Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
An e-commerce company experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. They need to ensure their web application automatically scales out during high demand and scales in when demand drops, paying only for resources used. Which cloud benefit best describes this?
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
✓
Elasticity
Elasticity allows resources to automatically scale up and down based on demand, optimizing cost and performance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Economies of scale
Why it's wrong here
Economies of scale lower the per-unit cost of infrastructure due to large-scale operations, but they do not dynamically adjust capacity to match demand. An e-commerce platform facing unpredictable traffic spikes needs active resource provisioning that reacts in real time, not merely cheaper baseline pricing. Thus, while the cloud provider benefits from cost reduction, it is not the characteristic that solves the spike problem.
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Broad network access
Why it's wrong here
Broad network access means that cloud services are reachable over the network using standard protocols from a wide range of client devices. It describes how users connect to resources, not how those resources grow or shrink with workload. For unpredictable spikes, the enabling capability is the automatic scaling of compute/storage capacity, not the transport mechanism itself.
- ✓
Elasticity
Why this is correct
Elasticity is the cloud attribute that provisions and releases IT resources automatically to match current demand, often via auto-scaling policies or real-time monitoring. For an e-commerce site, this means adding virtual servers during a flash sale and removing them after the surge, preventing both over-provisioning and performance degradation. This dynamic, bidirectional scaling is exactly what addresses unpredictable traffic spikes.
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Reliability
Why it's wrong here
Reliability focuses on a system's ability to remain operational and recover from failures, using redundancy, failover, and health checks. While maintaining uptime during a spike is important, reliability does not imply the capacity itself changes; a reliable but static infrastructure would still be overwhelmed. The specific cloud advantage for variable demand is elasticity, not fault tolerance.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud 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 GCDL exam.