An event ticketing platform expects a major sales surge. The engineers debate two ways to prepare: scale out by adding identical virtual machine instances, or scale up by moving to larger virtual machines with more cores and memory. The finance lead asks how each strategy would affect the Azure bill. Which explanation is accurate?

1. A. Both strategies raise only the compute line item of the bill; storage and network charges stay flat no matter how many instances run or how large each one is 💬 A
2. B. Scaling out is billed as one flat platform fee per hour regardless of the instance count, so the total only changes when the fleet scales up to larger virtual machines 💬 B
3. C. Scaling up automatically converts the whole deployment to fixed reservation pricing for the commitment term, while scaling out keeps the standard variable per-usage billing 💬 C
4. D. Scaling out multiplies the number of billed instances — each added virtual machine brings its own compute, storage, and network charges — while scaling up moves each instance to a higher-priced size ✓ D

Reveal answer

Correct answer: Scaling out multiplies the number of billed instances — each added virtual machine brings its own compute, storage, and network charges — while scaling up moves each instance to a higher-priced size

Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/describe-cost-management-azure/2-describe-factors-affect-costs-azure