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Difficulty: MediumHigh Availability, Scalability, and Elasticity

An accounting firm hosts a tax-filing software-as-a-service (SaaS) application on Azure. During the final week of the tax season, the application experiences a massive, unpredictable surge in user traffic. To manage this demand while minimizing costs during periods of low activity, the system is configured to automatically add Virtual Machine instances when CPU usage exceeds 70%70\% and deallocate them when usage drops below 40%40\%. Which cloud concept is directly demonstrated by this automated scaling behavior?

  1. A
    Scalability
  2. ElasticityAnswer
  3. C
    Disaster recovery
  4. D
    High availability

Answer

Elasticity
The correct answer is elasticity because the scenario describes the system's ability to automatically scale resources out (adding instances) and in (deallocating instances) in response to dynamic, real-time demand (CPU utilization), which optimizes both performance and cost.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the scenario requirements.
The scenario describes a system that automatically adds compute resources during high traffic spikes and automatically removes them when demand decreases to minimize costs.
Understanding the core behavior of the system helps identify the correct cloud concept.
2
Differentiate between the cloud concepts of scalability, elasticity, high availability, and disaster recovery.
Elasticity is defined by the automated, dynamic scaling up/down or out/in of resources based on demand, whereas scalability is the general capability to handle growth, high availability is about uptime and redundancy, and disaster recovery is about recovering from failures.
Mapping the specific behavior (automatic scaling in and out based on thresholds to optimize cost) to the correct definition leads to the correct option.

Key Concept

Elasticity in cloud computing
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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Topics

High Availability, Scalability, and Elasticity

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