Question

Difficulty: MediumUnderstand concepts of cloud economics

AquaPure Utilities operates an on-premises data center where it recently purchased high-capacity servers to run a monthly water-quality simulation that lasts for 48 hours. During the rest of the month, these servers remain largely idle, yet the utility must continue to pay for power, cooling, and physical security. By migrating this simulation workload to AWS and paying only for the compute resources during the active 48-hour window, which concept of cloud economics is AquaPure Utilities primarily leveraging?

  1. A
    Rehosting the workload to completely eliminate the operational costs of maintaining and patching application software
  2. Trading capital expense (CapEx) for variable operating expense (OpEx) to pay only for active resource consumptionAnswer
  3. C
    Relying on scalability to permanently increase baseline server capacity, thereby converting operational expenses into fixed capital assets
  4. D
    Increasing capital expense (CapEx) by provisioning dedicated physical host servers in the cloud to eliminate variable operating costs

Answer

Trading capital expense (CapEx) for variable operating expense (OpEx) to pay only for active resource consumption
The correct answer is the trade-off of capital expense (CapEx) for variable operating expense (OpEx). By running the simulation on AWS, the utility avoids upfront server purchases and pays only for resources consumed during the 48-hour window.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the current on-premises cost structure and utilization pattern.
The utility has high upfront capital expenses (CapEx) for hardware that remains idle 93% of the time, resulting in inefficient spending on power and space.
To identify the source of financial inefficiency.
2
Evaluate the impact of moving the periodic simulation to a cloud consumption model.
On AWS, the utility can use compute resources on-demand and pay only for the 48 hours of simulation time, converting fixed upfront hardware costs into variable operational expenses (OpEx).
To determine the cloud economic principle that solves the identified inefficiency.

Key Concept

The transition from capital expenses (CapEx) to variable operational expenses (OpEx) in cloud economics.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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