Microsoft Certification Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the Circuit Breaker design pattern used for in cloud architecture?
- Managing electrical power consumption in Azure datacenters
- Preventing cascading failures by temporarily blocking requests to a failing service and allowing recovery time (Correct answer)
- Splitting large deployments into smaller circuit-based units
- Load balancing traffic across multiple virtual circuits
Correct answer: Preventing cascading failures by temporarily blocking requests to a failing service and allowing recovery time
The Circuit Breaker pattern monitors for failures in remote service calls and 'opens the circuit' to stop sending requests when failures exceed a threshold, preventing cascading failures.
Question 2: Which Azure storage option provides the highest throughput for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads?
- Azure Blob Storage (LRS)
- Azure NetApp Files or Azure Managed Lustre (Correct answer)
- Azure Table Storage
- Azure Queue Storage
Correct answer: Azure NetApp Files or Azure Managed Lustre
Azure NetApp Files and Azure Managed Lustre provide high-performance NFS/SMB file storage optimized for HPC, AI training, and media rendering workloads requiring ultra-low latency.
Question 3: What is the purpose of an Azure Application Gateway?
- Connecting on-premises networks to Azure via VPN
- A Layer 7 web application load balancer with SSL termination, URL-based routing, and optional WAF (Correct answer)
- Managing service endpoints for Azure PaaS services
- Providing private DNS resolution for virtual networks
Correct answer: A Layer 7 web application load balancer with SSL termination, URL-based routing, and optional WAF
Azure Application Gateway is a Layer 7 load balancer that routes HTTP/S traffic based on URL paths or hostnames, with SSL offloading and an optional Web Application Firewall.
Question 4: In a hub-spoke network topology in Azure, what is the purpose of the hub VNet?
- Hosting all production workloads
- Centralizing shared services like VPN gateway, firewall, and DNS that spoke VNets connect to via peering (Correct answer)
- Acting as the only VNet with internet access for billing purposes
- Isolating development environments from production
Correct answer: Centralizing shared services like VPN gateway, firewall, and DNS that spoke VNets connect to via peering
The hub VNet in a hub-spoke topology centralizes shared network services like VPN gateways, Azure Firewall, and DNS servers that multiple spoke VNets consume via peering.
Question 5: What is the difference between Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?
- RTO measures data loss; RPO measures downtime duration
- RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime to restore service; RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time (Correct answer)
- They are the same concept with different names
- RTO applies to databases; RPO applies to virtual machines only
Correct answer: RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime to restore service; RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time
RTO defines how quickly a system must be restored after a failure (downtime tolerance), while RPO defines how much data loss is acceptable (last backup age tolerance).
Question 6: What is Azure Private Endpoint used for?
- Creating public-facing API endpoints for mobile apps
- Connecting to Azure PaaS services over a private IP within your VNet, eliminating public internet exposure (Correct answer)
- Assigning static public IP addresses to virtual machines
- Load balancing traffic between Azure regions
Correct answer: Connecting to Azure PaaS services over a private IP within your VNet, eliminating public internet exposure
Azure Private Endpoint assigns a private IP address from your VNet to Azure PaaS services like Storage or SQL, so all traffic stays on the Microsoft backbone without traversing the public internet.
Microsoft Certification Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) 2
What is the Circuit Breaker design pattern used for in cloud architecture?