Question

Difficulty: EasyUnderstand concepts of cloud economics

An agricultural technology startup is deploying a crop monitoring platform that processes sensor data primarily during the three-month harvest season, with minimal activity during the rest of the year. The startup is deciding whether to purchase physical on-premises servers or migrate the workload to the AWS Cloud. Which TWO of the following represent cloud economics benefits of migrating this platform to AWS?

  1. Replacing upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) for physical server hardware with variable operating expenditures (OpEx).Answer
  2. Eliminating costs for idle server capacity during the off-season by paying only for resources when they are actively used.Answer
  3. C
    Converting variable operating expenses into fixed long-term capital investments to increase budget predictability.
  4. D
    Scaling the infrastructure vertically to permanently handle peak harvest loads, ensuring servers run at full capacity year-round.
  5. E
    Using Spot Instances to guarantee 100% availability for database storage during the critical harvest season.

Answer

Migrating the platform to AWS allows the startup to replace upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) with variable operating expenditures (OpEx) and eliminate costs for idle server capacity during the off-season by paying only for resources when they are actively used.
The correct options describe the fundamental economic advantages of cloud computing for highly seasonal workloads. First, replacing upfront capital expenditures for hardware with variable operating expenditures allows the startup to avoid initial setup costs. Second, paying only for resources when they are actively used prevents the startup from paying for idle server capacity during the nine-month off-season.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the workload characteristics of the startup.
The platform has highly seasonal demand, active for only 3 months of the year and idle for the remaining 9 months.
Understanding the usage pattern helps identify how elasticity and pay-as-you-go pricing apply.
2
Evaluate the financial benefits of the cloud model.
Avoiding upfront hardware purchases shifts the model from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operating expenditure (OpEx), and elasticity allows scaling down during the off-season.
These factors directly map to the core concepts of cloud economics.

Key Concept

Cloud Economics (CapEx vs. OpEx and Elasticity)
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