AZ-900 Describe cloud concepts Practice Question
Which cloud computing characteristic allows an organization to avoid purchasing excess capacity to handle occasional peak loads?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse elasticity with high availability, as both involve redundancy, but elasticity specifically addresses dynamic capacity adjustment for variable demand, not just uptime or fault tolerance.
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 is the cloud computing characteristic that allows resources to automatically scale up to meet peak demand and scale down when demand decreases, so organizations only pay for what they use and avoid over-provisioning. This eliminates the need to purchase and maintain excess capacity for occasional load spikes, as the cloud provider dynamically allocates resources in real time.
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 it's wrong here
High availability focuses on maximizing uptime by deploying redundant components across fault domains and using health monitoring to automatically fail over. While it helps mitigate the impact of component failures, it does not automatically change capacity to meet fluctuations in demand. A highly available system can still be sized for a peak that rarely occurs, leading to idle resources.
- ✗
Geo-distribution
Why it's wrong here
Geo-distribution places Azure services in multiple regional datacenters to reduce network latency and improve fault tolerance for global users. However, this capability does not dynamically adjust compute or storage capacity to match fluctuating demand, so it cannot prevent over-provisioning for occasional traffic peaks. Peak load is still addressed by fixed capacity or separate scaling mechanisms, not by location spread.
- ✓
Elasticity
Why this is correct
Elasticity in Azure is the ability to automatically add or remove resources in response to real-time demand, such as CPU, memory, or request count, via autoscaling rules. This dynamic provisioning ensures you only pay for what you actually consume, eliminating the need to purchase permanent extra capacity to handle rare, short-lived peaks. It directly solves the over-provisioning problem the question describes.
- ✗
Durability
Why it's wrong here
Durability guarantees that data remains intact and recoverable over time, typically through redundant copies, geo-replication, and backup policies. It addresses data loss or corruption scenarios, not resource capacity planning. Over-provisioning for peaks has nothing to do with how reliably data is persisted; a durable storage system can still have fixed compute resources.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
What is Cloud Computing?
Key term
Elasticity
Elasticity is the ability of a cloud system to automatically add or remove computing resources (like servers, storage, or bandwidth) in response to real-time changes in demand.
Key term
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet, allowing users to access computing power, storage, and applications without owning physical hardware.
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