Teach
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services — servers, storage, databases, networking, and software — over the internet, billed as you consume them.
Core cloud benefits
- Scalability adds or removes resources to match demand (scale up for bigger VMs, scale out for more instances).
- Elasticity automatically expands and contracts capacity so you pay only for what current load needs.
- High availability keeps workloads running through redundancy and SLAs across infrastructure.
- Fault tolerance lets a system keep operating even when a component fails.
- Agility lets teams provision resources in minutes instead of weeks.
- Global reach deploys workloads close to users across worldwide datacenters.
CapEx vs OpEx
- Capital expenditure (CapEx) is large upfront spend on owned assets like servers and datacenters, depreciated over time.
- Operational expenditure (OpEx) is ongoing, usage-based spend with no upfront hardware purchase.
- Cloud shifts IT spending from CapEx to OpEx: no datacenter to buy, pay monthly for what you use.
Quick decision checkpoints
- Does demand change over time? Elasticity and scalability cut waste.
- Is uptime critical? Favor high availability and fault tolerance designs.
- Avoiding upfront hardware cost? The OpEx consumption model fits.
Understand the benefits and the CapEx-to-OpEx shift first; Azure pricing and service choices follow naturally.
Practice
Practice 1
An e-commerce site automatically adds capacity during a flash sale and removes it afterward. This benefit is:
Practice 2
A workload must keep serving users even if a single server fails. Which characteristic addresses this?
Practice 3
A company wants to serve customers in Europe and Asia with low latency by deploying to nearby datacenters. This is:
Practice 4
Buying physical servers and a datacenter upfront is an example of:
Practice 5
Moving to Azure changes most infrastructure costs from CapEx to: