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

Which offering provides high availability by protecting applications from datacenter failures?

1. Azure Datacenters

2. Availability Zones

3. Azure Resource Manager

4. Virtual Machines

The correct answer is: Availability Zones

Availability Zones are designed to provide high availability by protecting applications from datacenter failures. Each Availability Zone is composed of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking, which ensures that if one zone experiences a failure, the others can continue to operate. This architecture is crucial for building resilient applications, as it allows for redundancy and failover capabilities. In contrast, while Azure Datacenters are the physical infrastructure where services are hosted, they do not inherently provide high availability across multiple locations, as a failure within a single datacenter could impact the services hosted there. Azure Resource Manager serves as a management layer that enables resource management but does not directly contribute to protecting applications from datacenter failures. Virtual Machines, while they can be part of a highly available architecture, need to be deployed in conjunction with Availability Zones or other redundancy measures to ensure that they are protected from datacenter issues. Thus, Availability Zones stand out as the best choice for achieving high availability in this context.