AZ-305 domain - 22% of the exam

Design Data Storage Solutions

Design Data Storage Solutions is 22% of the Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305) (AZ-305) exam. These are the objectives it covers, each with practice questions and worked explanations.

Objectives in this domain

Sample question from this domain

Free sampleDesign Data Storage Solutionshard

A financial-services architect is configuring failover-group policy for a mission-critical Azure SQL Database deployment. Internal recovery procedures require humans to make the call to fail over so business continuity owners stay in control of timing. Which failover policy aligns with this requirement?

  • ASet the failover policy to Microsoft-managed (automatic) with the default grace period.
  • BSet the failover policy to customer-managed (manual) and document the human-driven runbook. Correct
  • CSet the failover policy to Microsoft-managed with a zero-hour grace period for fastest failover.
  • DDisable failover groups and rely on per-database active geo-replication failovers.
Customer-managed failover policy is the recommended default; Microsoft-managed only fires for widespread regional outages. Customer-managed failover keeps the decision with the customer; the documentation explicitly recommends this policy so the business retains control over when failover happens. Microsoft-managed failover triggers only during widespread regional outages and only after the grace period, and it removes that control.

Why A is wrong: Microsoft-managed failover only triggers during widespread regional outages and removes human control over when failover happens, contrary to the requirement.

Why B is correct: Correct. Customer-managed failover keeps the decision with the customer; the documentation explicitly recommends this policy so the business retains control over when failover happens.

Why C is wrong: A zero-hour grace period still hands the failover decision to Microsoft; the requirement is human-controlled timing.

Why D is wrong: Active geo-replication failover is also manual but loses the listener endpoint and the group abstraction that the architect explicitly relies on.

Other domains in this exam

See also the AZ-305 cert hub, the study guide, and the cheat sheet.

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