AZ-304 Azure Application Architecture Design 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Azure service is best suited for implementing a serverless, event-driven architecture that responds to HTTP triggers without managing infrastructure?
- Azure Logic Apps
- Azure Functions (Correct answer)
- Azure Service Bus
- Azure Event Grid
Correct answer: Azure Functions
Azure Functions supports HTTP triggers and runs serverless code without managing infrastructure, making it ideal for event-driven architectures.
Question 2: A company is designing a microservices architecture requiring built-in service discovery, load balancing, and automated rollouts. Which Azure service best meets these requirements?
- Azure Container Instances
- Azure App Service
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (Correct answer)
- Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Correct answer: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
AKS provides built-in service discovery, load balancing, automated rollouts, and self-healing capabilities essential for microservices architectures.
Question 3: An application must process messages in strict order with exactly-once delivery guarantees. Which Azure messaging service should be selected?
- Azure Event Hubs
- Azure Event Grid
- Azure Service Bus with sessions (Correct answer)
- Azure Queue Storage
Correct answer: Azure Service Bus with sessions
Azure Service Bus with sessions ensures ordered, exactly-once delivery by binding related messages to a named session and processing them sequentially.
Question 4: A web application tier must scale horizontally without maintaining server-side session state. Which approach best enables this design?
- Store sessions in local disk on each VM
- Use sticky sessions on Azure Load Balancer
- Offload session state to Azure Cache for Redis (Correct answer)
- Increase VM size to handle more concurrent sessions
Correct answer: Offload session state to Azure Cache for Redis
Offloading session state to Azure Cache for Redis makes the web tier stateless, allowing any instance to handle any request and enabling true horizontal scaling.
Question 5: Which cloud design pattern is specifically intended to prevent a failing component from causing cascading failures across a distributed system?
- Retry pattern
- Queue-based load leveling
- Circuit Breaker pattern (Correct answer)
- Bulkhead pattern
Correct answer: Circuit Breaker pattern
The Circuit Breaker pattern monitors failures and opens the circuit to stop calling a failing service, preventing cascading failures across the system.
Question 6: An architect needs to ensure a multi-region application routes new users to the closest available region while failing over automatically if a region goes down. Which service should be used?
- Azure Load Balancer
- Azure Application Gateway
- Azure Traffic Manager (Correct answer)
- Azure Internal Load Balancer
Correct answer: Azure Traffic Manager
Azure Traffic Manager uses DNS-based routing with health probes to direct users to the closest healthy endpoint, providing automatic geographic failover.
Question 7: A solution must decouple a high-throughput data producer from slower consumers to prevent the producer from being blocked. Which pattern addresses this requirement?
- Synchronous request-response
- Queue-based load leveling (Correct answer)
- Direct method invocation
- Polling pattern
Correct answer: Queue-based load leveling
Queue-based load leveling uses a queue as a buffer between the producer and consumer, decoupling them and smoothing out traffic spikes.
AZ-304 Azure Application Architecture Design 1
Which Azure service is best suited for implementing a serverless, event-driven architecture that responds to HTTP triggers without managing infrastructure?