Worth 11% of the CompTIA A+ (Core 1) (220-1201) exam. CertClue has 52 questions on this objective.
The service models describe how much of the stack the provider runs and how much you run. Questions give a scenario and ask which model fits, so anchor on who is responsible for the operating system.
Exam tip. Decide who owns the operating system. That single question separates IaaS from PaaS in almost every exam scenario.
Deployment models describe who the infrastructure is for, not what services run on it. The distinguishing factor is tenancy and control, and the usual trade is cost against control.
Exam tip. Any scenario that mentions keeping some data in-house while using public capacity for the rest is hybrid, even if the words private and public both appear.
Virtualisation questions test the two hypervisor types, what a VM needs from the host, and the hardware feature that must be enabled in firmware before any of it works.
Exam tip. If a virtual machine will not start on otherwise capable hardware, the first answer to consider is that virtualization support is disabled in UEFI firmware.
Beyond the mechanics, Core 1 asks why virtualization is used. Each purpose maps to a business benefit, and questions usually describe the benefit and ask you to name the use case.
Exam tip. When a question describes testing suspicious software safely, the answer is a sandbox or isolated VM, never running it on a production host with antivirus enabled.
These are the defining properties that separate cloud from ordinary hosting. Exam questions describe a behaviour and ask which characteristic it demonstrates.
Exam tip. Elasticity and high availability are frequently confused. Elasticity is about handling changing load; high availability is about surviving failure.
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1. A company rents virtual servers from a cloud provider and is responsible for installing and managing its own operating system and applications on them, while the provider manages the physical hardware and networking. Which cloud service model does this describe?
IaaS provides virtualized computing infrastructure, such as servers and storage, while the customer manages the OS, runtime, and applications themselves. SaaS delivers fully managed, ready-to-use software, PaaS provides a managed platform for developing applications without managing the underlying OS, and DaaS delivers virtual desktops rather than raw infrastructure.
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