CCSP Cloud Concepts, Architecture, and Design Practice Question
A media company runs a video transcoding workflow on a public cloud. Jobs arrive unpredictably and must be processed within minutes, but the company wants to minimize cost by using spare capacity that can be reclaimed when demand for full-price capacity rises. The jobs are checkpointed every 30 seconds and can resume on a different host. Which cloud service model and purchasing approach BEST fits this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that any discounted cloud pricing model will reduce cost for bursty work, when committed-use and per-seat models actually require predictable consumption or named users.
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
✓
Infrastructure as a Service with spot instances
The workload is interruption-tolerant because it checkpoints frequently and can resume elsewhere, which is exactly the profile that reclaimable spare-capacity pricing is built for. Using infrastructure as a service preserves control over the transcoding runtime while allowing the team to bid on spare capacity and cut cost. Committed discounts, per-seat subscriptions, and dedicated hosts all price or isolate capacity in ways that do not match unpredictable, bursty batch processing.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Platform as a Service with a committed use discount
Why it's wrong here
PaaS abstracts the runtime but does not by itself provide reclaimable spare capacity pricing. A committed use discount trades a long-term spend commitment for a lower rate, which conflicts with the goal of minimizing cost for unpredictable, bursty work. PaaS also constrains how the transcoding binaries and checkpoint logic are packaged, so it does not address the reclaimable-capacity requirement described.
- ✗
Infrastructure as a Service with dedicated hosts
Why it's wrong here
Dedicated hosts provide physical server isolation and are typically billed per host, not per unit of reclaimed spare capacity. They are appropriate for licensing or compliance requirements that demand hardware isolation, but here they raise cost and leave capacity idle between jobs. They also do not deliver the interruption-tolerant, low-cost capacity the transcoding workflow is designed to exploit.
- ✓
Infrastructure as a Service with spot instances
Why this is correct
Spot instances sell unused provider capacity at a steep discount and can be reclaimed with a short notice period, which matches the requirement to minimize cost using spare capacity. Because the transcoding jobs checkpoint every 30 seconds and can resume on another host, interruption is tolerable. IaaS also gives the team full control over the runtime needed to install and tune the transcoding software.
- ✗
Software as a Service with a per-seat subscription
Why it's wrong here
SaaS delivers a finished application and does not expose the compute layer where a custom transcoding workflow runs. Per-seat licensing scales with named users rather than with processing jobs, so cost would not track the bursty workload. This model also removes the ability to checkpoint jobs and move them between hosts, which the scenario explicitly requires for resilience.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISC2 exam blueprint
This CCSP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 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 CCSP exam.