Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-304) Practice Test

When utilizing Azure Load Balancer for a multi-region web app, which of the following is essential to ensure high availability?

1. Active Directory integration

2. Load balancing rules

3. Monitoring services

4. Static Web Apps

The correct answer is: Load balancing rules

Ensuring high availability in a multi-region web app using Azure Load Balancer fundamentally relies on load balancing rules. Load balancing rules are critical because they define how traffic should be distributed among the various instances of the application across different regions. By creating load balancing rules, you can direct incoming traffic to the healthy instances, thus ensuring that users can access your application reliably without interruption. These rules allow for configuring how requests are routed based on specific criteria like session persistence and protocol types, which is essential for managing user experiences and application performance. This is particularly important in a multi-region setup, as it helps balance the workload and maintain system stability, allowing for failover scenarios where traffic can seamlessly shift to alternate regions or resources without impacting the user experience. While other aspects like Active Directory integration, monitoring services, and static web apps play meaningful roles in the broader architecture, they do not directly define the mechanism that sustains high availability through effective traffic management in the context of Azure Load Balancer.