AZ-900 Describe cloud concepts Practice Question
Which term describes the cloud's ability to quickly provision and de-provision resources to meet demand without human intervention?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse elasticity with high availability, but high availability is about uptime and redundancy, not the ability to dynamically adjust capacity to match demand.
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 correct term because it specifically refers to the cloud's ability to automatically scale resources up or down in response to fluctuating demand, without requiring manual intervention. This is a core characteristic of cloud computing, enabling dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning of compute, storage, or network resources based on real-time metrics like CPU utilization or request count.
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 (HA) is a design principle aimed at maximizing uptime through redundancy, load balancing, and failover mechanisms, often formalized in SLAs. It does not involve automatically adjusting compute resources in response to fluctuating demand; instead, HA ensures that if one component fails, traffic is redirected to healthy instances. While critical for production workloads, HA's focus is on maintaining service continuity rather than scaling capacity up or down based on load.
- ✓
Elasticity
Why this is correct
Elasticity refers to a cloud system's ability to automatically scale resources—both up/down and out/in—in real time to match current workload demand without manual intervention. Azure Autoscale, for example, can add or remove VM instances based on CPU utilization or custom metrics, ensuring you pay only for what you consume. This dynamic provisioning is what separates elasticity from static capacity planning and is a fundamental benefit of cloud computing.
- ✗
Fault tolerance
Why it's wrong here
Fault tolerance (FT) is a resilience property that allows a system to continue operating correctly and transparently when one or more components fail, often using redundant hardware or software replicas. Unlike elasticity, FT does not adjust resource capacity based on demand; it maintains the same operational level despite failures by masking the impact. For instance, Azure Availability Zones place replicas across physically separate sites to tolerate a datacenter outage.
- ✗
Disaster recovery
Why it's wrong here
Disaster recovery (DR) is the process of restoring an organization's IT systems and data after a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster, cyberattack, or region-wide outage. DR strategies involve pre-defined procedures, infrastructure replication, and defined recovery objectives like RTO and RPO to resume business operations. This is fundamentally different from elasticity, which is about scaling to meet demand during normal operations, not recovering from a disaster.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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