TOC Cloud Computing & Infrastructure 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which cloud deployment model allows an organization to keep sensitive workloads on-premises while offloading less critical workloads to a public cloud provider?
- Community cloud
- Hybrid cloud (Correct answer)
- Multi-cloud
- Private cloud
Correct answer: Hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud integrates on-premises or private cloud infrastructure with public cloud services, enabling data and application portability between them.
Question 2: In cloud computing, what does 'elasticity' specifically refer to?
- The ability to encrypt data at rest and in transit
- The automatic scaling of resources up or down based on demand (Correct answer)
- The geographic distribution of data across multiple regions
- The redundancy built into cloud storage systems
Correct answer: The automatic scaling of resources up or down based on demand
Elasticity is the dynamic provisioning and deprovisioning of cloud resources in real time to match fluctuating workload demands.
Question 3: Which cloud storage tier is most cost-effective for archiving data that is rarely accessed but must be retained for compliance purposes?
- Standard storage
- Infrequent access storage
- Cold archive storage (Correct answer)
- Cached edge storage
Correct answer: Cold archive storage
Cold archive storage offers the lowest per-GB cost at the expense of higher retrieval latency, making it ideal for compliance-driven long-term retention.
Question 4: What is the primary purpose of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in cloud infrastructure?
- To encrypt data transferred between data centers
- To cache and serve content from edge locations closer to end users (Correct answer)
- To replicate databases across multiple cloud regions
- To monitor and log all API calls within a cloud account
Correct answer: To cache and serve content from edge locations closer to end users
CDNs distribute cached copies of content to geographically dispersed edge nodes, reducing latency and load on origin servers.
Question 5: An organization uses separate cloud accounts for development, staging, and production environments. This practice is best described as:
- Multi-region deployment
- Account segregation / environment isolation (Correct answer)
- Serverless architecture
- Infrastructure as Code
Correct answer: Account segregation / environment isolation
Separating environments into distinct accounts limits the blast radius of misconfigurations and enforces least-privilege access between lifecycle stages.
Question 6: Which cloud networking concept allows virtual machines in different subnets to communicate privately without traversing the public internet?
- VPN gateway
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering (Correct answer)
- NAT gateway
- Internet gateway
Correct answer: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering
VPC peering creates a private network connection between two VPCs so traffic routes through the cloud provider's internal backbone rather than the public internet.
Question 7: In the Shared Responsibility Model, which security task is always the customer's responsibility regardless of the cloud service model used?
- Physical data center security
- Hypervisor patching
- Identity and access management for their own users (Correct answer)
- Network hardware maintenance
Correct answer: Identity and access management for their own users
Across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models, managing user identities, roles, and access permissions always remains the customer's responsibility.
Which cloud deployment model allows an organization to keep sensitive workloads on-premises while offloading less critical workloads to a public cloud provider?