Your design calls for every tier to be zone redundant. Part way through the build you discover the region the business picked does not offer availability zones. What is the correct response?
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), objective architecture-and-services. Azure architecture and services hard
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The options
Correct Deploy into a region that supports availability zones, or knowingly accept a design without zone redundancy
Correct. Zones are a property of the region, not something you can switch on for a region that does not have them, so this is a genuine choice between moving and dropping the requirement.
Not correct Create three resource groups and spread the virtual machines across them
Wrong. A resource group is a management container with no physical meaning at all, so filing resources into three of them changes nothing about which datacentre they land in.
Not correct Use an availability set instead, since it is the same mechanism under a different name
Wrong. They are not the same: an availability set distributes instances across fault and update domains inside one datacentre, while zones distribute them across separate datacentres. One survives a rack, the other survives a building.
Not correct Turn on geo-redundant storage, which makes the whole workload zone redundant
Wrong. Geo-redundant storage copies a storage account's data to the paired region. It says nothing about the compute tier and is a cross-region option, not a zone-level one.
Why
Regions are not interchangeable: availability zones, individual services, individual virtual machine sizes and even prices all vary between them. That makes region choice a design input to check before the first deployment, alongside data residency and proximity to users, rather than a box ticked at the end. When a required capability is missing from a region, the honest options are to move or to change the requirement.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Microsoft AZ-900 study guide skill area architecture-and-services.core-architectural-components
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