Question

Difficulty: MediumUnderstand concepts of cloud economics

AquaSmart, a water conservation utility, is preparing a business case to migrate its municipal water monitoring system from an on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud. The system currently experiences predictable baseline usage with sudden, massive spikes in telemetry data traffic during summer droughts. Which two of the following reflect the cloud economics principles that explain how this migration will reduce the utility's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)? (Select TWO.)

  1. Trading capital expenses (CapEx) for variable operating expenses (OpEx) by paying only for active cloud infrastructure instead of purchasing physical hardware upfront.Answer
  2. Leveraging cloud elasticity to scale resources dynamically during seasonal droughts and scale down during low-demand periods, avoiding payment for idle capacity.Answer
  3. C
    Permanently provisioning compute resources to match peak summer demand to ensure the application is highly scalable and always available.
  4. D
    Converting variable operating expenses (OpEx) into fixed capital expenses (CapEx) to establish long-term physical assets on the company balance sheet.
  5. E
    Deploying the application in a tightly coupled, monolithic architecture to minimize the network overhead and data transfer costs between services.

Answer

The correct answers are the option stating that variable operating expenses are traded for capital expenses, and the option describing the use of elasticity to scale resources dynamically based on demand.
The correct options represent the fundamental economic benefits of the AWS Cloud. First, trading capital expenses (CapEx) for variable operating expenses (OpEx) allows organizations to pay only for resources consumed rather than investing in physical infrastructure upfront. Second, cloud elasticity enables the dynamic scaling of resources to match seasonal demand spikes, ensuring the company does not pay for idle capacity during low-usage periods.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the financial transition
Transitioning from physical server purchases to dynamic cloud pricing represents a shift from Capital Expenditures (CapEx) to Operating Expenses (OpEx).
This shows how upfront capital is saved and converted into smaller, continuous operating costs.
2
Identify the utilization strategy
Varying resources dynamically to match seasonal usage (drought spikes) represents the concept of elasticity.
Elasticity helps the utility scale down during low-use periods to stop paying for idle hardware, which is a major driver of TCO reduction.

Key Concept

Cloud Economics: CapEx to OpEx shift and Elasticity
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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