Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Practice Exam

A company is deploying a critical business application on two virtual machines (VMs). Which configuration should the company use to deploy the solution for high availability and low latency?

1. Separate regions in a regional pair.

2. Separate availability sets.

3. Separate availability zones.

4. Separate resource groups in the same region.

The correct answer is: Separate availability zones.

When deploying critical business applications that require high availability and low latency, using separate availability zones is the best practice. Availability zones are physically separated locations within a region that provide redundancy and fault isolation. By deploying the virtual machines in different availability zones, the company ensures that if one zone experiences a failure, the other zone remains operational, thereby enhancing the application's availability. In addition, the proximity of availability zones within the same region optimizes latency, ensuring that the latency between VMs remains low while still providing resilience. This is crucial for applications that require real-time processing and minimal downtime. Using separate availability sets would offer some redundancy but would not provide the same level of physical separation as availability zones, making them less effective for protecting against certain types of failures. Deploying in separate regions would increase latency due to the distance between the regions and could complicate the application architecture. Lastly, using separate resource groups in the same region does not provide any fault tolerance benefits, as it lacks physical separation.