Question

Difficulty: MediumUnderstand concepts of cloud economics

A digital archiving firm, ArchivalSafe, is planning to migrate its legacy document indexing system from an on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud. The current system requires upfront hardware purchases every three years to handle peak storage and indexing periods, resulting in underutilized servers during off-peak months. Which two of the following represent the primary cloud economics benefits that ArchivalSafe will realize by migrating to AWS? (Select TWO.)

  1. Shifting from upfront capital expenses (CapEx) to variable operating expenses (OpEx), paying only for the storage and compute resources consumedAnswer
  2. Leveraging elasticity to dynamically scale resources up or down to match actual demand, eliminating the cost of idle capacityAnswer
  3. C
    Eliminating operational expenses (OpEx) entirely by transitioning all infrastructure management and billing to fixed capital expenses (CapEx)
  4. D
    Designing the infrastructure to run on a monolithic architecture to minimize the complexity and billing overhead of distributed cloud resources
  5. E
    Statically provisioning resource capacity to always meet the highest projected peak demand, thereby replacing elasticity with scalability

Answer

Shifting from upfront capital expenses to variable operating expenses, and leveraging elasticity to dynamically scale resources to match actual demand.
Moving to the AWS Cloud allows the company to transition from capital expenses (CapEx) to variable operating expenses (OpEx), meaning they pay only for what they use instead of buying hardware upfront. Furthermore, cloud elasticity enables the company to scale resources dynamically to align with demand spikes and scale down during off-peak times, eliminating underutilized server costs.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the business scenario to identify the primary cost inefficiencies: upfront hardware purchases every three years (representing capital expenses) and underutilized servers during off-peak periods (representing resource waste).
Identified capital expenditure (CapEx) inefficiencies and lack of elasticity as the main problems.
Understanding the baseline problem is necessary to map it to the correct AWS cloud economics solutions.
2
Evaluate the options against AWS cloud economics principles, specifically how AWS transitions capital expenses to operational expenses and how elasticity dynamically resolves underutilization.
Determined that shifting from CapEx to OpEx addresses the upfront purchasing cycles, and leveraging elasticity addresses the idle capacity costs.
Matching AWS features like pay-as-you-go pricing and auto-scaling directly answers the business scenario requirements.

Key Concept

AWS cloud economics principles focus on shifting capital expenses to operational expenses and leveraging elasticity to pay only for resources consumed.
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