CLF-C02 Billing, Pricing, and Support — Timed 30 Questions

Question 1

A company runs multiple workloads on Amazon EC2 instances. They expect consistent usage for the next three years but want the flexibility to change instance families (for example, from M5 to C5) if performance requirements shift. Which AWS pricing model meets these requirements while providing a significant discount over On-Demand pricing?

Accepted Answer

Compute Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans (Option B) offer a significant discount (up to 66%) over On-Demand pricing in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1- or 3-year term. Unlike Reserved Instances, Savings Plans are flexible across instance families (e.g., M5 to C5), regions, OS, and tenancy, making them ideal for workloads that may need to change instance types over time while still receiving a discounted rate.

Answer

Reserved Instances (Standard)

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EC2 Instance Savings Plans

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Spot Instances

Question 2

A company wants to proactively monitor its AWS spending and receive email notifications when actual or forecasted costs exceed a defined threshold. The company has a monthly budget of $10,000 and wants to be alerted when costs reach 80% of the budget. Which AWS service should the company use to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Budgets. AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets, and configure alerts that trigger when actual or forecasted costs exceed a defined threshold (e.g., 80% of a $10,000 monthly budget). It can send email notifications via Amazon SNS when the threshold is breached, meeting the proactive monitoring requirement.

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AWS Cost Explorer

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Consolidated Billing

Question 3

A company operates five separate AWS accounts for different business units. The finance team wants to aggregate the usage across all accounts to benefit from volume pricing discounts and to receive a single monthly bill. The company does not need to centrally manage permissions or apply service control policies at this time. Which AWS feature should the company use to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Consolidated Billing through AWS Organizations. AWS Organizations provides Consolidated Billing, which allows a company to aggregate usage across multiple AWS accounts into a single monthly bill. This enables the finance team to benefit from volume pricing discounts because AWS combines usage across all accounts, potentially lowering the overall cost tier. The requirement does not include centralized permission management or service control policies, so the basic Consolidated Billing feature of AWS Organizations is sufficient.

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

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AWS Budgets

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AWS Trusted Advisor

Question 4

A company wants to review its AWS spending for the past six months to identify which services and business units are driving costs. The finance team needs to interactively examine cost trends, filter by service and account, and visualize the data without setting up complex reports. Which AWS service or tool should the company use to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cost Explorer. AWS Cost Explorer provides a pre-built, interactive dashboard that allows you to visualize and analyze your AWS cost and usage data over the past 12 months. You can filter by service, linked account (business unit), and time range, and drill down into trends without needing to set up complex reports or queries. This directly meets the requirement for interactive examination of cost trends by service and account.

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AWS Budgets

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Cost and Usage Reports

Question 5

A company is launching a critical production application on AWS. The operations team requires technical support with a response time of less than 1 hour for urgent system issues. They also need access to AWS Trusted Advisor best practice checks for cost optimization and security. Which AWS Support plan meets these requirements at the lowest cost?

Accepted Answer

AWS Business Support. AWS Business Support provides a response time of less than 1 hour for urgent system issues (production system impaired) and includes full access to AWS Trusted Advisor best practice checks for cost optimization and security. This meets all stated requirements at the lowest cost among the plans that offer these features.

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AWS Developer Support

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AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support

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AWS Enterprise Support

Question 6

A company operates separate AWS accounts for its engineering, marketing, and finance departments. The CFO wants to consolidate billing to receive a single monthly invoice and to benefit from volume pricing discounts. The security team also requires a centralized mechanism to prevent users in any department from launching Amazon EC2 instances outside of the us-east-1 and eu-west-1 Regions to meet data residency compliance. Which AWS service or feature should the company use to meet both requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Organizations with Service Control Policies (SCPs). AWS Organizations allows the company to consolidate multiple AWS accounts under a single management account, enabling consolidated billing for a single monthly invoice and volume pricing discounts. Service Control Policies (SCPs) provide centralized governance by restricting the AWS services and Regions that member accounts can use, such as preventing EC2 instances from being launched outside us-east-1 and eu-west-1. This combination directly addresses both the CFO's billing consolidation needs and the security team's data residency compliance requirements.

Answer

AWS Budgets

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AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) cross-account roles

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AWS Cost and Usage Reports

Question 7

A company runs a batch processing workload on Amazon EC2 instances. The finance team has set a monthly budget of $10,000 for this workload. They want to automatically stop the batch processing instances if the accumulated costs for the month exceed $8,000, to prevent overspending. The company needs a native AWS solution that can monitor the costs and take corrective action automatically. Which AWS feature should the company use to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Budgets with budget actions configured to stop EC2 instances. AWS Budgets allows you to set a cost budget of $8,000 and attach a budget action that triggers an AWS Systems Manager (SSM) automation document to stop EC2 instances when actual or forecasted costs exceed the threshold. This provides a native, automated, and serverless solution to enforce cost controls without manual intervention.

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AWS Cost Explorer with a custom cost threshold report

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AWS Trusted Advisor with a cost optimization check

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AWS Organizations with a service control policy (SCP)

Question 8

A company runs a mix of Amazon EC2 instances and AWS Fargate containers. The CFO wants to reduce costs by committing to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $ per hour) for a 1-year term. The company expects to change instance families and regions occasionally and needs the flexibility to apply the savings to both EC2 and ECS Fargate usage. Which AWS pricing option should the company choose?

Accepted Answer

Compute Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans offer the flexibility to cover EC2 instance and Fargate usage across any region, instance family, or compute type, while providing a discounted hourly rate in exchange for a 1-year commitment. This matches the CFO's requirement to reduce costs with a consistent $/hour commitment and the need to change instance families and regions occasionally, as Compute Savings Plans automatically apply to any eligible compute usage without requiring specific reservations.

Answer

EC2 Instance Savings Plans

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Reserved Instances (Convertible)

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On-Demand Instances

Question 9

A company is planning to migrate its on-premises data center to AWS. The Chief Financial Officer wants to compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the current on-premises infrastructure against running equivalent workloads on AWS. The company needs a tool that allows them to input details about their existing servers, storage, and network usage to generate a detailed cost comparison report. Which AWS tool should the company use to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator. The AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator is specifically designed to compare the costs of on-premises infrastructure with AWS by allowing users to input details about their existing servers, storage, and network usage. It generates a detailed report that highlights potential savings from migrating to AWS, directly addressing the CFO's requirement for a cost comparison.

Answer

AWS Pricing Calculator

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AWS Budgets

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AWS Cost Explorer

Question 10

A company uses AWS Organizations with separate accounts for development, testing, and production. The finance team wants to track monthly spending by internal project, but a single project may use resources across multiple accounts. The team has applied a 'Project' tag to all resources. They need a detailed billing report that shows costs grouped by this Project tag, combining data from all accounts. Which AWS feature should they enable to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cost and Usage Reports with cost allocation tags activated. AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) with cost allocation tags activated is the correct choice because it provides the most detailed billing data, including all tags, and can be delivered to an S3 bucket for analysis. This allows the finance team to group costs by the 'Project' tag across all accounts in the AWS Organization, meeting the requirement for a detailed, combined report.

Answer

AWS Consolidated Billing

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AWS Cost Explorer with tag filtering

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AWS Budgets with tag-based alerts

Question 11

A company is planning to migrate its on-premises database and web application to AWS. The solutions architect needs to provide a detailed monthly cost estimate for the AWS resources that will be used, including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS database instances, and Amazon S3 storage. The architect wants to specify instance types, storage sizes, data transfer amounts, and other parameters to get a precise estimate before building the environment. Which AWS tool should the architect use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Pricing Calculator. The AWS Pricing Calculator (formerly Simple Monthly Calculator) allows users to specify exact instance types, storage sizes, data transfer amounts, and other parameters for services like EC2, RDS, and S3 to generate a detailed monthly cost estimate before provisioning resources. This makes it the correct tool for the architect's requirement of a precise, pre-build cost estimate.

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

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AWS Budgets

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AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

Question 12

A company operates 10 AWS accounts, each managed by a separate team. Each account runs its own Amazon EC2 instances and stores data in Amazon S3. The CFO wants to minimize overall costs by taking advantage of volume discount pricing tiers that AWS offers (e.g., lower per-GB storage costs as total S3 usage increases). Which AWS feature should the company use to combine usage from all accounts so they benefit from the highest possible volume discounts?

Accepted Answer

AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. AWS Organizations with consolidated billing allows you to aggregate usage from all member accounts into a single payer account. This combined usage qualifies for volume discount pricing tiers (e.g., lower S3 per-GB storage costs as total usage increases), enabling the company to benefit from the highest possible discounts across all 10 accounts.

Answer

AWS Budgets

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AWS Cost Explorer

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AWS Trusted Advisor

Question 13

A company has been using AWS for six months and wants to predict their expected spending for the next quarter. They have historical cost data and need to use an AWS tool that can analyze past usage patterns and generate a monthly cost forecast. Which AWS tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cost Explorer. AWS Cost Explorer provides a pre-built dashboard with historical cost data and the ability to generate forecasts for future spending based on past usage patterns. It uses machine learning models to analyze your historical usage and produce a monthly cost forecast, making it the correct tool for predicting expected spending for the next quarter.

Answer

AWS Budgets

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Cost and Usage Report

Question 14

A company's finance team wants to receive an email alert when monthly AWS costs exceed 80% of the budgeted amount. Additionally, they want to automatically apply a specific IAM policy to restrict further resource provisioning if costs exceed 100% of the budget. Which AWS feature should the team configure to meet both requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Budgets with budget actions. AWS Budgets allows you to set cost budgets and configure budget actions that trigger when actual or forecasted costs exceed a threshold. In this scenario, you can create a budget with an alert action to send an email when costs reach 80% of the budget, and a separate budget action (using an IAM policy) to automatically restrict resource provisioning when costs hit 100%. This meets both requirements natively without additional services.

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Organizations Service Control Policies (SCPs)

Question 15

A company runs a fleet of production Amazon EC2 instances that operate 24/7 throughout the year. The CFO wants to reduce compute costs by committing to a consistent usage level. The finance team needs a tool that analyzes the company's historical EC2 usage and provides recommendations for the most cost-effective purchase options, including recommendations for both Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, with support for instance size flexibility. Which AWS tool should the finance team use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cost Explorer. AWS Cost Explorer provides a comprehensive analysis of historical EC2 usage and generates tailored recommendations for both Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans, including support for instance size flexibility. This directly meets the CFO's requirement to commit to a consistent usage level while optimizing costs based on actual usage patterns.

Answer

AWS Budgets

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Pricing Calculator

Question 16

A company runs development and test environments on Amazon EC2 instances in separate AWS accounts. The finance team wants to automatically stop all non-production EC2 instances if the monthly development account costs exceed $1,000. The team needs a solution that requires no manual intervention and uses only AWS-native features. Which AWS feature should the team configure to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Budgets with a cost action. AWS Budgets allows you to set a cost budget with a cost action that automatically stops EC2 instances when the threshold is exceeded. This meets the requirement for no manual intervention and uses only AWS-native features, as the cost action can be configured to trigger an IAM policy or a service control policy (SCP) to stop instances in the development account.

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer with a cost allocation tag filter

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AWS Trusted Advisor with the cost optimization check

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Amazon CloudWatch with a billing metric alarm

Question 17

A company is evaluating a migration of its on-premises data center to AWS. The CIO wants a detailed report that compares the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the current on-premises infrastructure versus running the equivalent workloads on AWS. The report should include costs for hardware, software, labor, power, cooling, and facilities. Which AWS tool should the company use to generate this comparison?

Accepted Answer

AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator. The AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator is specifically designed to compare the costs of on-premises infrastructure with AWS, including hardware, software, labor, power, cooling, and facilities. It generates a detailed report that breaks down these cost categories, making it the correct tool for the CIO's requirement.

Answer

AWS Pricing Calculator

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Question 18

A company runs a critical production application on AWS. The internal team is unable to resolve intermittent errors that are impacting the application. The company currently has the AWS Basic Support plan and requires access to AWS technical support with a faster response time for production issues. Due to budget constraints, the company wants the most cost-effective support plan that provides a response time of 1 hour for production system impaired cases. Which AWS Support plan should the company choose?

Accepted Answer

Business Support. The AWS Business Support plan is the most cost-effective option that provides a 1-hour response time for production system impaired cases. The Basic Support plan offers no technical support, while the Developer Support plan only provides a 12-hour response time for impaired systems, which does not meet the requirement. Business Support is the lowest-tier plan that includes 1-hour response for production issues, making it the correct choice.

Answer

Developer Support

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Enterprise Support

Answer

Enterprise On-Ramp

Question 19

A company runs a large-scale e-commerce platform on AWS and is preparing for a major product launch. The company needs the highest level of AWS support, including a response time of 15 minutes or less for critical business-impacting issues. Additionally, the company wants a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM) to provide proactive guidance and a personalized onboarding plan. Which AWS Support plan should the company select?

Accepted Answer

AWS Enterprise Support. AWS Enterprise Support is the only plan that offers a 15-minute response time for critical business-impacting issues and includes a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM) who provides proactive guidance and a personalized onboarding plan. This meets the company's requirements for the highest level of support during a major product launch.

Answer

AWS Developer Support

Answer

AWS Business Support

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AWS Enterprise On-Ramp

Question 20

A company runs separate AWS accounts for development, testing, and production workloads. The finance team wants a single view that shows the total spending across all accounts. Additionally, the team wants to benefit from volume discount pricing by aggregating usage across all accounts. The team also needs to allocate costs to individual projects based on custom tags applied to resources. Which AWS feature should the finance team use to meet all these requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Organizations consolidated billing. AWS Organizations consolidated billing allows you to aggregate usage across all linked accounts, enabling volume discount pricing (e.g., lower S3 storage rates or EC2 Reserved Instance tiers) based on combined usage. It also provides a single payer account that can view total spending across all accounts, and supports cost allocation using custom tags (e.g., Project or CostCenter) via AWS Cost Explorer or AWS Cost and Usage Reports. This directly meets the finance team's requirements for unified spending visibility, volume discounts, and tag-based cost allocation.

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

Answer

AWS Budgets

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor