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AZ-305 Practice Question 47: Container Platform Regional Failover

Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) · Test 5 · question 7 of 10

Business Continuityhard

A SaaS company runs its product on a single Azure Kubernetes Service cluster in West Europe, with container images in one Azure Container Registry in the same region. The board now requires that a West Europe outage be survivable with a recovery time objective of about ten minutes. The finance director will not approve paying for a second region at full production capacity, and the application is stateless, with all state in a geo-replicated data tier.

Which design should you recommend?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • D. Create a scaled-down second cluster in North Europe, put both clusters behind Azure Front Door with the secondary origin group at a lower priority, configure autoscaling so the secondary grows when it takes over, and geo-replicate the container registry

This is the active-passive disaster recovery model Microsoft documents for AKS: two clusters in two regions, with Azure Front Door holding an origin group per region at different priorities, so traffic routes to the primary until it becomes unavailable and then automatically to the next region in the priority list. Because the failover happens at the Front Door, clients are not waiting on a DNS record to expire. Microsoft's own guidance for this model is to configure autoscaling rules so the secondary scales to the primary's instance count when the primary becomes inactive, and to leave it small while inactive to reduce cost, which is exactly the finance director's constraint. Geo- replicating the container registry provides continued access to images even if a region experiences an outage, so the secondary can pull images while West Europe is down.

Option A protects against the wrong failure. Availability zones are separate facilities within West Europe and are excellent against a zonal fault, but the requirement is the loss of the region, and the single registry in that region would be unreachable too.

Option B is the passive-cold model, and it fails the RTO. Activating the cluster requires manual intervention, and repointing a DNS record leaves clients and resolvers holding the old address until the TTL expires, minutes to hours of extra downtime on top of the manual work.

Option C would meet the RTO and is the most resilient design, but it is the one the finance director explicitly ruled out: active-active runs full capacity in both regions all the time, which is the model Microsoft lists as having higher cost and more complex management.

Reference: Multi-region deployment models for Azure Kubernetes Service

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