CapEx vs OpEx

Capital expenditure (CapEx) means paying upfront for physical infrastructure — servers, data centers, networking hardware — that depreciates over time and sits on the balance sheet as an asset. Operational expenditure (OpEx) means paying for resources as consumed, which is how Azure services are billed through subscriptions and pay-as-you-go pricing. The AZ-900 exam tests this as a cloud benefit: moving to Azure shifts spending from CapEx to OpEx, improving cash-flow predictability and eliminating over-provisioning risk. A common confusion equates OpEx with “cheap” — the real advantage is flexibility and no idle-capacity waste, not necessarily lower total spend.