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Compute resilience

Core

Azure Availability Zones

Physically separate datacenter groups within supported regions.

Key points

  • A zonal design requires redundant instances; placing one instance in a zone does not create application redundancy.
  • Redundant instances across zones can tolerate a zonal facility failure.
  • Dependent disks, IPs, and load-balancing resources need compatible zonal design.

Best-known use cases

  • Place redundant VMs across zone boundaries.
  • Align zonal frontends and disks with a resilient deployment.

What candidates often confuse it with

  • Availability Zone vs region: isolated datacenter group within one region vs separate geographic Azure area.
  • Availability Zone vs availability set: zonal failure boundary vs fault and update domains within a datacenter boundary.

Key takeaway

Use multiple zone-aligned instances when the required failure boundary is an availability zone.

Related services

  • Availability sets
  • Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Relevant exam tasks

  • D3.2.S6 — Deploy virtual machines to availability zones and availability sets
  • D3.2.S7 — Deploy and configure an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

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Free Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate prep

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Exam Weights

Exam snapshot

AZ-104 at a glance

Level
Intermediate
Duration
100 minutes
Questions
No fixed live question count published
Formats
No guaranteed question-type mix
Scoring
1–1,000 scaled score; 700 minimum passing score

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Exam fidelity: Microsoft does not publish a fixed live question count or guarantee a question-type mix for AZ-104. This lane counts multiple-choice and multiple-response items as exam-style practice. Ordering, matching, and case-study items are supplemental site exercises and do not count toward exam-style accuracy. Practice percentages do not reproduce Microsoft's scaled scoring, and difficulty labels describe this site's Intermediate-level scenario complexity rather than a Microsoft-published question rating.

Reference

AZ-104 topics and reference map

Study links

AZ-104 resources

Official Microsoft resources

AZ-104 official study guide

The live Microsoft guide with the skills-measured date, domain ranges, and detailed objectives.

Azure Administrator Associate certification

Official certification overview, assessment duration, practice assessment, exam sandbox, and scheduling path.

AZ-104T00 Microsoft Azure Administrator course

Official instructor-led course and training path for Azure administrators preparing for AZ-104.