine Scale Set across multiple availability zonesAnswer
  2. B
    Azure Spot Virtual Machines in a Virtual Machine Scale Set deployed across multiple availability zones
  3. C
    Azure Functions running on a Consumption plan
  4. D
    Azure Virtual Machines deployed in an availability set within a single availability zone

Answer

Azure Virtual Machines deployed in a Virtual Machine Scale Set across multiple availability zones
The correct solution uses standard Azure Virtual Machines deployed across multiple availability zones. This provides persistent compute hosting that allows the 45-minute batch jobs to run without execution timeout restrictions, guarantees that the VMs will not be evicted, and ensures resilience against localized datacenter failures.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate execution time requirements
Since the batch jobs require 45 minutes to complete, serverless compute options with short execution timeouts (such as Azure Functions on a Consumption plan, which limits execution to 10 minutes) must be ruled out in favor of full virtual machines that support unrestricted execution runtimes.
To ensure long-running processes can complete successfully without system-imposed timeouts.
2
Evaluate workload stability and eviction tolerance
Since the workload is a critical 24/7 production process that cannot tolerate unexpected interruptions or evictions, Spot VMs are ruled out because they are subject to sudden eviction based on capacity demands.
To satisfy the requirement that the application must run continuously without eviction.
3
Evaluate high availability and zone-resilience requirements
To protect against datacenter outages within an Azure region, the virtual machines must be distributed across multiple availability zones. Standard availability sets only protect against hardware or power failures within a single zone.
To meet the resilience requirement against localized datacenter outages.

Key Concept

Selecting appropriate Azure compute virtualization and deployment topologies based on availability, runtime, and stability constraints.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Compute Virtualization Solutions

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