Microsoft Certification Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is an Azure Landing Zone?
- A physical data center location for Azure hardware
- A pre-configured, scalable environment following best practices for deploying enterprise workloads in Azure (Correct answer)
- A temporary sandbox for testing Azure resources
- A specific Azure VM size tier
Correct answer: A pre-configured, scalable environment following best practices for deploying enterprise workloads in Azure
Azure Landing Zones provide a modular, opinionated environment with governance, networking, security, and identity foundations for deploying enterprise workloads at scale.
Question 2: Which design pattern decouples services by placing a queue between a producer and consumer to handle load spikes?
- Circuit Breaker pattern
- Queue-based Load Leveling pattern (Correct answer)
- Saga pattern
- Strangler Fig pattern
Correct answer: Queue-based Load Leveling pattern
The Queue-based Load Leveling pattern uses a message queue as a buffer between a producer and consumer, smoothing out spikes in traffic without dropping requests.
Question 3: What is the primary consideration when choosing between Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Front Door?
- Traffic Manager is cheaper; Front Door has no cost difference
- Traffic Manager routes DNS-level traffic globally; Front Door is an application-layer (L7) global load balancer with WAF and CDN capabilities (Correct answer)
- Front Door only works in US regions; Traffic Manager is global
- Traffic Manager supports HTTP/HTTPS; Front Door supports TCP only
Correct answer: Traffic Manager routes DNS-level traffic globally; Front Door is an application-layer (L7) global load balancer with WAF and CDN capabilities
Traffic Manager operates at DNS level for global routing, while Azure Front Door provides Layer 7 HTTP routing with built-in WAF, SSL offload, and CDN edge caching.
Question 4: What is the purpose of Azure Blueprints?
- Designing network topology diagrams
- Defining repeatable sets of Azure resources, policies, and role assignments to deploy compliant environments consistently (Correct answer)
- Generating cost reports for Azure subscriptions
- Creating virtual machine images for deployment
Correct answer: Defining repeatable sets of Azure resources, policies, and role assignments to deploy compliant environments consistently
Azure Blueprints package ARM templates, policies, and RBAC assignments into a single artifact that can be deployed to subscriptions to enforce consistent, compliant environments.
Question 5: What architectural benefit does deploying across Azure Availability Zones provide?
- Reduced per-VM cost
- Protection against an entire datacenter failure within a region, providing 99.99% SLA (Correct answer)
- Automatic cross-region failover
- Unlimited throughput for storage accounts
Correct answer: Protection against an entire datacenter failure within a region, providing 99.99% SLA
Deploying resources across Availability Zones protects against entire datacenter failures since zones are physically separate facilities within a region, achieving a 99.99% SLA.
Question 6: When designing a multi-region active-active architecture, which Azure database service supports automatic multi-region write capabilities?
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure Cosmos DB with multi-region writes enabled (Correct answer)
- Azure Database for MySQL
- Azure Table Storage
Correct answer: Azure Cosmos DB with multi-region writes enabled
Azure Cosmos DB supports multi-region writes, allowing applications to write data to any configured region with automatic conflict resolution.
Microsoft Certification Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) 1
What is an Azure Landing Zone?