AZ-305 Questions 71-80: Data Integration and Resiliency Design

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AZ-305 practice questions

AZ-305 Questions 71-80: Data Integration and Resiliency Design

Use this AZ-305 questions 71-80 practice set to review Azure data platform, integration, global routing, and business continuity design decisions for the Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert exam. These are original scenario questions based on public Microsoft objectives and documentation — not exam dumps or reconstructed real items.

Exam:
AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
Range:
Questions 71-80
Primary objective:
Design data storage, integration, and business continuity solutions
Difficulty:
Architect-level design tradeoffs
Series note: This post continues the AZ-305 sequence after AZ-305 Questions 61-70: Security, Governance, and Monitoring Design and builds on the earlier AZ-305 Questions 41-50: Mixed Domain Review. Questions 71-80 focus on choosing the right Azure service or pattern when availability, recovery, latency, and integration requirements compete.
Exam tip: AZ-305 answers often hinge on the exact wording: regional outage, zone failure, readable secondary, automatic failover, metadata only, and lowest operational effort all point to different design choices.

AZ-305 questions 71-80

Question 71 Storage resiliency

Choosing redundancy for zone and regional failure scenarios

A media company stores critical image assets in Azure Blob Storage. The solution must protect against a zone failure in the primary region and must also allow applications to read data from a secondary region if the primary region is unavailable. The company wants the storage platform to handle replication.

Choose one answer.

  1. Locally redundant storage (LRS)
  2. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
  3. Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
  4. Read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS)
Correct answer: D

Explanation: RA-GZRS combines zone redundancy in the primary region with geo-replication to a secondary region and read access to that secondary endpoint. That satisfies both parts of the requirement: primary-region zone resiliency and readable data during a regional outage.

Why the other options are wrong: LRS only replicates within a single datacenter. ZRS protects across zones in one region but does not provide a secondary region. GRS provides geo-replication but does not provide read access to the secondary endpoint unless the read-access option is selected.

Objective/domain: Design data storage and business continuity solutions.

Question 72 Azure SQL continuity

Designing failover for related Azure SQL databases

An application uses three Azure SQL Database databases on the same logical server. The application must fail over the databases together to another Azure region and use stable listener endpoints so the connection string does not need to change during failover.

Choose one answer.

  1. Configure active geo-replication separately for each database and hard-code the secondary server name in the application.
  2. Configure an Azure SQL Database failover group that includes the databases and use the read-write listener endpoint.
  3. Back up each database to a storage account and restore the backups manually during an outage.
  4. Place the logical server behind Azure Load Balancer and configure health probes for SQL connections.
Correct answer: B

Explanation: Failover groups are designed to manage replication and failover for one or more Azure SQL databases. They provide listener endpoints that keep the application connection pattern stable while the databases fail over as a group.

Why the other options are wrong: A can replicate data but increases application and operational complexity. C has a much larger recovery time and manual process. D does not provide Azure SQL database replication or database-level failover.

Objective/domain: Design business continuity solutions.

Question 73 Globally distributed data

Supporting low-latency reads and writes in multiple regions

A SaaS application has users in North America, Europe, and Asia. Users update profile preferences frequently, and writes should be accepted near each user region. The data model is JSON-based, access is mostly by user ID, and the application can tolerate session consistency.

Choose one answer.

  1. Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL with multiple write regions and an appropriate partition key such as user ID
  2. Azure Blob Storage with RA-GRS and one container per region
  3. Azure SQL Database Basic tier in one region with weekly exports
  4. Azure Files mounted by all application instances across regions
Correct answer: A

Explanation: Azure Cosmos DB is built for globally distributed, low-latency applications and supports multi-region writes. A good partition key is critical for scalable point reads and writes. Session consistency is often a good fit when users should read their own writes without requiring strong global consistency.

Why the other options are wrong: B is object storage, not a low-latency multi-write operational database for JSON profile updates. C creates a single-region write bottleneck and weak recovery approach. D is not the right service for globally distributed JSON document writes.

Objective/domain: Design data storage solutions.

Question 74 Global routing

Routing users to the closest healthy web endpoint

A public web application is deployed to App Service in two Azure regions. The architecture must route users to a healthy endpoint with low latency, provide global HTTP(S) load balancing, and support edge Web Application Firewall policy. The solution should not require users to choose a region manually.

Choose one answer.

  1. Azure Front Door with origin groups, health probes, routing rules, and WAF policy
  2. Azure Application Gateway deployed in one region only
  3. Azure Load Balancer with backend pools in both regions
  4. Azure Private DNS zones with one A record per region
Correct answer: A

Explanation: Azure Front Door is a global layer 7 service for HTTP(S) applications. It can route users to healthy origins, improve latency through edge presence, and apply WAF policy at the edge.

Why the other options are wrong: B is regional, so it does not provide the same global entry point by itself. C is regional and layer 4, not the right global HTTP routing service. D only resolves names; it does not provide health-based global application routing or WAF.

Objective/domain: Design infrastructure and business continuity solutions.

Question 75 Application integration

Decoupling order processing with multiple subscribers

An e-commerce application publishes an OrderSubmitted event. The billing, fulfillment, analytics, and customer notification services must each receive their own copy of the event. Subscribers should process messages independently, and a temporary outage in one subscriber must not block the others.

Choose one answer.

  1. Azure Service Bus topic with one subscription per downstream service
  2. Azure Service Bus queue shared by all downstream services
  3. Azure Storage account lifecycle management rules
  4. Azure Virtual Network peering between all service subnets
Correct answer: A

Explanation: A Service Bus topic supports publish/subscribe messaging. Each subscription receives a logical copy of the message and can have its own filters, dead-letter handling, and processing lifecycle. That matches independent downstream processing.

Why the other options are wrong: B is competing-consumer queue behavior; one service receives a given message rather than every service receiving its own copy. C manages storage data lifecycle, not messaging. D provides network connectivity but not asynchronous event distribution.

Objective/domain: Design integration solutions.

Question 76 Messaging disaster recovery

Understanding Service Bus Geo-Disaster Recovery

A platform team uses Azure Service Bus Premium for critical messaging. They want a disaster recovery design that provides an alias for failover to a paired namespace in another region. The architects must correctly describe what the built-in Geo-Disaster Recovery feature protects.

Choose one answer.

  1. It replicates namespace metadata such as entities and configuration, while message data recovery requires a separate application or replication strategy.
  2. It synchronously replicates every message body to the paired namespace with zero data loss for all tiers.
  3. It converts queues to topics during failover so multiple subscribers can receive old messages.
  4. It backs up Service Bus messages to Azure Blob Storage and restores them automatically after failover.
Correct answer: A

Explanation: Service Bus Geo-Disaster Recovery is primarily a metadata continuity feature for Premium namespaces. It helps preserve namespace configuration and provides an alias pattern for failover, but it does not replace a message-level replication, replay, or idempotent processing design.

Why the other options are wrong: B overstates the feature and ignores tier limitations. C invents behavior that Service Bus does not provide. D describes a backup/restore capability that is not the built-in Geo-DR mechanism.

Objective/domain: Design business continuity and integration solutions.

Question 77 VM disaster recovery

Replicating virtual machines to a secondary region

A company runs several stateful line-of-business applications on Azure virtual machines. The applications can tolerate a short outage but must be recoverable in another Azure region with orchestrated failover steps and recovery testing. The company wants to avoid keeping a fully running duplicate environment at all times.

Choose one answer.

  1. Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VMs to a recovery region and create recovery plans for failover orchestration.
  2. Use Azure Backup only and manually rebuild all networking and compute resources during an outage.
  3. Use Azure Load Balancer across two regions with the existing VMs in one backend pool.
  4. Use availability sets in the primary region only.
Correct answer: A

Explanation: Azure Site Recovery is the native Azure service for replicating workloads and orchestrating disaster recovery failover. Recovery plans help coordinate failover order and automation, and test failover supports validation without a full production cutover.

Why the other options are wrong: B protects data but usually results in longer, more manual recovery. C does not provide cross-region VM replication. D improves availability within a datacenter fault domain pattern but not regional disaster recovery.

Objective/domain: Design business continuity solutions.

Question 78 Data model selection

Selecting a store for time-series telemetry and analytical queries

An IoT platform ingests high-volume telemetry from devices. Data is appended continuously, rarely updated, and queried by time range for reporting and anomaly analysis. The architects want an open data lake foundation that can support analytics engines without forcing the data into an OLTP schema first.

Choose one answer.

  1. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 as the analytical storage foundation, with downstream analytics services querying curated data
  2. Azure Files with SMB shares mounted directly to every IoT device
  3. Azure Cache for Redis as the long-term system of record
  4. Azure SQL Database Basic tier with one table column for all raw JSON telemetry
Correct answer: A

Explanation: A data lake is a strong fit for high-volume append-oriented telemetry and analytical processing. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 provides scalable storage for raw and curated data that analytics services can process without requiring the original ingestion path to be modeled as transactional OLTP rows.

Why the other options are wrong: B is file sharing, not an analytical telemetry lake. C is an in-memory cache, not durable long-term analytical storage. D can store data, but a basic OLTP database with raw JSON in one column is a poor fit for large-scale analytical telemetry design.

Objective/domain: Design data storage solutions.

Question 79 Availability zones

Designing compute placement for datacenter failure tolerance

A new web API will run on virtual machines in a region that supports availability zones. The SLA target requires the application tier to keep running if a single datacenter in the region fails. The design should use Azure-native datacenter isolation.

Choose one answer.

  1. Deploy VM instances across multiple availability zones and place them behind a zone-redundant load balancing design.
  2. Deploy all VM instances into one availability set in a single zone.
  3. Deploy one larger VM and use premium SSD storage.
  4. Deploy all VM instances to one proximity placement group to minimize latency.
Correct answer: A

Explanation: Availability zones are physically separate datacenter locations within supported Azure regions. Spreading instances across zones helps protect the application tier from a single datacenter failure. A zone-redundant load balancing entry point avoids pinning access to one zone.

Why the other options are wrong: B improves fault-domain placement but does not provide multi-zone isolation as stated. C reduces neither datacenter dependency nor single-instance risk. D optimizes for low latency placement and can reduce resiliency if everything is placed too close together.

Objective/domain: Design infrastructure and business continuity solutions.

Question 80 Recovery strategy

Matching RPO and RTO to the right continuity pattern

A business-critical application has a 15-minute recovery point objective and a 30-minute recovery time objective during regional failures. The application uses a database, messaging, and web tier. Leadership asks whether nightly backups alone are sufficient because they are cheaper.

Choose one answer.

  1. No. Design active/passive or active/active regional resiliency with data replication, tested failover runbooks, and service-specific recovery mechanisms that meet the stated RPO and RTO.
  2. Yes. Nightly backups always satisfy any RPO or RTO as long as the backups are encrypted.
  3. Yes. A resource group export template contains all application data and can restore the environment within 30 minutes.
  4. No. The only valid design is active/active in every Azure region worldwide, regardless of cost or business impact.
Correct answer: A

Explanation: RPO and RTO drive continuity architecture. A 15-minute RPO and 30-minute RTO generally require planned replication and tested failover, not a manual rebuild from nightly backups. The exact pattern can vary by service, but the design must prove the recovery objectives can be met.

Why the other options are wrong: B confuses backup existence with recovery objective compliance. C infrastructure templates do not contain runtime application data. D may be unnecessary and cost-prohibitive; AZ-305 expects the least-complex design that satisfies stated requirements.

Objective/domain: Design business continuity solutions.

Answer key summary

Question Answer Key idea
71DRA-GZRS for zone resiliency plus readable geo-secondary
72BAzure SQL failover group with stable listener
73ACosmos DB multi-region writes for global JSON workloads
74AAzure Front Door for global HTTP(S) routing and WAF
75AService Bus topic for publish/subscribe integration
76AService Bus Geo-DR protects metadata, not message bodies
77ASite Recovery for VM replication and failover orchestration
78AData Lake Storage Gen2 for analytical telemetry storage
79AAvailability zones for datacenter isolation
80ARPO/RTO drive replication and failover design
Final review: For AZ-305, do not simply pick the most powerful service. Match the business continuity objective to the smallest design that satisfies it: zone redundancy for datacenter failures, geo-replication for regional recovery, Front Door for global HTTP entry, topics for fan-out, and tested runbooks for real recovery confidence.

Sources

📚 More questions from: AZ-305: Azure Solutions Architect

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