AWS Solutions Architect Cost Optimization & Performance 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company runs analytical workloads on EC2 that can tolerate interruptions. Which purchasing option provides the deepest discount?
- Reserved Instances
- Spot Instances (Correct answer)
- Dedicated Hosts
- On-Demand Instances
Correct answer: Spot Instances
Spot Instances offer up to 90% discount over On-Demand but can be interrupted when EC2 needs capacity back.
Question 2: Which S3 storage class automatically moves objects between tiers based on access patterns without retrieval fees?
- S3 Standard-IA
- S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Correct answer)
- S3 One Zone-IA
Correct answer: S3 Intelligent-Tiering
S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and moves objects automatically between frequent, infrequent, and archive tiers with no retrieval charges.
Question 3: An application experiences read-heavy traffic on RDS MySQL. What is the most cost-effective way to scale read capacity?
- Upgrade to a larger RDS instance
- Add RDS Read Replicas (Correct answer)
- Enable Multi-AZ deployment
- Migrate to DynamoDB
Correct answer: Add RDS Read Replicas
RDS Read Replicas offload read traffic from the primary instance at lower cost than scaling up the primary.
Question 4: Which AWS tool analyzes your account and provides recommendations to reduce costs based on usage history?
- AWS Config
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Trusted Advisor (Correct answer)
- AWS Budgets
Correct answer: AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your environment and provides recommendations across cost optimization, security, performance, and fault tolerance.
Question 5: A company wants to right-size EC2 instances without manual analysis. Which service provides automated recommendations?
- AWS Compute Optimizer (Correct answer)
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Systems Manager
- EC2 Auto Scaling
Correct answer: AWS Compute Optimizer
AWS Compute Optimizer uses machine learning to analyze CloudWatch metrics and recommends optimal EC2 instance types.
Question 6: What is the most cost-effective storage option for backup data that is rarely accessed and must be retained for 7 years?
- S3 Standard
- S3 Standard-IA
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive (Correct answer)
- EBS Cold HDD (sc1)
Correct answer: S3 Glacier Deep Archive
S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest storage cost at ~$0.00099/GB/month, designed for long-term archival with 12-hour retrieval.
Question 7: A team uses NAT Gateway to allow private subnet instances to access the internet. What can reduce NAT Gateway data processing costs for S3 traffic?
- Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration
- Use a VPC Gateway Endpoint for S3 (Correct answer)
- Switch to a NAT Instance
- Enable S3 Cross-Region Replication
Correct answer: Use a VPC Gateway Endpoint for S3
A VPC Gateway Endpoint for S3 routes traffic privately within AWS, bypassing the NAT Gateway and eliminating its data processing charges.
AWS Solutions Architect Cost Optimization & Performance 2
A company runs analytical workloads on EC2 that can tolerate interruptions.
Which purchasing option provides the deepest discount?