AZ-900 Practice Question 93: On Demand Provisioning
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 10 · question 3 of 10
Before moving to Azure, a company's infrastructure team needed six to eight weeks to order, rack, and configure a new physical server before an application team could use it. After adopting Azure, the same team provisions an equivalent virtual machine in minutes, whenever it is needed, with no purchase order required first. Which fundamental characteristic of cloud computing does this illustrate?
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Answer:
Microsoft's own framing of this exact scenario is that cloud computing "changes infrastructure planning from long procurement cycles to on-demand provisioning," letting teams get capacity in minutes instead of waiting weeks for hardware to be ordered and configured. That shift in *speed and self-service*, independent of what anything costs, is what the stem is testing.
Option B describes a real and separate cloud trait, paying only for what is used, but it is about the billing model, not about how quickly a resource can be obtained; a company could provision on-demand and still be billed a flat rate, or vice versa. Option C, geo-redundancy, is a storage resiliency feature that has nothing to do with how fast a VM can be requested. Option D, the shared responsibility model, describes who secures which layer of the stack, not how long it takes to get a resource in the first place.
Reference: What is cloud computing