A marketing company is launching a new campaign that will require a temporary increase in web server capacity. The operations team provisions an additional 10 Amazon EC2 instances through the AWS Management Console within five minutes, without needing to submit a purchase order or wait for hardware delivery. Which advantage of cloud computing does this scenario best demonstrate?
Increasing speed and agility means that IT resources can be provisioned in minutes, allowing organizations to respond swiftly to new requirements without the delays of traditional procurement and hardware setup. This directly matches the scenario.
Why this answer
The scenario highlights how cloud computing enables rapid provisioning of resources—10 EC2 instances in five minutes—without the delays of procurement or hardware setup. This directly demonstrates increased speed and agility, a core advantage of cloud computing that allows businesses to experiment and scale quickly.
Exam trap
The trap here is that candidates may confuse 'speed and agility' with 'economies of scale' or 'variable expense,' but the key differentiator is the rapid provisioning without procurement delays, not cost structure or provider scale.
Why the other options are wrong
The scenario highlights rapid provisioning of EC2 instances without procurement delays, which directly demonstrates increased speed and agility, not economies of scale. Economies of scale refer to cost advantages from large-scale operations, not provisioning speed.
The scenario highlights rapid provisioning of resources without upfront procurement, which is about speed and agility, not about converting capital expenditure to variable expenditure. The company is not shifting from buying hardware to paying for usage; they are simply adding capacity quickly.
The scenario focuses on provisioning EC2 instances quickly without procurement delays, which demonstrates speed and agility. Option D is about reducing costs by not running physical data centers, which is not the primary benefit illustrated here.