CompTIA A+ 220-1101 (V14) Practice Question

The correct answer is rapid elasticity. Rapid elasticity is the cloud characteristic that allows computing resources to be quickly provisioned and de-provisioned to meet changes in demand. In this scenario, the company needs to automatically scale up its server resources for the 48-hour sale and then scale them back down to save costs, which is the primary function of elasticity.

• Metered utilization is the 'pay-as-you-go' model where a customer is billed for the resources they consume. While related to the cost savings in this scenario, it is the result of using an elastic system; elasticity is the feature that enables the scaling itself.
• High availability ensures that a service remains operational by minimizing downtime, often through redundancy across multiple servers or data centers. While important for an e-commerce site, it does not specifically address the need to handle a massive, temporary surge in traffic.
• File synchronization is the process of keeping files consistent across multiple devices or locations (e.g., Dropbox) and is not relevant to scaling web server capacity for traffic.