Deploying Critical LOB Application to Azure: Guaranteed Availability Strategy

Deploying Critical LOB Application to Azure: Guaranteed Availability Strategy

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Question

Note: The question is included in a number of questions that depicts the identical set-up. However, every question has a distinctive result. Establish if the solution satisfies the requirements.

You are tasked with deploying a critical LOB application, which will be installed on a virtual machine, to Azure.

You are informed that the application deployment strategy should allow for a guaranteed availability of 99.99 percent. You need to make sure that the strategy requires as little virtual machines and availability zones as possible.

Solution: You include two virtual machines and one availability zone in your strategy.

Does the solution meet the goal?

Answers

Explanations

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A. B.

B

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/availability-zones/az-overview

The solution provided does not meet the goal of guaranteeing an availability of 99.99 percent while minimizing the number of virtual machines and availability zones.

To understand why the solution is not sufficient, let's break down the requirements and analyze the solution:

  1. Guaranteed availability of 99.99 percent: This requirement means that the application should be available and accessible for at least 99.99 percent of the time. In other words, there can be at most around 4.38 minutes of downtime per month.

  2. Minimizing virtual machines and availability zones: The solution aims to minimize the number of virtual machines and availability zones to reduce costs and complexity.

The provided solution includes two virtual machines and one availability zone. While having multiple virtual machines can help with redundancy and fault tolerance, a single availability zone is not enough to meet the goal of 99.99 percent availability.

An availability zone is a physically separate data center within an Azure region, designed to provide resilience and redundancy. It offers isolation from failures that may occur in other zones. However, a single availability zone does not guarantee the required level of availability.

To achieve 99.99 percent availability, you should consider deploying your application across multiple availability zones within a region. This configuration ensures that if one availability zone experiences an outage, the application can fail over to another zone and remain accessible.

To improve the solution and meet the goal, you should include at least two or more availability zones in your deployment strategy. By doing so, you increase the redundancy and fault tolerance, minimizing the risk of downtime and ensuring a higher level of availability.

Therefore, the correct answer is B. No, the solution does not meet the goal.

The given scenario describes the deployment of a critical LOB (line of business) application on Azure, and the requirement is to ensure a guaranteed availability of 99.99%. In addition, the strategy should require as few virtual machines and availability zones as possible. The proposed solution is to include two virtual machines and one availability zone.

An availability zone is a physically separate data center within an Azure region that has its own power, cooling, and networking. The use of multiple availability zones within a region ensures that an application is highly available and fault-tolerant. The virtual machines in each availability zone can be configured in such a way that they provide redundancy and failover capabilities to the application.

In this scenario, the proposed solution of using two virtual machines and one availability zone can potentially meet the requirement of a guaranteed availability of 99.99%. However, it may not provide the highest level of availability or fault-tolerance.

Azure provides various options for achieving high availability and fault-tolerance, such as using multiple virtual machines across multiple availability zones, using load balancers and auto-scaling, deploying the application in a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model, or using Azure Site Recovery for disaster recovery.

Therefore, while the proposed solution may meet the requirement of requiring as little virtual machines and availability zones as possible, it may not necessarily provide the highest level of availability or fault-tolerance. The decision on the appropriate solution would depend on the specific needs and requirements of the LOB application and the level of risk the organization is willing to accept.

In conclusion, the answer to the question would be "it depends." The proposed solution may meet the goal of requiring as little virtual machines and availability zones as possible, but it may not provide the highest level of availability or fault-tolerance.