CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Lower storage costs

  Why it's wrong here

  Stateless horizontal scaling adds compute instances, not storage tiering, so it does not lower storage costs; those depend on data volume and lifecycle policies. It would be the right aim when the workload's bottleneck is storage spend rather than capacity or availability.

• ✗

  Simpler licensing costs

  Why it's wrong here

  Licensing cost simplification is not the primary driver for redesigning a monolithic application to be stateless and horizontally scalable; the core benefit is achieving elastic fault tolerance and independent scaling of components, which licensing models do not directly address. This option is tempting because moving to the cloud can sometimes reduce per-core or per-instance licensing overhead, but the question’s stem explicitly focuses on architectural redesign for scalability and statelessness, not on procurement cost structures. In a scenario where the goal was purely to reduce software licensing fees by shifting to a pay-as-you-go model, this would be a correct consideration.

• ✓

  Improved fault tolerance and elasticity

  Why this is correct

  Stateless, horizontally scalable designs let the platform add or replace instances independently, so a failed node does not lose session state and traffic redistributes automatically. This satisfies the fault tolerance and elasticity benefit, unlike the single-server monolith's fixed capacity and single point of failure.

• ✗

  Reduced network latency

  Why it's wrong here

  Adding stateless instances across availability zones increases network hops between components, so latency is not reduced. Horizontal scaling targets capacity and resilience instead; reduced latency would be the goal when placing compute close to users or data.