CCSP Cloud Concepts, Architecture, and Design Practice Question
A media company runs a video-transcoding workload on a public cloud IaaS platform. The workload is stateless, tolerant of interruption, and must complete within a 6-hour window at the lowest possible compute cost. The company's architects propose using a cloud service that provisions spare capacity at a significant discount but can reclaim it with a two-minute notice. Which cloud deployment and service model does this describe?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming any discounted compute purchase is equivalent, when only spare-capacity instances carry the provider-initiated reclamation with short notice that this workload is built to tolerate.
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
✓
Spot instances within a public cloud
The workload is stateless, tolerant of interruption, and cost-sensitive, which maps precisely to spare-capacity compute sold at a discount with short-notice reclamation. Committed-term reservations, physically isolated hosts, and full-price on-demand capacity all fail at least one stated constraint, either cost, availability guarantees, or the eviction behavior the architects are designing around.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Reserved instances within a community cloud
Why it's wrong here
Reserved instances commit the organization to a one- or three-year term in exchange for a discount, and they are not reclaimed at short notice. A community cloud is a deployment model shared by organizations with common concerns, not a spare-capacity purchasing mechanism. Neither characteristic matches the requirement for interruptible, deeply discounted capacity with a two-minute eviction notice.
- ✗
Dedicated hosts within a private cloud
Why it's wrong here
Dedicated hosts give a single tenant physical isolation of the server hardware, which is the opposite of cheap spare capacity and carries a premium price. A private cloud is operated for a single organization, so there is no external pool of unused capacity to bid on. This option addresses isolation and licensing concerns rather than the cost and interruptibility needs described.
- ✓
Spot instances within a public cloud
Why this is correct
Spot instances (also called spot VMs or preemptible VMs) let a consumer bid on a provider's unused capacity at steep discounts, and the provider can reclaim that capacity with short notice, often around two minutes. Stateless, interruption-tolerant batch work such as video transcoding is the canonical fit, and the reclaimed capacity directly explains the lowest-cost requirement in this scenario.
- ✗
On-demand instances within a hybrid cloud
Why it's wrong here
On-demand instances are billed per second or per hour with no upfront commitment, but they carry the highest compute rate rather than a discount, and they are not reclaimed while running. A hybrid cloud merely combines private and public resources. This choice fails the lowest-possible-cost requirement and does not provide the two-minute reclamation behavior.
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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.