Unit 13: Cloud Computing and IoT - Practice Quiz

1 What does the acronym SaaS stand for in cloud computing?

2 Which of the following is a common example of a SaaS application?

3 What does PaaS primarily provide to its users?

4 In the IaaS model, what does the provider mainly deliver?

5 Which cloud service model gives the user the most control over the operating system and installed software?

6 A public cloud is best described as one that is:

7 Which type of cloud is dedicated to a single organization for its exclusive use?

8 Virtualization in computing mainly allows you to:

9 The software layer that creates and manages virtual machines is called a:

10 A virtual server is best described as:

11 One key advantage of using virtual servers over dedicated physical servers is:

12 Cloud storage allows users to:

13 Which of the following is a popular cloud storage service?

14 Database storage in the cloud is mainly used to:

15 Which language is most commonly used to query data in a relational database?

16 In cloud computing, resource management is mainly concerned with:

17 The ability of a cloud system to automatically add or remove resources based on demand is called:

18 A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is best defined as:

19 Which of the following is commonly guaranteed in an SLA?

20 What does the acronym IoT stand for?

21 A small company wants to use email, document editing, and CRM tools without installing or maintaining any software on their own machines. They access everything through a web browser and pay a monthly per-user fee. Which cloud service model best fits this need?

22 A development team wants to build and deploy a web application without managing operating systems, runtime, or server patching, but they still want full control over their application code and database schema. Which model is most appropriate?

23 An organization needs raw compute, storage, and networking resources so it can install its own operating systems and configure the entire software stack itself. Which service model gives it this level of control?

24 A hospital must keep patient records on infrastructure that is dedicated solely to the hospital and not shared with other organizations, mainly for security and compliance. Which deployment model suits this requirement?

25 Which statement most accurately compares public and private clouds?

26 In a virtualized environment, what is the primary role of a hypervisor?

27 A data center runs 5 physical servers, each hosting 8 virtual machines. If all VMs are evenly distributed, how many virtual machines are running in total?

28 Why can a virtual server be provisioned much faster than a traditional physical server?

29 A company scales its web app by adding more virtual server instances behind a load balancer during peak hours and removing them afterward. This practice is best described as:

30 A photographer wants to store thousands of high-resolution images in the cloud and access them from any device, paying only for the capacity used. Which characteristic of cloud storage most directly supports this?

31 Cloud providers often keep multiple copies of your data across different locations. What is the main benefit of this replication?

32 An application stores rapidly changing, unstructured user activity logs with flexible fields that vary per record. Which database type is generally the better fit?

33 A managed cloud database service handles backups, patching, and replication for you. What is the main trade-off compared to running your own database on a VM?

34 A cloud platform automatically increases the number of running instances when CPU usage crosses 80% and reduces them when it drops below 30%. This mechanism is called:

35 Why is efficient resource management important for controlling cloud costs?

36 A provider's SLA guarantees 99.9% monthly uptime. Approximately how much downtime per 30-day month does this allow?

37 Which of the following is typically defined in a cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

38 In a typical IoT system, what is the primary function of sensors?

39 A smart thermostat learns household patterns and adjusts heating automatically to save energy. Which IoT application domain does this best represent?

40 Why is connectivity (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cellular) considered a fundamental component of any IoT ecosystem?

41 An organization migrates to an IaaS provider and later suffers a data breach because an operating system on one of its VMs was left unpatched. Under the standard cloud shared responsibility model for IaaS, who is accountable for this vulnerability?

42 A development team wants to deploy application code without managing runtimes, OS, or scaling logic, but needs the freedom to choose the programming language and framework. Which characteristic BEST distinguishes a suitable PaaS from a SaaS offering here?

43 A Type-1 (bare-metal) hypervisor and a Type-2 (hosted) hypervisor are compared for a latency-sensitive production workload. Why is the Type-1 approach generally preferred?

44 An SLA guarantees monthly uptime for a service. For a 30-day month, what is the maximum allowed downtime before the guarantee is breached?

45 A bank must keep customer records on infrastructure it fully controls for compliance, yet wants to burst non-sensitive analytics workloads to scalable shared infrastructure during peak load. Which deployment strategy fits this requirement?

46 An application stores millions of rarely accessed backup files and wants to minimize cost, accepting retrieval delays of several hours. Which cloud storage tier characteristic is the correct match?

47 A cloud platform observes CPU utilization repeatedly crossing during traffic spikes and adds instances automatically, removing them when load falls. What is this mechanism and its main risk if thresholds are poorly tuned?

48 A SaaS vendor serves thousands of organizations from one shared application instance while keeping each organization's data logically separated. Which architectural concept enables this, and what is its principal challenge?

49 In a smart-factory IoT deployment, sensors generate high-frequency data that must be filtered and acted upon within milliseconds. Sending all raw data to the cloud is too slow. Which approach directly addresses this latency constraint?

50 An application needs flexible, schema-less storage that scales horizontally across many nodes and tolerates eventual consistency for high write throughput. Which database category best fits, and what tradeoff does it accept per the CAP theorem?

51 Two virtual servers on the same physical host experience degraded performance because one consumes excessive CPU and I/O. What is this phenomenon called, and which mechanism mitigates it?

52 A team provisions IaaS compute and forgets to release unused block volumes and elastic IPs after decommissioning VMs. What best explains why the bill remains high?

53 An enterprise argues that a private cloud is always more secure than a public cloud. Which statement most accurately critiques this claim?

54 A provider offers availability while a competitor offers . Over a 365-day year, approximately how much less downtime does the higher tier permit?

55 A company runs many microservices that each need isolation but share the same OS kernel to save resources and start in milliseconds. Which technology fits better than full hardware virtualization, and why?

56 A workload has predictable steady-state usage plus occasional unpredictable spikes. Which mix of pricing/allocation models minimizes cost while preserving elasticity?

57 A large-scale IoT network of battery-powered field sensors must send small packets over long distances for years without recharge. Which communication characteristic is the priority, and which protocol class fits?

58 An architect needs storage that presents raw, low-latency volumes to a single VM for a high-performance database, rather than shared file or object access. Which storage type is correct, and why?

59 A startup adopts a proprietary PaaS that uses vendor-specific APIs, managed services, and configuration. Two years later migrating away proves costly. Which risk does this illustrate, and what practice reduces it?

60 An e-commerce system requires that a customer's payment either fully completes or fully rolls back, with no partial state, even under concurrent access. Which storage guarantee is essential, and which model provides it natively?