What are the main advantages of adopting a cloud architecture compared with a traditional on premises setup, especially in terms of scalability, cost model, and ease of management?

Introduction / Context:
Cloud architecture has become the preferred model for many organizations because it delivers benefits that traditional on premises setups often cannot provide efficiently. Interviewers frequently ask candidates to list and explain the advantages of cloud architecture, focusing on scalability, cost, availability, and management. A clear understanding of these benefits demonstrates that the candidate can evaluate cloud adoption from both a business and technical perspective.

Given Data / Assumptions:
We compare cloud based architectures to conventional in house server deployments.We consider typical public or hybrid cloud scenarios with shared infrastructure.The main dimensions of interest are scalability, cost model, and manageability.We assume standard features like automation, monitoring, and high availability tools are available in the cloud.

Concept / Approach:
Cloud architecture uses virtualization and orchestration to pool resources and offer them as services. This enables elastic scalability: resources can be increased or decreased rapidly to match demand. The cost model changes from large capital expenditures to pay as you go operating expenses, where organizations pay primarily for what they consume. High availability is easier to achieve using multiple availability zones and managed services that handle failover. Centralized consoles and APIs make it simpler to manage infrastructure, apply configuration changes, and monitor performance across many resources.

Step-by-Step Solution:
Step 1: Identify the key benefits of cloud architecture, including elasticity, flexible pricing, and improved availability.Step 2: Recognize that cloud management tools provide dashboards, automation, and monitoring that reduce operational complexity.Step 3: Review the options and look for the one that correctly lists these benefits without making unrealistic guarantees.Step 4: Option A mentions elastic scalability, pay as you go pricing, high availability, and simplified management, which aligns with standard cloud benefits.Step 5: Confirm that the other options either exaggerate cloud capabilities or describe incorrect behavior, making them unsuitable.

Verification / Alternative check:
To verify, think about typical reasons organizations give when they share case studies of cloud migration. They highlight faster response to demand, ability to scale during peaks, reduced upfront investment, and better visibility into infrastructure. They do not claim that outages never occur or that security and backups are no longer needed. This real world evidence supports the balanced view in option A and shows why the other statements are misleading or wrong.

Why Other Options Are Wrong:
Option B claims that cloud guarantees zero outages and zero performance issues, which is unrealistic. Even major providers publish service level agreements that acknowledge possible downtime. Option C suggests that security controls are no longer necessary, but shared responsibility models clearly state that customers must still secure their applications and data. Option D describes the opposite of cloud resource pooling by requiring dedicated physical servers for each application. Option E says that backup and disaster recovery are no longer required, which is incorrect because responsible cloud users still plan for failures and data loss scenarios.

Common Pitfalls:
Many learners either overestimate or underestimate cloud benefits. Overestimation leads to myths that cloud magically removes all risks, which is not true. Underestimation ignores the significant gains in agility, scale, and cost flexibility that cloud architecture brings. Another pitfall is focusing only on cost savings and ignoring improvements in innovation speed, such as rapid experimentation and deployment. Balanced, realistic descriptions of cloud advantages help in exams and interviews.

Final Answer:
The correct answer is: It offers elastic scalability, pay as you go pricing, high availability, and simplified centralized management of resources.