An online retailer expects a large but temporary spike in website traffic during a holiday sale weekend. Which cloud benefit allows the retailer to automatically add web server capacity during the spike and reduce it afterward without manually provisioning hardware?
- A. Scalability and elasticity Correct
- B. Data residency
- C. Capital expenditure (CapEx) budgeting
- D. Fault domains
Why A is correct
Scalability and elasticity let capacity automatically expand during the spike and contract afterward — which is exactly the retailer's need: temporary demand, no hardware purchases, no manual provisioning.
Why the others are incorrect
Data residency concerns where data is physically stored, not capacity changes. CapEx budgeting describes buying hardware upfront — the opposite of the flexible, on-demand model the cloud provides. Fault domains isolate hardware to limit the blast radius of a failure, but they don't add or remove capacity for a traffic spike.