Consumption-Based Model
Paying only for the resources you actually use, with no upfront cost.
The consumption-based model means you pay only for the cloud resources you actually use — compute seconds, storage gigabytes, network egress — rather than buying fixed capacity upfront. In Azure this is pay-as-you-go billing, where costs rise and fall with real demand and you stop paying once a resource is deleted, avoiding over-provisioned idle hardware. The key exam nuance is CapEx versus OpEx: on-premises infrastructure is a capital expense (large upfront investment, depreciated over time), while the consumption model shifts spend to an operational expense recorded in the period it occurs.
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