220-1101 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Practice Test 7 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company hosts a critical web application on a public cloud provider. The architecture uses virtual server instances in two geographically separate data centers (regions). A global load balancer monitors the health of each region and distributes incoming user traffic. If an entire region becomes unavailable due to a natural disaster, the load balancer automatically redirects all traffic to the remaining healthy region. This design is intended to meet a specific business requirement. Which cloud characteristic does this architecture BEST demonstrate?

Accepted Answer

High availability. This architecture demonstrates high availability because it uses redundant virtual server instances across two geographically separate regions with a global load balancer that performs automatic failover. When an entire region becomes unavailable due to a disaster, the load balancer detects the health check failure (e.g., HTTP 503 or TCP timeout) and redirects all traffic to the remaining healthy region, ensuring the application remains accessible. This design minimizes downtime and meets the business requirement for continuous operation despite regional outages.

Answer

Elasticity

Answer

Resource pooling

Answer

Measured service

Question 2

A cloud provider hosts virtual servers for multiple clients on the same physical hardware. Each client's data and applications are logically isolated from others, and the clients have no knowledge of where their resources are physically located. This is an example of which essential characteristic of cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

Resource pooling. Resource pooling is the correct answer because the scenario describes a cloud provider using virtualization to aggregate physical hardware resources (compute, storage, network) and dynamically assign them to multiple clients. Each client's data and applications are logically isolated, and the clients have no awareness or control over the exact physical location of their resources, which is the defining characteristic of resource pooling as per NIST SP 800-145.

Answer

Rapid elasticity

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Measured service

Answer

On-demand self-service

Question 3

A financial services company needs to migrate its customer transaction processing system to the cloud. Regulatory requirements mandate that all customer data must reside on servers physically located within the country’s borders and that the hardware must be dedicated solely to the company (no multi-tenancy at the hardware level). The company wants to retain the ability to scale resources on demand and manage the operating system and applications. Which cloud deployment model BEST meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Private cloud. A private cloud provides dedicated physical resources that are not shared with other organizations, offering the required isolation and control. It can be hosted on-premises or by a third-party provider with exclusive hardware. A public cloud would involve shared hardware, violating the requirement. A hybrid cloud combines public and private but does not guarantee full isolation. A community cloud is shared among several organizations with common concerns, but still not dedicated to one company.

Answer

Public cloud

Answer

Hybrid cloud

Answer

Community cloud

Question 4

A global e-commerce company is designing a cloud architecture for its customer-facing website. The website experiences unpredictable traffic spikes during promotions. The company requires that during a regional cloud provider outage, all traffic is automatically redirected to a fully operational region with no manual intervention. Additionally, the company must ensure that all virtual machines across regions use identical configurations and a single management interface. Which cloud characteristic does the primary requirement address?

Accepted Answer

High availability. The primary requirement—automatic traffic redirection to a fully operational region during a regional outage with no manual intervention—directly defines high availability. High availability ensures that a system remains accessible by eliminating single points of failure through redundancy and automated failover mechanisms, such as DNS-based routing (e.g., using health checks and failover policies) or global load balancers that detect region failures and reroute traffic seamlessly.

Answer

Elasticity

Answer

Resource pooling

Answer

Measured service

Question 5

A company wants to move its on-premises email server to the cloud. The goal is to eliminate all management overhead related to the operating system, security patches, and the email application itself. The IT team needs the email service to be highly available and automatically scalable. Which cloud service model BEST meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

B. Software as a Service (SaaS). Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers a fully managed email application over the internet, where the provider handles all underlying infrastructure, operating system, security patches, and application updates. This model eliminates all management overhead for the IT team while offering built-in high availability and automatic scalability, as seen with services like Microsoft 365 Exchange Online or Google Workspace.

Answer

A. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Answer

C. Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Answer

D. Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

Question 6

A company hosts its e-commerce application on a public cloud provider. The architecture includes duplicate virtual servers in two separate geographic regions. A global load balancer monitors server health. If an entire region becomes unavailable due to a natural disaster, the load balancer automatically reroutes all traffic to the remaining region. The application continues to run without any manual intervention. This capability is BEST described by which cloud characteristic?

Accepted Answer

Fault tolerance. The correct answer is D, fault tolerance. This scenario describes a system that continues operating without interruption when an entire region fails, automatically rerouting traffic via a global load balancer. Fault tolerance specifically refers to a system's ability to continue functioning, without any downtime or manual intervention, even when a component or entire infrastructure fails. High availability (A) aims to minimize downtime but typically allows for brief interruptions or manual failover, whereas this design ensures zero-touch, continuous operation.

Answer

High availability

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Scalability

Answer

Elasticity

Question 7

A small business wants to move its company website to the cloud. The goal is to eliminate all management tasks related to the operating system and the web server software. The business wants to simply upload its website content and have the cloud provider handle all patching, security, and availability. Which cloud service model BEST meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Platform as a Service (PaaS). Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the correct model because it provides a managed platform where the cloud provider handles the operating system, web server software, patching, security, and availability. The business only needs to upload its website content (e.g., HTML, PHP files) and the provider manages the underlying runtime environment, including the web server (like Apache or Nginx) and OS updates. This eliminates all management tasks related to the OS and web server software, directly matching the requirement.

Answer

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Answer

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Answer

Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

Question 8

A company hosts its e-commerce application on a public cloud provider. The architecture includes identical virtual server instances in two geographically separate data centers. A global load balancer monitors the health of each data center. If an entire data center becomes unavailable due to a natural disaster, the load balancer automatically redirects all traffic to the remaining healthy data center. The application continues to run without any manual intervention. This capability is BEST described by which cloud characteristic?

Accepted Answer

High availability. High availability (HA) is the correct answer because the architecture uses redundant virtual server instances across two geographically separate data centers with a global load balancer that automatically redirects traffic when an entire data center fails. This design ensures the application remains accessible without manual intervention, which is the defining characteristic of high availability — minimizing downtime through redundancy and automated failover.

Answer

Rapid elasticity

Answer

Measured service

Answer

Resource pooling

Question 9

A software development company wants to migrate a custom Python web application to the cloud. The team wants to focus exclusively on writing code and managing the database, without worrying about patching the operating system, managing the runtime environment, or scaling the underlying servers. Which cloud service model BEST meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Platform as a Service (PaaS). Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides a managed platform that includes the runtime environment, operating system, and scaling capabilities, allowing developers to focus solely on writing code and managing the database. In this scenario, the team wants to avoid patching the OS, managing the runtime, or scaling servers, which aligns exactly with PaaS offerings like AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Google App Engine.

Answer

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Answer

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Answer

Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

Question 10

A cloud provider offers a service where customers can provision virtual servers with varying amounts of CPU, RAM, and storage on-demand. Customers are billed only for the actual resources they consume each hour, with no upfront commitment. This cloud characteristic is known as:

Accepted Answer

Measured service. The correct answer is D (Measured service) because the scenario describes a pay-per-use billing model where customers are charged based on actual resource consumption (CPU, RAM, storage) per hour, with no upfront commitment. Measured service is a core NIST-defined cloud characteristic that enables metering and billing for usage, typically using a pay-as-you-go model. This directly matches the description of being billed only for resources consumed each hour.

Answer

Resource pooling

Answer

Rapid elasticity

Answer

On-demand self-service

Question 11

A company hosts its e-commerce website on a public cloud platform. During a marketing campaign, the website experiences a sudden, unplanned spike in traffic. The cloud environment automatically provisions additional virtual servers to handle the load and later decommissions them when traffic returns to normal. This capability is BEST described by which cloud computing characteristic?

Accepted Answer

Elasticity. Elasticity is the cloud computing characteristic that enables automatic scaling of resources up or down based on demand. In this scenario, the cloud platform provisions additional virtual servers during a traffic spike and decommissions them when traffic normalizes, which is the precise definition of elasticity. This differs from high availability, which focuses on uptime through redundancy, not dynamic scaling.

Answer

High availability

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Fault tolerance

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Disaster recovery

Question 12

A financial services company must store customer data on-premises due to strict regulatory requirements. However, they want to leverage cloud resources to run analytics on that data during peak reporting periods. The company plans to use a cloud provider that can securely access the on-premises data and provide additional compute capacity only when needed. Which cloud deployment model BEST describes this configuration?

Accepted Answer

Hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud model combines on-premises infrastructure (private cloud) with public cloud resources, connected via a secure VPN or dedicated link. This allows the company to keep sensitive customer data on-premises for regulatory compliance while bursting compute-intensive analytics workloads to the public cloud during peak reporting periods, paying only for additional capacity when needed.

Answer

Public cloud

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Private cloud

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Community cloud

Question 13

A company wants to ensure business continuity in the event of a primary data center failure. They replicate their critical virtual machines to a cloud provider's secondary region. In the secondary region, the VMs are stored as templates and are not running, but the cloud provider can instantiate them within minutes if needed. The company is charged only for the storage costs of the templates, not for compute resources. This approach BEST demonstrates which cloud computing characteristic?

Accepted Answer

Measured service. This scenario illustrates 'Measured service', one of the five essential cloud characteristics defined by NIST. Measured service means that cloud resources are metered and customers are billed only for what they consume. Here, the company only pays for storage (the templates) and not for idle compute, which would be the case if the VMs were running. While 'rapid elasticity' allows quick provisioning, it does not directly describe the billing model. 'High availability' implies redundant active resources, which is not the case here (VMs are offline). 'Resource pooling' refers to multi-tenant shared infrastructure.

Answer

High availability

Answer

Rapid elasticity

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Resource pooling

Question 14

A company hosts a critical application on a public cloud provider. The solution is designed with a set of pre-configured virtual machines that are kept powered off in a different availability zone. In the event of a failure in the primary zone, the standby VMs are automatically started, and traffic is rerouted. This design primarily addresses which of the following cloud computing characteristics?

Accepted Answer

Disaster recovery. The design described—pre-configured VMs kept powered off in a different availability zone, automatically started on failure, with traffic rerouted—is a classic warm standby disaster recovery (DR) pattern. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring operations after a major failure or disaster, often in a secondary site or zone, which matches this scenario. High availability (HA) typically uses active-active or active-passive configurations with automatic failover, but the VMs here are powered off, not running, so this is DR, not HA.

Answer

High availability

Answer

Fault tolerance

Answer

Scalability

Question 15

A company needs to run a one-time data analysis job that requires a high-performance virtual machine with 16 vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM. The job will take approximately 3 hours to complete. After the job finishes, the company wants to release the resources and stop paying for them. The cloud provider allows the company to provision such a virtual machine through a web portal in minutes and bills only for the hours the VM is running. This scenario BEST demonstrates which cloud computing characteristic?

Accepted Answer

Rapid elasticity. The scenario describes provisioning a high-performance VM with 16 vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM in minutes, running it for only 3 hours, and then releasing it to stop paying. This directly demonstrates rapid elasticity, which is the ability to quickly scale computing resources up or down on demand and pay only for what is used. The cloud provider's web portal and per-hour billing model enable this near-instant provisioning and de-provisioning, which is the core of rapid elasticity.

Answer

High availability

Answer

Resource pooling

Answer

Metered service