AZ-900 Practice Question 62: Sustainability Right Sizing
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 7 · question 2 of 10
An IT team wants its Azure footprint to reduce environmental impact as well as cost. It automatically deallocates development virtual machines outside business hours, and it continually right-sizes resources that are running larger than they need to be. Which cloud computing benefit do these practices belong to?
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Answer:
Microsoft's sustainability guidance for cloud computing describes exactly these two habits as sustainability-aligned practices: scaling resources down when demand decreases, and turning off or deallocating resources that aren't in use, alongside choosing efficient configurations to reduce overprovisioning. It also notes that cloud providers operate at large scale, which improves resource utilization compared to many isolated on-premises environments, so matching deployed capacity to actual demand is both a cost and an environmental win.
Option A, reliability, is about a system continuing to function correctly and recovering from failures; it says nothing about resource utilization or emissions. Option C, cost predictability, is the ability to forecast spending accurately; it's a financial planning benefit, and while right-sizing also happens to lower cost, that's not what defines this benefit. Option D, high availability, is about maximizing uptime through SLAs, which is unrelated to whether idle resources are switched off.
Reference: Describe sustainability considerations in the cloud