220-1101 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Practice Question
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?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA often tests the distinction between high availability and elasticity, where candidates confuse automatic scaling for demand (elasticity) with automatic failover for outages (high availability).
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
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 analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
High availability
Why this is correct
High availability is the cloud characteristic that ensures continuous operation by automatically rerouting traffic away from a failed region to healthy ones. A global load balancer monitors regional health and redirects requests in real time, meeting the stated failover requirement. This redundancy eliminates a single point of failure, which is exactly what the scenario demands.
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Elasticity
Why it's wrong here
Elasticity refers to a system's ability to dynamically provision and deprovision resources to match fluctuating demand, such as scaling compute capacity up during peak traffic. While a secondary concern in the scenario, elasticity alone does not address failover across regions; it manages capacity, not continuity during an outage. This is a separate operational capability focused on workload matching, not fault tolerance.
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Resource pooling
Why it's wrong here
Resource pooling is a multi-tenancy model where a cloud provider serves multiple customers from shared physical infrastructure using hypervisors and virtualized environments. It is an underlying economic and efficiency enabler, but it has no inherent mechanism for regional failover or traffic rerouting. Resource pooling does not contribute to disaster recovery; it only maximizes hardware utilization, leaving availability to be handled by other design patterns.
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Measured service
Why it's wrong here
Measured service is the cloud capability that meters resource usage for billing and optimization purposes, typically via metered APIs and monitoring tools. It provides visibility into consumption and enables pay-per-use pricing, but it is unrelated to resilience or failover. Automatic redirection during outages is a topological and operational concern, completely orthogonal to usage metering.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 220-1101 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 220-1101 exam.