Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies (AZ-300) Practice Exam

What is the primary goal of high-availability designs?

1. Rapidly eliminate the impact of incidents

2. Unconditionally ensure service restoration

3. Maintain operations despite unexpected failures

4. Completely eliminate system downtime

The correct answer is: Maintain operations despite unexpected failures

The primary goal of high-availability designs is to maintain operations despite unexpected failures. This concept centers around minimizing disruptions and ensuring that services remain operational regardless of certain types of failures or incidents that might occur within the system or infrastructure. High-availability systems are typically designed with redundancy, load balancing, and failover mechanisms that work to preserve continuous service availability and functionality, thus providing a seamless experience for users. While reducing the impact of incidents and rapidly restoring services are important aspects of high-availability strategies, these actions are part of a broader approach to ensure that operations can continue uninterrupted. Complete elimination of downtime is often unrealistic; instead, high-availability designs aim to significantly reduce potential downtime and ensure that services remain accessible as much as possible, even during adverse conditions or failures.