Complete 400-007 Cisco Materials

Private cloud architecture provides:

On-demand provisioning and decoupling from hardware

Security controls under enterprise ownership

Strong isolation — comparable to an air-gapped model if fully controlled on-premises or in a dedicated hosted environment

While public or hybrid clouds offer flexibility, they cannot guarantee security parity with air-gapped systems unless significant additional controls are implemented. Private cloud supports containerized architectures and modern DevOps pipelines, while keeping the data plane within enterprise boundaries.

This aligns with CCDE’s cloud design principles — balancing modernization goals with strict compliance and cybersecurity mandates.

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Public cloud offers scalability, flexibility, and consumption-based pricing, which directly reduces capital expenditures (CAPEX) and minimizes operational burden (less IT staff needed for infrastructure maintenance).

Public cloud eliminates upfront hardware investments and shifts cost to predictable operational expenses.

Public cloud providers handle hardware maintenance, upgrades, and scalability, making it highly cost-effective for government agencies with fluctuating workloads.

Why other options are incorrect:

A: On-premises increases CAPEX and requires significant IT staff.

B: Private cloud reduces some OpEx but still requires infrastructure management and higher CAPEX.

D: Hybrid cloud increases complexity and operational costs.

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In a full-mesh iBGP design, every router must establish and maintain a BGP session with every other router. As the number of routers increases, the number of BGP sessions and the amount of BGP processing increases exponentially. This leads to high CPU utilization, especially in devices with limited processing capabilities, such as distribution routers.

Themost cost-effectiveandscalablesolution in this scenario is toimplement route reflectors (RRs)on the two core routers. Route reflectors significantly reduce the number of iBGP peerings required, eliminating the full mesh requirement by allowing the distribution routers (RR clients) to establish a single iBGP session with the route reflector. The route reflector handles route advertisement to other RR clients, thereby reducing overhead on the distribution routers.

This solution adheres to CCDE v3.1 design principles for:

Optimizing control plane scalability

Reducing unnecessary CPU load from control protocols

Ensuring a maintainable and scalable enterprise BGP deployment

Why the other options are incorrect:

BandD(Increasing memory): Addresses only hardware capacity without solving the root cause (BGP scaling issue).

C(Using eBGP): Misaligned with enterprise internal network design; eBGP adds complexity in route policy and administrative boundaries.

E(Increasing bandwidth): Bandwidth does not alleviate CPU overhead caused by BGP processing.

Implementing route reflectors aligns with both scalability and cost-efficiency goals as prescribed in the CCDE v3.1 methodology.

UplinkFast is an STP optimization feature designed primarily for access layer switches to reduce convergence time when a direct link failure occurs. When a primary uplink fails, UplinkFast immediately activates a backup uplink port without waiting for traditional STP convergence.

It is most effective on access layer switches where redundant uplinks to distribution switches exist.

On distribution switches, it may also be useful if they have multiple uplinks toward the core.

UplinkFast is not recommended for core switches as these typically don’t have redundant uplinks toward lower-tier devices.

It is not designed to resolve interoperability issues between different STP versions or to adjust hello timers.

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