An organization designing a data center wants the ability to quickly create and shut down virtual systems based on demand. Which concept describes…

Ephemeral computing describes a model where virtual systems or computing instances are designed to be transient, existing only for a short period. This concept directly aligns with the requirement to quickly create (provision) and shut down (de-provision) systems based on real-time demand. These short-lived instances are spun up to perform a specific task or handle a temporary load and are then destroyed, optimizing resource utilization and cost. This is a foundational principle for modern cloud-native architectures, including containers and serverless functions.

A. Resource scheduling: This is the process of allocating resources like CPU and memory over time, but it does not inherently describe the transient lifecycle of the entire system.

B. High availability: This concept focuses on designing systems for continuous operation and resilience to failure, which is contrary to the short-lived nature of ephemeral systems.

D. Maintenance mode: This is a specific operational state where a system is taken offline for updates or repairs, not a design paradigm for on-demand system creation and destruction.

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP 800-190

Application Container Security Guide. Section 3.1

"Container Technologies and Orchestrators

" states

"Containers are intended to be ephemeral

with a lifecycle that may be very short... This is in contrast to traditional hosts

which are typically persistent." This official source directly links the concept of being ephemeral to short lifecycles in virtualized environments.

2. Hasan

S.

& Sion

R. (2018). Security for the Ephemeral Cloud: The Case for Rich

Verifiable

and Actionable Provenance. 2018 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW). The paper's introduction defines the ephemeral cloud model: "In this model

computation is broken down into small

independent

short-lived tasks

each executed within its own isolated

transient container or 'nanoprocess'." (p. 102). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SPW.2018.00021

3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Documentation. Instance store. AWS documentation describes instance store volumes as "temporary" or "ephemeral" storage. It states

"The data in an instance store persists only during the life of its associated instance. If an instance reboots (intentionally or unintentionally)

data in the instance store persists. However

data in the instance store is lost" when the instance is stopped

hibernated

or terminated. This illustrates the ephemeral principle applied to a component of a virtual system

reinforcing the transient design concept.