Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-301) Practice Exam

Achieving high availability for databases in Azure is crucial for ensuring that applications remain responsive and accessible, even in the face of failures or maintenance activities. The correct approach involves leveraging Azure SQL Database’s built-in features, such as geo-replication. This feature allows you to create readable secondary databases in different geographic regions, providing redundancy and reducing the risk of data loss. In the event of a failure in the primary region, applications can fail over to the secondary database, maintaining continuous availability and data integrity.

The other choices do not effectively address high availability in the same manner. Monthly backups are important for disaster recovery and data retention, but they do not provide real-time high availability since they do not ensure that the database is available during outages or failures. Setting up additional virtual machines may enhance capacity or performance but does not inherently create a high availability architecture unless paired with a proper load balancing and failover strategy. Relying solely on local resources limits the ability to withstand regional outages and does not facilitate redundancy in different locations. Therefore, utilizing Azure SQL Database’s geo-replication is the most effective way to ensure robust high availability.