Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

What is an availability zone?

1. Location that data is replicated to

2. Local datacenter that your cluster is located in

3. Location that data is replicated from

4. Backup storage location

The correct answer is: Location that data is replicated to

An availability zone refers to a distinct location within a cloud provider's infrastructure that is designed to be isolated from failures in other zones. It ensures that applications and services remain available even if one zone experiences an outage. The concept is crucial in cloud computing as it allows for redundancy and enhances resilience against various types of failures, such as hardware malfunctions or power outages. Data is often replicated to multiple availability zones to provide a safeguard against data loss and to ensure high availability. This means that if one zone fails, the other zones can continue to serve the application with minimal to no downtime. By understanding this principle, one can appreciate how availability zones contribute to the overall architecture of high-availability systems in a cloud environment. In contrast, the other options do not fully capture the definition or purpose of an availability zone. The notion of a local datacenter or backup storage does not necessarily encompass the wider aspect of redundancy and isolation that availability zones are designed for in cloud deployments. Replication points—whether from or to—do not exclusively define the managed infrastructure structure of availability zones, enhancing the importance of the selection regarding data resiliency across different geographic locations.