___________________________________________________________________
AZ-900 High Availability & Scalability
Practice Test 2026–2027 | Azure
Resilience, Performance & Elasticity
Questions
1. An organization hosts a customer-facing application in Azure and requires
the application to remain available if a single Azure datacenter experiences
an outage. Which Azure capability should the organization consider?
A. Availability Zones
B. Resource tags
C. Azure Policy
D. Resource locks
Answer: Availability Zones
Rationale: Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure
region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying
workloads across zones can protect against a datacenter-level failure.
2. A company wants to deploy an application so that it can automatically
handle increases in demand by adding or removing compute resources.
Which concept does this describe?
,A. Scalability
B. Governance
C. Compliance
D. Data residency
Answer: Scalability
Rationale: Scalability is the ability of a system to accommodate changing
workloads by increasing or decreasing resources. Azure provides several services
that support both vertical and horizontal scaling.
3. Which scaling approach increases the CPU, memory, or capacity of an
existing virtual machine?
A. Horizontal scaling
B. Vertical scaling
C. Geographic scaling
D. Zone scaling
Answer: Vertical scaling
Rationale: Vertical scaling, also called scaling up or down, changes the size or
capacity of an existing resource rather than adding more instances.
4. A web application currently runs on one virtual machine. The organization
deploys additional identical virtual machines behind a load balancer. Which
scaling strategy is being used?
A. Vertical scaling
B. Horizontal scaling
C. Manual resizing
D. Storage tiering
Answer: Horizontal scaling
Rationale: Horizontal scaling, or scaling out, adds additional instances of a
workload. A load balancer can distribute requests across those instances.
, 5. Which Azure feature provides physically separate datacenters within the
same Azure region?
A. Availability Zones
B. Management groups
C. Resource groups
D. Azure subscriptions
Answer: Availability Zones
Rationale: Availability Zones are distinct physical locations within an Azure
region. They provide isolation from failures affecting a single datacenter.
6. A company wants protection against an outage affecting an entire Azure
region. Which deployment approach provides the strongest architectural
basis for regional resilience?
A. Deploying everything in one availability zone
B. Deploying resources across multiple Azure regions
C. Increasing the VM size
D. Adding resource tags
Answer: Deploying resources across multiple Azure regions
Rationale: Regional redundancy can protect workloads from region-wide
failures. A multi-region architecture can route users to another region when the
primary region becomes unavailable.
7. Which statement best describes high availability?
A. Increasing the storage capacity of a system
B. Ensuring a service remains operational and accessible with minimal downtime
C. Reducing the number of Azure resources
D. Increasing the purchase price of infrastructure
Answer: Ensuring a service remains operational and accessible with minimal
downtime
, Rationale: High availability focuses on minimizing service interruption. It is
typically achieved through redundancy, fault isolation, resilient architecture,
and appropriate service-level capabilities.
8. Which Azure service is commonly used to distribute incoming network
traffic across multiple backend resources?
A. Azure Load Balancer
B. Azure Policy
C. Azure Cost Management
D. Azure Advisor
Answer: Azure Load Balancer
Rationale: Azure Load Balancer distributes network traffic across backend
resources. This can improve availability and allow applications to scale
horizontally.
9. An organization wants DNS-based global traffic distribution and automatic
routing users toward healthy application endpoints. Which Azure service is
designed for this purpose?
A. Azure Traffic Manager
B. Azure Blob Storage
C. Azure Key Vault
D. Azure Bastion
Answer: Azure Traffic Manager
Rationale: Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic routing service that can
direct clients to appropriate endpoints using routing methods such as priority,
performance, geographic, weighted, and multivalue routing.
10.What is the primary purpose of redundancy in a cloud architecture?
A. To eliminate all costs
B. To provide alternative resources if a component fails
AZ-900 High Availability & Scalability
Practice Test 2026–2027 | Azure
Resilience, Performance & Elasticity
Questions
1. An organization hosts a customer-facing application in Azure and requires
the application to remain available if a single Azure datacenter experiences
an outage. Which Azure capability should the organization consider?
A. Availability Zones
B. Resource tags
C. Azure Policy
D. Resource locks
Answer: Availability Zones
Rationale: Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure
region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying
workloads across zones can protect against a datacenter-level failure.
2. A company wants to deploy an application so that it can automatically
handle increases in demand by adding or removing compute resources.
Which concept does this describe?
,A. Scalability
B. Governance
C. Compliance
D. Data residency
Answer: Scalability
Rationale: Scalability is the ability of a system to accommodate changing
workloads by increasing or decreasing resources. Azure provides several services
that support both vertical and horizontal scaling.
3. Which scaling approach increases the CPU, memory, or capacity of an
existing virtual machine?
A. Horizontal scaling
B. Vertical scaling
C. Geographic scaling
D. Zone scaling
Answer: Vertical scaling
Rationale: Vertical scaling, also called scaling up or down, changes the size or
capacity of an existing resource rather than adding more instances.
4. A web application currently runs on one virtual machine. The organization
deploys additional identical virtual machines behind a load balancer. Which
scaling strategy is being used?
A. Vertical scaling
B. Horizontal scaling
C. Manual resizing
D. Storage tiering
Answer: Horizontal scaling
Rationale: Horizontal scaling, or scaling out, adds additional instances of a
workload. A load balancer can distribute requests across those instances.
, 5. Which Azure feature provides physically separate datacenters within the
same Azure region?
A. Availability Zones
B. Management groups
C. Resource groups
D. Azure subscriptions
Answer: Availability Zones
Rationale: Availability Zones are distinct physical locations within an Azure
region. They provide isolation from failures affecting a single datacenter.
6. A company wants protection against an outage affecting an entire Azure
region. Which deployment approach provides the strongest architectural
basis for regional resilience?
A. Deploying everything in one availability zone
B. Deploying resources across multiple Azure regions
C. Increasing the VM size
D. Adding resource tags
Answer: Deploying resources across multiple Azure regions
Rationale: Regional redundancy can protect workloads from region-wide
failures. A multi-region architecture can route users to another region when the
primary region becomes unavailable.
7. Which statement best describes high availability?
A. Increasing the storage capacity of a system
B. Ensuring a service remains operational and accessible with minimal downtime
C. Reducing the number of Azure resources
D. Increasing the purchase price of infrastructure
Answer: Ensuring a service remains operational and accessible with minimal
downtime
, Rationale: High availability focuses on minimizing service interruption. It is
typically achieved through redundancy, fault isolation, resilient architecture,
and appropriate service-level capabilities.
8. Which Azure service is commonly used to distribute incoming network
traffic across multiple backend resources?
A. Azure Load Balancer
B. Azure Policy
C. Azure Cost Management
D. Azure Advisor
Answer: Azure Load Balancer
Rationale: Azure Load Balancer distributes network traffic across backend
resources. This can improve availability and allow applications to scale
horizontally.
9. An organization wants DNS-based global traffic distribution and automatic
routing users toward healthy application endpoints. Which Azure service is
designed for this purpose?
A. Azure Traffic Manager
B. Azure Blob Storage
C. Azure Key Vault
D. Azure Bastion
Answer: Azure Traffic Manager
Rationale: Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic routing service that can
direct clients to appropriate endpoints using routing methods such as priority,
performance, geographic, weighted, and multivalue routing.
10.What is the primary purpose of redundancy in a cloud architecture?
A. To eliminate all costs
B. To provide alternative resources if a component fails
