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CompTIA Cloud+ (CV0-004)Cloud ArchitectureHard

A cloud engineer is configuring a highly available and fault-tolerant architecture for a mission-critical application. The application needs to withstand the failure of an entire availability zone within a region without significant downtime. Which approach ensures that the application's compute resources are distributed and can continue operating if one availability zone becomes unavailable?

  1. AImplementing a disaster recovery plan to restore from backups in a different region.
  2. BDeploying all instances in a single availability zone with auto-scaling.
  3. CDistributing instances across multiple availability zones and using a regional load balancer.
  4. DUsing a single load balancer to distribute traffic to instances in one availability zone.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C. Distributing instances across multiple availability zones and using a regional load balancer.

Distributing instances across multiple availability zones (AZs) and using a regional load balancer ensures that if one AZ fails, the load balancer automatically routes traffic to healthy instances in other AZs, providing high availability and fault tolerance within a region.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. A disaster recovery plan for a different region addresses regional outages, but the question specifically asks to withstand failure of an 'entire availability zone within a region', which is handled by multi-AZ deployment.
  • B. Deploying all instances in a single AZ creates a single point of failure and does not protect against an AZ outage.
  • D. A single load balancer distributing traffic to instances in only one AZ still creates a single point of failure for the entire AZ.

Multi-Availability Zone Deployment

A high availability strategy that involves deploying application components (e.g., compute instances, databases) across two or more geographically distinct availability zones within the same cloud region. This protects against the failure of a single availability zone.

  • Protects against AZ-level failures
  • Requires a regional load balancer for traffic distribution
  • Increases availability and fault tolerance within a region
  • Typically involves synchronous data replication between AZs

Memory trick: Multi-AZ, Load Balancer, always on the go.

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