Fundamental
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Fundamental
Prepare and test your skills
Automatic Scaling with Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Free sample question, answered and explained below. The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam practice bank has 688 more like it. Try 10 free: instant score, no account.
A retail company is planning to deploy a customer-facing web application on Azure. The application experiences significant traffic fluctuations during promotional sales events and requires automatic scaling of identical compute instances based on demand, as well as integrated load balancing to distribute incoming web traffic.
Which Azure compute solution should the company implement?
Explanations
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
What Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets Are
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) provide a management tool that lets you deploy and manage a group of identical, load-balanced virtual machines. The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule.
How It Meets the Requirements
- Automatic Scaling: Virtual Machine Scale Sets natively support autoscaling rules based on metrics such as CPU usage or predefined schedules, ensuring instances scale out during sales spikes and scale in during low-demand periods.
- Identical Instances: VMSS deploys homogeneous virtual machine instances from a single base image, guaranteeing consistency across all servers.
- Integrated Load Balancing: VMSS integrates seamlessly with Azure Load Balancer and Azure Application Gateway to distribute incoming web traffic across healthy VM instances.
Key Advantages and Capabilities
- High Availability: Instances are automatically distributed across fault domains and can be spread across Availability Zones to maximize uptime.
- Cost Efficiency: Automatically shutting down and deallocating unneeded VM instances during off-peak hours significantly reduces compute expenses.
- Centralized Management: Configuration updates, OS patches, and application deployments can be applied uniformly across hundreds of instances at once.
- Rapid Elasticity: Quickly scales up to handle large traffic bursts without manual administrator intervention.
Why This Is Optimal
Virtual Machine Scale Sets are purpose-built for scenarios requiring elasticity and identical multi-instance web workloads, making them the most cost-effective and scalable choice compared to managing standalone virtual machines individually.
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
What SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines Is
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) database offering that allows organizations to run fully customized installations of Microsoft SQL Server inside dedicated Azure virtual machines.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
- Database Workload Focus: This service is designed specifically for database management and hosting SQL Server database instances, not for deploying and scaling front-end web application instances.
- No Automatic Web Autoscaling: Individual SQL Server VMs do not dynamically scale out and in to handle stateless web traffic spikes.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Full Administrative Control: Provides full OS-level and database engine control, allowing deep customization and support for legacy features.
- Manual Maintenance: Requires administrators to manage OS patching, database updates, and VM configuration.
- Targeted for Lift-and-Shift Databases: Ideal for migrating existing on-premises SQL Server databases that require specific OS access or third-party plugins.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization needed to migrate an existing on-premises SQL database to Azure while maintaining full control over the underlying operating system and database engine.
Additional Context
SQL Server on Azure VMs serves as a database backend tier rather than an elastic, load-balanced compute tier for web frontend workloads.
Azure Virtual Desktop
Azure Virtual Desktop
What Azure Virtual Desktop Is
Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is a cloud-based desktop and application virtualization service running on Microsoft Azure. It delivers secure Windows desktops and published remote applications to end users across different devices.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
- Different Workload Type: Azure Virtual Desktop is designed for providing remote desktop environments and published client applications to human workers, not for hosting public web applications or APIs.
- Lack of Backend Web Scaling: While AVD has autoscale scaling plans for user session hosts, it does not function as an automated backend compute tier behind an HTTP/HTTPS load balancer for web traffic.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- User-Centric: Tailored for information workers requiring cloud PCs with Windows 10/11 multi-session capabilities.
- Client Protocol Dependent: Relies on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for end-user connectivity rather than standard web traffic distribution.
- Desktop Infrastructure: Manages user profiles, FSLogix containers, and session hosts rather than stateless application servers.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The company needed to provide remote employees with secure access to a virtualized Windows desktop and productivity applications from any location or device.
Additional Context
Azure Virtual Desktop is a specialized end-user computing solution and should not be confused with general-purpose application hosting services in Azure.
Availability Sets
Availability Sets
What Availability Sets Are
An Availability Set is a logical grouping capability in Azure that isolates virtual machine resources across multiple physical hardware racks, power units, and network switches within a single Azure datacenter.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
- No Native Autoscaling: Availability Sets do not provide automatic scaling capabilities. They are static groupings where each virtual machine must be created, configured, and scaled individually.
- Manual Instance Management: Adding or removing instances during sales spikes requires manual deployment or complex custom automation scripts.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Fault and Update Domains: Distributes VMs across separate Fault Domains (shared power source and network switch) and Update Domains (groups of VMs rebooted together during maintenance).
- High Availability Focus: Designed specifically to prevent a single hardware failure or maintenance event from taking down all application instances simultaneously.
- Static Scale: Does not automatically alter VM counts based on resource utilization metrics like CPU or memory demand.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization needed to ensure high availability for a fixed set of existing standalone virtual machines against hardware failures within a datacenter.
Additional Context
While Virtual Machine Scale Sets use the concepts of fault and update domains internally, an Availability Set by itself only provides redundancy for standalone VMs without dynamic autoscaling.
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