AZ-900 Practice Question 2: Consumption Based Model
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 1 · question 2 of 10
A finance director is reviewing a proposal to move the company's servers from its own datacenter into Azure. She wants to understand how the consumption-based model changes the way IT spending appears on the books. Which statement describes it correctly?
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Answer:
The consumption-based model means you pay for what you provision and use (per second of compute, per gigabyte stored, per transaction) with no purchase of hardware up front. That shifts IT spending from capital expenditure (CapEx), a large up-front purchase of assets that is depreciated over years, to operating expenditure (OpEx), an ongoing cost billed in the period it is incurred. It also means costs fall when you deallocate or scale down resources.
Option A describes an all-you-can-eat subscription, which Azure does not offer; per-service meters are the norm. Option C contradicts the model, no hardware purchase is required at all. Option D reverses the accounting treatment: the whole point of the shift is that cloud consumption is *not* CapEx.
Reference: Describe cloud computing