Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-304) Practice Test

How many instances of Key Vault should be implemented to meet the requirement of having keys readable during a regional outage?

1. 1

2. 2

3. 3

4. 6

The correct answer is: 1

To ensure that keys are readable during a regional outage, it's important to understand how Azure Key Vault operates and its geographic resilience features. Implementing a single instance of Key Vault can be adequate if the resources and applications relying on it are designed to handle regional outages with applications that can gracefully fail over to a secondary region. In Azure, key data stored in Key Vault can be replicated across multiple regions to increase availability and durability. However, having just one instance typically works well if proper disaster recovery and failover implementations are established using Azure's built-in capabilities, such as Azure Resource Manager, or by leveraging traffic managers or regional replicates. The decision to have only one instance, assuming that all necessary data replication policies and failover procedures are in place, is based on balancing cost and complexity against the availability needs of the applications that require access to the keys. This approach can simplify management while still providing sufficient reliability during regional disruptions, depending on the overall architecture and backup mechanisms employed. In summary, a single instance can suffice if the architecture is equipped to handle the challenges presented by regional outages, making it a practical and often adopted choice.