Operations for CompTIA Cloud+

Sample Practice Questions

1. Question 1

   Following a ransomware attack, the legal department at a company instructs the IT administrator to store the data from the affected virtual machines for a minimum of one year. Which of the following is this an example of?
   1. A. Recoverability
   2. B. Retention
   3. C. Encryption
   4. D. Integrity
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: B. Retention.

   Holding data for a fixed minimum period to satisfy legal, regulatory, or investigative obligations is the definition of data retention. A retention policy specifies how long records must be kept and when they may be destroyed, and a legal hold typically extends retention indefinitely until the matter is resolved. Recoverability describes the ability to restore data after loss, which is about backups and DR rather than how long forensic evidence must be preserved. Encryption protects confidentiality of stored data but does not impose a time-bound preservation requirement. Integrity ensures data has not been altered, which is important for forensic copies but is not the principle being invoked when legal counsel mandates a one-year preservation window.

2. Question 2

   An organization needs to retain its data for compliance reasons but only when required. Which of the following would be the MOST cost-effective type of tiered storage?
   1. A. Warm
   2. B. Hot
   3. C. Archive
   4. D. Cold
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: C. Archive.

   Compliance data that must be retained but is only read on rare occasions belongs in the archive tier, which offers the lowest at-rest cost in exchange for retrieval latency and retrieval fees. Archive is designed for retention scenarios such as legal hold and long-term audit records where the price per gigabyte month must be minimized. The warm tier serves moderate access and costs more than archive. The hot tier is the most expensive and is sized for frequent reads. The cold tier is cheaper than warm but still more expensive than archive and is aimed at data accessed roughly monthly, so for compliance-only retention that is read on demand, archive remains the most cost-effective tiered storage choice.

3. Question 3

   An e-commerce store is preparing for an annual holiday sale. Previously, this sale has increased the number of transactions between two and ten times the normal level of transactions. A cloud administrator wants to implement a process to scale the web server seamlessly. The goal is to automate changes only when necessary and with minimal cost. Which of the following scaling approaches should the administrator use?
   1. A. Scale horizontally with additional web servers to provide redundancy.
   2. B. Allow the load to trigger adjustments to the resources.
   3. C. When traffic increases, adjust the resources using the cloud portal.
   4. D. Schedule the environment to scale resources before the sale begins.
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: B. Allow the load to trigger adjustments to the resources..

   Load-triggered scaling allows the autoscaling group to react automatically when CPU, request count, or latency crosses a defined threshold, and because additional capacity is added only when actually needed, costs stay low during normal periods and grow only during the holiday surge. That fits the requirement to automate changes only when necessary and at minimal cost. Adding fixed redundant web servers preprovisioned for the peak wastes money the rest of the year. Using the cloud portal manually is reactive, slow, and not automation. Scheduling capacity before the sale begins works for very predictable windows but tends to overprovision because actual traffic between two and ten times normal is impossible to predict exactly.

4. Question 4

   Which of the following best describes a characteristic of a hot site?
   1. A. Servers in the hot site are clustered with the main site.
   2. B. Network traffic is balanced between the main site and hot site servers
   3. C. Offline server backups are replicated hourly from the main site
   4. D. All servers are replicated from the main site in an online status.
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: D. All servers are replicated from the main site in an online status..

   A hot site is a fully equipped, always-on standby environment where every server is online and continuously replicated from the primary site, so it can take over with near-zero RTO and RPO during a disaster. Continuous replication of all systems in an online status captures that defining attribute. Active clustering between the main site and a hot site is one possible architecture but not the general characteristic of a hot site. Load balancing live traffic between both sites describes an active-active deployment, which is a richer pattern that goes beyond the basic definition of a hot site. Offline backups replicated hourly describe a warm or cold site, not a hot site, because hot-site servers run continuously, not from offline copies.

5. Question 5

   Five thousand employees always access the company’s public cloud-hosted web application on a daily basis during the same time frame. Some users have been reporting performance issues while attempting to connect to the web application. Which of the following is the best configuration approach to resolve this issue?
   1. A. Scale vertically based on a trend.
   2. B. Scale horizontally based on a schedule.
   3. C. Scale vertically based on a load.
   4. D. Scale horizontally based on an event.
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: B. Scale horizontally based on a schedule..

   When the same large group of users hits the application every day during the same time window, the demand pattern is predictable, so horizontal scaling on a schedule is the most efficient configuration: the autoscaling group adds instances before the daily peak and removes them after, while spreading sessions across many nodes. Scaling vertically on a trend would resize a single server, which is capped by instance size and offers no redundancy. Scaling vertically on load reacts only after utilization climbs, so the first wave of users still experiences slowdowns. Horizontal event-based scaling is reactive and not aligned to a recurring time window, so it would not pre-warm capacity ahead of the daily login surge.

Other CompTIA Cloud+ domains

• Cloud Architecture (46 questions)
• Deployment (46 questions)
• DevOps Fundamentals (28 questions)
• Security (44 questions)
• Troubleshooting (43 questions)