Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Free AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C04) practice — 6 questions on Design Cost-Optimized Architectures, with explanations. No sign-up. Full 12-question mixed test →
An organization runs EC2 instances in private subnets that make heavy, constant calls to S3 for object storage. A NAT Gateway currently handles this traffic, and Cost Explorer shows NAT Gateway data processing charges are the largest line item in the VPC. The traffic never needs to leave AWS's network. Which change eliminates this specific cost with the least operational overhead?
A Gateway VPC Endpoint for S3 has no hourly charge and no per-GB data processing fee. Traffic routes directly to S3 over the AWS network backbone, completely bypassing the NAT Gateway and its data processing charges.
A company runs a fleet of EC2 instances with steady, predictable baseline utilization. Over the next 3 years, the team expects to change instance families as new generations are released, shift some workloads to AWS Fargate, and potentially move some services to a different AWS Region. They want the maximum discount with the maximum commitment flexibility. Which purchasing option BEST fits?
Compute Savings Plans provide up to 66% discount and apply automatically to usage regardless of instance family, size, OS, tenancy, Region, and even extend to Fargate and Lambda usage — the broadest flexibility of any commitment-based discount.
A media company stores millions of objects in S3 whose access patterns are unpredictable and change over time — some objects go unused for months, others suddenly become hot again. All objects must remain retrievable within milliseconds at any time, and the company wants automatic cost optimization without writing or maintaining lifecycle rules. Which storage configuration BEST meets these requirements?
S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and automatically moves objects between Frequent and Infrequent Access tiers with no retrieval fees and no operational effort, while keeping millisecond retrieval at all times — exactly matching unpredictable, changing access patterns.
A genomics research company runs large-scale batch data processing jobs that can be interrupted and resumed at any point without data loss, using EC2 Auto Scaling groups. Jobs can run at any time within a multi-day window. The company wants to minimize compute cost as much as possible for this workload. Which configuration is MOST cost-effective?
Spot Instances offer up to 90% savings over On-Demand and are ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible batch workloads. A mixed instances policy with capacity-optimized allocation minimizes interruption frequency by drawing from the deepest available Spot capacity pools.
A three-tier application has application servers deployed across three Availability Zones for high availability. All three app tiers query a single RDS database instance located in one AZ. Cost Explorer reveals significant inter-AZ data transfer charges from this read-heavy, latency-sensitive traffic. High availability across all three AZs must be preserved. Which change BEST reduces this specific cost?
Placing a read replica in each AZ lets app servers query a replica within the same AZ, eliminating the charged cross-AZ transfer for the read-heavy workload. Only write traffic and replication continue to cross AZs, and RDS does not charge for replication traffic between AZs — replicas preserve HA across all three zones.
A finance team needs hourly, resource-level billing data broken down by cost allocation tags, delivered automatically to an S3 bucket so it can be ingested into a custom BI tool for cross-business-unit chargeback reporting. Which AWS service or feature BEST satisfies this requirement?
The Cost and Usage Report is the most granular billing data AWS offers — line-item, resource-level detail including cost allocation tags, at hourly granularity, delivered automatically to an S3 bucket in CSV or Parquet format, purpose-built for feeding external BI tools.
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