Which cloud computing characteristic describes the ability to increase or decrease resources quickly in line with demand?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
Elasticity is the ability of a workload to grow or shrink automatically as demand changes. An elastic system can absorb a sudden traffic spike by adding capacity and release that capacity after the peak passes, without a person intervening.
High availability is about keeping a service accessible, fault tolerance is about surviving component failures, and disaster recovery is about restoring service after a major outage. None of those describe dynamic capacity matching.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. High availability is about uptime, meaning keeping a service reachable through redundancy, not about how quickly capacity can be added or removed to match demand.
- C. Fault tolerance addresses surviving component failures through redundancy; it says nothing about scaling capacity up or down as workload changes.
- D. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring service and data after a major event such as a regional outage, not on matching day-to-day demand.
Exam tip. Elasticity = automatic scaling with demand. Scalability is the ability to scale, which may be a manual change.