Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

A startup runs a 24/7 web tier on Amazon EC2 with a stable baseline of 8 instances and a nightly analytics batch job that can resume from checkpoints if interrupted. The company wants to minimize monthly compute cost without hurting the always-on web tier. Which two actions should it take? Select two.

A marketing site runs on x86 EC2 instances and uses open-source software with no architecture-specific licensing restriction. What should be evaluated to reduce compute cost?

A media processing pipeline runs batch jobs overnight. The jobs are stateless, can be restarted from checkpoints, and can tolerate interruptions. The team wants to minimize compute cost. Which EC2 approach is the best fit?

Based on the exhibit, your application runs entirely in private subnets and only needs to reach Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Secrets Manager, and CloudWatch Logs. The monthly bill is dominated by NAT Gateway charges. Which change most directly reduces cost while preserving private connectivity to these AWS services?

A solutions architect is designing a cost-optimized data storage solution for a large dataset that is accessed infrequently but must be retained for compliance for 7 years. Which three actions should the architect take to minimize costs? (Choose three.)

A team serves static web assets (JS, CSS, images) from an Amazon S3 origin through CloudFront. Recently, the S3 origin has received a high number of requests for the same files, increasing origin data transfer costs. CloudFront access logs show many cache misses, and each request includes a unique query string used only for tracking (for example, ?utm=...). The application does not require query-string-specific content. What CloudFront change will most directly reduce origin fetches and cost?

You store application logs in an S3 bucket. After 30 days, the logs are rarely accessed, but you must retain them for 1 year for compliance. Which S3 feature is the best way to reduce storage cost while meeting the retention requirement?

A risk simulation workload generates analytics files that are accessed unpredictably. Some files become hot again months later. The team wants automatic storage cost optimisation without retrieval delays. What should be used?

A company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences predictable traffic patterns: low traffic at night and high traffic during business hours. The company wants to optimize costs without compromising availability. Which two actions should be taken? (Choose two.)

An S3 bucket stores user-uploaded images. Access patterns are unpredictable: some objects are never read again, while others are occasionally retrieved months later. The team wants to reduce storage cost without having to manually track access frequency or run periodic analyses. Which S3 storage and lifecycle approach is the best fit?

A small analytics team runs a nightly batch job on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The job starts at 2:00 AM and finishes by 4:00 AM. The instance is idle for the rest of the day. The team wants to reduce EC2 costs and is willing to accept that the instance may be stopped and started. Which action will reduce costs MOST effectively?

A company runs EC2 workloads in one region with somewhat steady overall demand. Over time, the team frequently changes instance families (for performance/optimization) and sometimes changes instance size, but wants predictable cost discounts. Which purchase option provides the best balance of cost savings and flexibility?

A batch analytics job has unpredictable DynamoDB traffic with long idle periods and occasional spikes. Which capacity mode should minimize operational overhead and avoid paying for idle provisioned capacity?

Based on the exhibit, the team serves versioned JavaScript and CSS files from an S3 origin through CloudFront. After a release, the cache hit ratio dropped and origin fetches increased sharply. What change best reduces both CloudFront and S3 costs without changing the application’s public behavior?

A digital agency runs a web application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady and predictable during business hours but drops to near zero overnight and on weekends. The operations team wants to reduce compute costs without impacting availability during peak periods. They cannot modify the application code and must keep the same instance types. What should a solutions architect recommend?

An application runs on EC2 in us-east-1 and frequently reads objects from an S3 bucket that is physically located in us-west-2. The finance team reports unexpectedly high inter-Region data transfer charges because the application retrieves objects for many user requests. A constraint: the bucket in us-west-2 must remain the system of record for compliance, but the application can read from a replica in us-east-1. What should the solutions architect do to minimize network spend while meeting the compliance constraint?

A solutions architect is reviewing an Amazon S3 bucket that stores application assets. The bucket has S3 Versioning enabled and accumulates many noncurrent object versions that are no longer needed. The team wants to reduce storage cost while preserving the ability to recover from accidental deletions of current objects. Which two actions should the architect take? (Choose two.)

A team runs a containerized API on Amazon ECS on Fargate in a single Region. Traffic is steady during business hours but drops to near zero overnight, and the team wants to reduce cost without rewriting the application. The team already uses Application Load Balancer and CloudWatch. Which two actions will reduce cost while keeping the API available? (Choose two.)

A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EC2 instances that takes approximately 4 hours to complete. The job can be interrupted and resumed from a checkpoint. The company wants to minimize the cost of running this job. Which pricing model should they use?

A data analytics team runs an Amazon EMR cluster for 2 hours every weekday morning to process a daily batch. The cluster must be fully available during that window, and the team wants the lowest possible compute cost. The jobs are stateless and can be re-run if a node fails. Which configuration should a solutions architect recommend?

A company has a steady-state workload on Amazon EC2 that runs 24/7 for the next 3 years. They want to achieve the maximum possible discount and are willing to make a upfront payment. Which purchasing option should they choose?

A healthcare company stores 80 TB of medical imaging data in Amazon S3. The data is written once and must be retained for seven years for compliance. New images are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then almost never after that, but auditors occasionally request a specific image with no advance notice and expect it within minutes. The company wants to minimize storage cost while meeting the retrieval requirement. Which two actions should a solutions architect recommend? (Choose two.)

A production internal reporting portal runs continuously on EC2 with predictable usage for the next three years. The team wants a discount while retaining some instance-family flexibility. What should they buy?

CloudWatch metrics show your EC2 instances have average CPU utilization around 10% with stable performance over several weeks. The application does not require additional headroom right now. What is the most effective cost-optimization action?

A company runs a microservices application on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate. The tasks run continuously, and the company has committed to a 3-year term. The team wants to reduce Fargate compute cost while keeping the same task definitions and architecture. Which action should a solutions architect take?

A risk simulation workload in private subnets downloads large amounts of data from S3 through a NAT gateway. NAT data processing charges are high. What should the architect use to reduce cost?

Based on the exhibit, the company runs a self-managed RabbitMQ cluster on EC2 for asynchronous work. The queue only needs durable at-least-once delivery, and the application does not require AMQP-specific features such as exchanges, routing keys, or broker plugins. Which change is the best cost-optimization move?

A small e-commerce company hosts its website on a single EC2 instance in a public subnet. The site receives low but steady traffic. The company wants to reduce cost and is willing to accept a brief interruption if the instance is terminated. The workload can be restarted automatically. Which EC2 purchasing option should the company use to minimize cost?

A team serves static content (JavaScript, CSS, images) from S3 through CloudFront. After a recent release, CloudFront reports a low cache hit ratio and the S3 origin receives a much higher request rate. The site still works, but billing shows higher origin and data transfer costs. Which change is most likely to improve cache hit ratio and reduce origin load?

A marketing site serves versioned JavaScript and CSS files from Amazon S3 through CloudFront. The origin bill is rising because CloudFront keeps fetching the same files too often, and the application never changes a file at the same URL once it is published. Which two changes should you make? Select two.

A retail company runs a stateless web tier on a fleet of On-Demand EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady and predictable throughout the year, and the team has committed to running this exact instance family and Region for at least the next three years. Leadership wants to reduce compute cost as much as possible while keeping the ability to change instance size within the same family. Which purchasing option should the solutions architect recommend?

A financial analytics team runs a nightly Monte Carlo simulation on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. The simulation writes checkpoint files to an Amazon EBS volume, and the job can be safely restarted from the last checkpoint if interrupted. The team needs the lowest possible compute cost and can tolerate interruptions. The job must run every night and finish within a 6-hour window. Which solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

An application serves static images through Amazon CloudFront. The team observes higher-than-expected origin fetches, which increases origin bandwidth costs. Which change most directly improves CloudFront cache reuse to reduce origin requests for the static content?

Your team runs a batch processing workload on EC2 that can tolerate interruptions. If an instance is terminated, the job can restart from checkpoints. To reduce compute costs, what is the most cost-optimized approach?

A marketing site stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A company runs a microservices application on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate. The application experiences variable traffic throughout the day, with peak hours during business hours and minimal traffic at night. The company wants to optimize costs without affecting performance. Which action should they take?

A risk simulation workload generates analytics files that are accessed unpredictably. Some files become hot again months later. The team wants automatic storage cost optimisation without retrieval delays. What should be used? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A team runs an EC2-based API on a single Auto Scaling group (ASG). Over the last month, they observed: - Average CPU utilization is ~15%. - p95 latency is stable and within the performance target. - The attached EBS volumes are gp3, provisioned with high baseline IOPS/throughput “just to be safe,” but CloudWatch shows consistently low utilization of those provisioned IOPS/throughput limits. They want to reduce monthly cost while maintaining current performance. Which action is the best cost-optimized choice?

A media company runs a batch job that processes image thumbnails. The job can be restarted from checkpoints and does not have user-facing SLAs. The batch capacity can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option is the best cost optimization choice?

A financial services firm runs a containerized risk-analysis platform on Amazon EKS. The containers are stateless and the platform runs continuously, but the firm wants a pricing model that reduces compute cost for the steady baseline while still allowing occasional short bursts above the baseline. Which combination of actions best achieves this?

A development team expects their EC2 utilization to average about 40% of capacity across the next year. They want to lower costs but need flexibility to change instance families and sizes as requirements evolve (for example, moving from compute-optimized to memory-optimized instances). Which AWS purchasing commitment best meets the goal of reducing cost while keeping flexibility?

A batch analytics job currently uses two NAT gateways in each of three Availability Zones, but only one private subnet per AZ needs outbound internet access. What should the architect review first? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A company runs a real-time bidding platform on Amazon EC2 instances that must respond within milliseconds. The workload is highly variable, with unpredictable spikes during business hours. The company wants to minimize costs while ensuring the application always has enough capacity to handle sudden traffic surges. Which pricing model should they use?

A company has a steady-state workload running on Amazon EC2 instances that must run 24/7 for the next 3 years. The workload uses a consistent instance family and size across multiple Availability Zones. The company wants to achieve the maximum possible discount and is willing to make an upfront payment. Which purchasing option should a solutions architect recommend?

A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EC2 that takes about 4 hours to complete. The job can be interrupted and resumed from checkpoints. The company wants to minimize compute costs. Which pricing model is MOST cost-effective?

A log archive serves infrequently accessed user documents that must be available immediately when requested. Which S3 storage class is likely the best cost fit?

A company stores user uploads in an S3 bucket. Objects are accessed rarely after upload, but when an object is accessed, it must be retrievable quickly (minutes to a few hours). Objects must be retained for at least 18 months. The team wants to reduce storage cost while meeting these requirements. Which lifecycle configuration best fits these requirements?

A dev sandbox runs for several hours each night and can be interrupted and restarted. Which EC2 purchasing option should minimize cost?

A test environment runs on x86 EC2 instances and uses open-source software with no architecture-specific licensing restriction. What should be evaluated to reduce compute cost?

A retail company runs an e-commerce platform on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic follows a predictable pattern: high during business hours and very low overnight. The operations team wants to reduce EC2 costs without affecting availability during peak hours. The instances currently run continuously and are managed by an Auto Scaling group with a minimum capacity of 4 and a maximum of 20. Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

A company runs an internal analytics application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The database is used heavily from 08:00 to 18:00 on weekdays, but outside those hours it receives almost no queries. The company must keep the database available at all times and cannot tolerate downtime during business hours. The team wants to reduce the cost of running this database. Which approach is the MOST cost-effective while meeting the availability requirement?

A media company runs a nightly batch job that processes video thumbnails. The batch can be interrupted at any time, and workers can resume automatically from checkpoints (a termination does not corrupt progress). The business goal is the lowest possible compute cost, and occasional interruptions are acceptable as long as the job continues automatically. Which approach is most cost-optimized?

A data engineering team runs a nightly ETL job on EC2. The job can be checkpointed every 5 minutes and can be retried from the last checkpoint if the instance terminates. The job runtime varies from 2 to 4 hours, and the team has no need for a specific instance type, as long as it completes before 7:00 AM local time. They currently run the job on On-Demand EC2, leading to high monthly compute cost. Which change best reduces cost while maintaining the business deadline?

A company has a steady, predictable workload that must run continuously (24/7) in a single AWS Region. The team wants the lowest cost option available for this steady usage, but also expects they may choose different EC2 instance families in the future (without re-buying compute discounts). Which AWS purchase option best meets these goals?

A company hosts a public-facing static website and a set of downloadable software packages. Users are distributed globally, and the packages are large, so the company wants to reduce data transfer costs and improve download latency. The content changes only when a new release is published, a few times per month. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

A solutions architect is optimizing the cost of a serverless data-processing pipeline. The pipeline uses AWS Lambda functions that process messages from an Amazon SQS queue and write results to Amazon DynamoDB. The team observes that Lambda invocations spike unpredictably, DynamoDB is provisioned with high capacity that is often idle, and the SQS queue occasionally accumulates a large backlog. Which two changes will most directly reduce cost while preserving the pipeline's ability to handle bursts? (Choose two.)

Based on the exhibit, the company wants to lower CloudWatch and EC2 monitoring costs. Auditors require logs to be retained for 90 days, but operations only uses detailed per-instance metrics during rare troubleshooting events. Which change best reduces recurring cost while preserving the required visibility?

A company runs a containerized API on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate. Traffic is highly variable: it peaks during business hours and drops to near zero overnight. The team wants to pay only for what they use while keeping the API responsive during peaks. Which approach BEST optimizes cost for this workload?

A company runs a stateless web application on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances are in an Auto Scaling group that scales between 4 and 40 instances, and utilization is highly variable. The company wants to reduce compute cost while keeping the ability to change instance families and Regions over the next three years. Which purchasing strategy should the company use?

A test environment stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost?

A media company runs a 24/7 ingestion API on EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer and a nightly transcoding job that can resume from checkpoints. The API fleet runs at roughly 65 percent CPU all day, while the batch workers sit idle most of the time. The company wants to cut compute cost without risking the API. Which two changes should they make? Select two.

A company runs a containerized order-processing service on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. The service scales out during business hours and scales down to a small baseline overnight. Usage is expected to remain stable for the next two years, and the team wants to reduce Fargate cost without managing any servers. Which action should the solutions architect take?

A marketing site has EC2 instances that are oversized based on CPU, memory, and network utilisation. Which AWS service should identify rightsizing recommendations?

A internal reporting portal has old unattached EBS volumes and many stale snapshots. Which two actions reduce storage cost without affecting running instances? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Based on the exhibit, the company stores application logs in Amazon S3 for 400 days. The logs are read heavily for the first 30 days, occasionally for the next 90 days, and very rarely after that. Retrieval after day 120 can take up to several hours, but the data must remain available until day 400. Which lifecycle policy is the most cost-effective fit?

A financial services company stores monthly regulatory reports in an Amazon S3 bucket. The reports are accessed frequently for the first 60 days after creation for audits and internal review. After that period, they are almost never accessed but must be retained for seven years and retrieved within 12 hours if a regulator requests them. The compliance team requires that the objects remain in a single bucket and that retrieval costs be minimized. Which storage solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

A test environment has EC2 instances that are oversized based on CPU, memory, and network utilisation. Which AWS service should identify rightsizing recommendations?

A batch analytics job runs for several hours each night and can be interrupted and restarted. Which EC2 purchasing option should minimize cost? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A web service runs continuously on AWS 24/7. The team expects steady compute usage for the next 12–24 months, but may change instance families/sizes as performance tuning continues. Which purchase option best reduces cost while keeping flexibility to change instance types?

A company runs a stateless web tier on a fleet of On-Demand EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady and predictable, and the team has committed to running this tier for the next three years with no planned architectural changes. Management wants the lowest possible compute cost while preserving the ability to change instance families during the term if a better price-performance option emerges. Which purchasing approach best meets these requirements?

A company stores 500 TB of archival data in Amazon S3. The data is accessed only once a year for compliance audits. The company wants the most cost-effective storage solution that still allows retrieval within 48 hours. Which S3 storage class should they use?

A company stores 500 TB of data in Amazon S3 Standard. The data is accessed frequently for the first 30 days after creation, then access drops to almost zero, but the data must be retained for 10 years for compliance. The company wants to minimize storage costs. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

A company runs a steady-state web application on a fixed number of Amazon EC2 instances that have been running continuously for over a year. The workload is predictable and will remain in production for at least three more years. Management wants to reduce compute cost without changing the architecture. Which purchasing option should a solutions architect recommend?

A SaaS company uses an S3 bucket for database backups created daily. Backups are rarely restored; the company’s documented RTO is 24 hours, and the compliance policy requires backups be kept for 90 days. The team currently stores all backups in S3 Standard, which is costly. Which single lifecycle policy change is most cost-optimized while still meeting the 24-hour RTO and 90-day retention?

A team stores application logs in Amazon S3. They need access to the logs only occasionally for troubleshooting (infrequent access), and they want to reduce storage cost automatically over time without manually moving objects. What should they implement?

A internal reporting portal serves infrequently accessed user documents that must be available immediately when requested. Which S3 storage class is likely the best cost fit?

Your global users access static images stored in S3. Origin bandwidth costs are higher than expected because CloudFront is not caching effectively. What change most directly reduces origin fetches (and typically lowers data transfer costs) without changing application logic?

A team runs an EC2-based service and ships logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. They enabled long log retention and turned on detailed monitoring to improve troubleshooting. Their monthly CloudWatch costs have grown unexpectedly. Compliance requires that the logs remain available in CloudWatch Logs (for querying and audits) for 90 days, and alerts/alarms do not require detailed EC2 monitoring. What change best reduces cost while meeting requirements?

A dev sandbox has unpredictable DynamoDB traffic with long idle periods and occasional spikes. Which capacity mode should minimize operational overhead and avoid paying for idle provisioned capacity? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A marketing site runs on x86 EC2 instances and uses open-source software with no architecture-specific licensing restriction. What should be evaluated to reduce compute cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A company runs a containerized microservices application on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. The application experiences highly variable traffic, with long periods of low utilization and occasional sharp spikes. The company wants to minimize cost while ensuring the application can scale quickly during spikes. The tasks are stateless and can be restarted. Which combination of actions will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Based on the exhibit, the team wants to minimize compute cost for a workload with a steady 24/7 baseline and a separate nightly batch job that can be interrupted and resumed from checkpoints. They also expect to change EC2 instance families during the year as performance needs evolve. Which approach is the best fit?

A media processing workflow generates analytics files that are accessed unpredictably. Some files become hot again months later. The team wants automatic storage cost optimisation without retrieval delays. What should be used?

A batch analytics job has unpredictable DynamoDB traffic with long idle periods and occasional spikes. Which capacity mode should minimize operational overhead and avoid paying for idle provisioned capacity? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A test environment stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EC2 instances that runs for 4 hours every night. The job can be interrupted and restarted from a checkpoint. The company wants to minimize compute costs for this job. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

A risk simulation workload uses CloudWatch Logs heavily. Retaining all debug logs forever is increasing costs. What should be configured?

A company runs a web application on AWS and wants to reduce costs. The application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The company observes that the EC2 instances are underutilized during off-peak hours. They want to optimize costs without affecting performance during peak hours. Which two actions should they take? (Choose two.)

A team stores application logs in an S3 bucket. They keep logs for 18 months for compliance. Access patterns: logs are heavily accessed during the first 30 days, rarely accessed between days 31 and 180, and almost never accessed after day 180. They currently store everything in S3 Standard and want to reduce storage cost without violating the 18-month retention requirement. What should they implement?

A company is migrating its on-premises workloads to AWS and wants to optimize costs. Which three strategies should the company implement to achieve a cost-optimized architecture? (Choose three.)

A media processing workflow uses CloudWatch Logs heavily. Retaining all debug logs forever is increasing costs. What should be configured?

A company runs an application on EC2 instances in private subnets. The instances must access Amazon S3, and the team currently routes all outbound traffic to the internet through a NAT Gateway. Monthly NAT Gateway charges increased significantly, even though the application only needs to call S3 (not access other public internet services). Which change will most directly reduce NAT Gateway charges while keeping S3 access working?

A company stores millions of small, rarely accessed backup objects in Amazon S3 Standard. The objects must remain immediately retrievable within milliseconds and be retained for at least five years, but the company wants to reduce storage cost. Which action should the company take?

A SaaS provider runs a multi-tenant application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The database is 2 TB and experiences steady read-heavy traffic during business hours. The provider wants to offload read traffic to reduce load on the primary instance and lower cost compared to scaling up the primary. The application can tolerate slightly stale reads for reporting queries. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

A marketing site stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost?

A marketing team runs a report-generation process that must execute once per day at 02:00 UTC. It usually completes in 10315 minutes, but sometimes takes up to 45 minutes due to varying data volumes. They currently run the workload on an EC2 instance that is always on, which wastes money during off-hours. The team wants to minimize operational overhead and pay mainly for actual execution time. What is the best architecture choice?

You need to run batch jobs on EC2. The jobs can tolerate interruptions: if an instance is terminated, the job can restart from checkpoints. To reduce compute cost as much as possible, what is the best choice?

A company stores several petabytes of archived regulatory records in Amazon S3. The records must be retained for seven years and are almost never accessed, but if an auditor requests a record, it must be retrievable within 12 hours. The company wants the lowest storage cost that still meets the retrieval requirement. Which S3 storage class should the solutions architect choose?

A test environment runs on x86 EC2 instances and uses open-source software with no architecture-specific licensing restriction. What should be evaluated to reduce compute cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

An S3 bucket stores application logs. After 30 days, the team rarely accesses the logs, but compliance requires keeping them for 18 months. Which setup most directly reduces storage cost while maintaining compliance?

A company is running a production web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The workload has predictable traffic spikes during business hours and low traffic at night. The current architecture uses On-Demand EC2 instances, leading to high costs. The company wants to reduce costs without sacrificing availability or performance. Which three of the following strategies would help achieve this goal? (Choose three.)

A media processing workflow in private subnets downloads large amounts of data from S3 through a NAT gateway. NAT data processing charges are high. What should the architect use to reduce cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A dev sandbox has unpredictable DynamoDB traffic with long idle periods and occasional spikes. Which capacity mode should minimize operational overhead and avoid paying for idle provisioned capacity?

A production internal reporting portal runs continuously on EC2 with predictable usage for the next three years. The team wants a discount while retaining some instance-family flexibility. What should they buy? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A latency-sensitive API is implemented with AWS Lambda. The team enabled provisioned concurrency to avoid cold starts, setting provisioned concurrency to 50 because marketing campaigns occasionally cause spikes. However, during most weekdays the API receives little traffic (near zero), and the team is seeing high monthly Lambda costs from idle provisioned capacity. What is the best cost-optimized strategy that still meets the requirement of fast initial responses during traffic spikes?

A product catalog system uses a relational database for orders and a simple key-value profile store for shopping carts. Traffic is unpredictable, and the company wants to avoid paying for large idle database instances. Which two choices are best? Select two.

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones. The application uses an Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group. The company wants to reduce cost while maintaining high availability. The workload is steady and predictable, and the instances run continuously. Which two actions will reduce cost? (Choose two.)

A static web application uses CloudFront with an S3 origin for assets (JavaScript, CSS, images). After deploying a new frontend build, the CloudFront cache hit ratio dropped significantly because the S3 origin receives many repeated requests for the same assets. The team notices that requests now include the Authorization header in asset requests. Which change is most likely to restore cache efficiency and reduce origin request costs?

A dev sandbox has unpredictable DynamoDB traffic with long idle periods and occasional spikes. Which capacity mode should minimize operational overhead and avoid paying for idle provisioned capacity? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A company serves versioned images from S3 through CloudFront. After a release, CloudFront origin fetches increased sharply and the monthly CloudFront bill went up. They reviewed CloudFront logs and found that many requests include a query string parameter `reqId` that is unique per request (for example, `...?v=2026-04-01&reqId=...`). The team currently forwards all query strings to the cache key. What change is most likely to reduce origin fetches and cost while keeping the versioned images correct?

A media processing workflow uses CloudWatch Logs heavily. Retaining all debug logs forever is increasing costs. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A risk simulation workload uses CloudWatch Logs heavily. Retaining all debug logs forever is increasing costs. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A log archive has old unattached EBS volumes and many stale snapshots. Which two actions reduce storage cost without affecting running instances?

A company hosts an application on EC2 instances in private subnets. The instances must (1) read objects from Amazon S3 and (2) retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. The team currently sends all outbound traffic through a NAT gateway to reach both services. They want to reduce monthly cost while keeping traffic private (no internet egress) and without changing application logic. Which change is the most cost-effective?

A company keeps daily database backups in an S3 bucket. They may restore from backups during the first 30 days if there is an issue. After 30 days, backups are rarely restored, but must be retained for 2 years. Which lifecycle strategy most cost-effectively meets these requirements?

An application runs on an EC2 Auto Scaling group. Over the last month, CPU utilization averaged 8% with no sustained memory pressure, and response times are stable. The team wants to lower monthly cost without changing the application. What is the most appropriate next step for cost optimization?

A production log archive runs continuously on EC2 with predictable usage for the next three years. The team wants a discount while retaining some instance-family flexibility. What should they buy? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A media processing workflow generates analytics files that are accessed unpredictably. Some files become hot again months later. The team wants automatic storage cost optimisation without retrieval delays. What should be used? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A company stores 500 TB of archival data in Amazon S3. The data is accessed only for compliance audits, which occur once every two years. Retrieval times of up to 12 hours are acceptable. The company wants the lowest storage cost. Which S3 storage class should be used?

A media company runs a 24/7 recommendation engine on EC2 in one AWS Region. The workload is interruption-intolerant, and the team expects steady usage but may change instance families and sizes during planned optimizations. Compared to the current On-Demand setup, they want the lowest cost while avoiding the rigidity of locking to a specific instance type. What should the solutions architect recommend?

A website serves versioned JavaScript and CSS files through CloudFront, but origin fetches are still high and the CloudFront bill increased. Developers confirm that URLs include a version in the filename (for example, app.1.4.2.js). What CloudFront behavior/configuration is most likely to reduce origin fetches and associated costs?

A company runs EC2 workloads including web servers (m5.large), batch jobs (c5.xlarge), and a data processing service that will migrate from r5 to r6i instances within 6 months. The company wants to commit to 1 year to reduce costs but needs flexibility for the planned instance family migration. Which purchasing option provides the GREATEST savings while accommodating the change?

A dev sandbox currently uses two NAT gateways in each of three Availability Zones, but only one private subnet per AZ needs outbound internet access. What should the architect review first?

A service runs in private subnets. It must call AWS APIs (for example, S3 and Secrets Manager). The team currently sends all outbound traffic through a NAT Gateway, and NAT charges have become a major cost driver. The workload must not traverse the public internet. What change most directly reduces NAT Gateway cost while maintaining private connectivity to those AWS services?

A log archive serves infrequently accessed user documents that must be available immediately when requested. Which S3 storage class is likely the best cost fit? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A startup has three sandbox accounts and one production account. The CTO wants lower cost and operational overhead while keeping central purchasing and spend visibility. Which two actions are best? Select two.

A internal reporting portal serves infrequently accessed user documents that must be available immediately when requested. Which S3 storage class is likely the best cost fit? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A company runs a stateless web application on a fleet of six On-Demand EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances are spread across three Availability Zones in a single AWS Region and run 24/7. The workload is steady and predictable, and the company wants to reduce compute costs without changing the application architecture or reducing availability. The company is willing to commit to a one-year term. Which two actions will reduce the EC2 compute cost for this workload? (Choose two.)

An Auto Scaling group for a background worker runs EC2 instances continuously. Over the last 30 days, CloudWatch shows sustained CPU utilization around 6% with no memory pressure, and queue processing latency meets all SLAs. The team wants to lower monthly cost with minimal risk. What is the best next action?

A test environment has EC2 instances that are oversized based on CPU, memory, and network utilisation. Which AWS service should identify rightsizing recommendations? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

An internal team runs a report-generation job once per day. It typically finishes in a few minutes, and even on its slowest days it still completes in under 15 minutes. The team wants to reduce operational overhead and pay primarily for actual runtime instead of keeping servers running 24/7. Which AWS approach best matches these goals?

A internal reporting portal serves infrequently accessed user documents that must be available immediately when requested. Which S3 storage class is likely the best cost fit? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A dev sandbox currently uses two NAT gateways in each of three Availability Zones, but only one private subnet per AZ needs outbound internet access. What should the architect review first? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A startup runs two EC2-based workloads in the same AWS Region. Its customer-facing API is always on, and its nightly video transcoding fleet can restart jobs from checkpoints if an instance is interrupted. The finance team wants the lowest monthly compute cost without changing the application design. Which two actions should the team take? Select two.

A marketing site runs on x86 EC2 instances and uses open-source software with no architecture-specific licensing restriction. What should be evaluated to reduce compute cost? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

An EC2 workload runs in one region on a single instance type. For the last month, CloudWatch metrics show average CPU utilization of 12% and no sustained memory pressure. The team wants to reduce cost while maintaining the current performance level. What is the best first step?

A company runs an Amazon DynamoDB table that stores session data for a consumer application. The table is 800 GB and receives highly variable read and write traffic with sharp, unpredictable peaks during marketing campaigns. The team currently provisions 20,000 read capacity units and 10,000 write capacity units and frequently sees throttling during peaks and wasted capacity between them. A solutions architect must reduce cost and eliminate throttling with the least operational effort. Which solution meets these requirements?

A startup expects steady compute usage around the clock for the next year. They want to reduce costs compared to On-Demand pricing, without tightly planning specific instance types. Which option best matches their goal?

A batch analytics job has unpredictable DynamoDB traffic with long idle periods and occasional spikes. Which capacity mode should minimize operational overhead and avoid paying for idle provisioned capacity? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A test environment stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A log archive has old unattached EBS volumes and many stale snapshots. Which two actions reduce storage cost without affecting running instances? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A media company uploads raw video thumbnails to an S3 bucket every hour. The application needs these thumbnails for active browsing for the first 7 days. After day 7, access becomes rare. Requirements: - Objects must remain available in S3 for at least 180 days total. - After day 7, the team can tolerate retrieval latency in the range of minutes to hours. - They want to minimize storage cost while keeping the ability to read objects (no application changes required). Which storage strategy is the most cost-optimized fit?

Multiple teams share one AWS Organization. Finance wants chargeback by project, alerts before overspend, and monthly views by account without manually opening each account. Which three actions best fit? Select three.

A retailer runs a reporting-heavy relational app on Amazon RDS MySQL. Peak dashboard traffic lasts only three hours each day, but the database is sized for the peak all day. The business wants lower cost without rewriting the application. Which three actions are best? Select three.

A team stores application logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs. They enabled long retention and detailed dashboards, resulting in higher-than-expected monthly spend. Compliance requires retaining logs for 90 days, but operations only needs aggregated views. Which change most directly reduces CloudWatch Logs cost while meeting the requirement?

A company runs a media transcoding service on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The workload is steady at 60% CPU utilization from 08:00 to 18:00 local time on weekdays and drops to under 5% overnight and on weekends. A solutions architect must reduce compute costs without changing the application code or degrading transcoding throughput during peak hours. (Choose two.)

A log archive has old unattached EBS volumes and many stale snapshots. Which two actions reduce storage cost without affecting running instances? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A production log archive runs continuously on EC2 with predictable usage for the next three years. The team wants a discount while retaining some instance-family flexibility. What should they buy?

A media company runs a fleet of EC2 instances using Auto Scaling across multiple instance families (for example, m-series and c-series) in a single region. The business wants to commit to steady usage for one year to reduce cost, but the application team must retain flexibility to switch instance families and scale up/down as demand changes. They need the cost-reduction approach that best matches this flexibility. Which option is the best fit?

A solutions architect is reviewing a workload that runs on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in a single AWS Region. The application serves a global user base, and the team wants to reduce both data transfer costs and latency for users in Europe and Asia. The application is stateless and stores assets in Amazon S3. The team is also evaluating how to pay for the compute layer over the next three years, as usage is expected to be steady. Which two actions will reduce cost in this scenario? (Choose two.)

A company runs a containerized web application on Amazon ECS with a steady baseline of 10 tasks that must run continuously. During business hours, traffic spikes require up to 30 additional tasks that can be terminated at any time. The company wants to minimize costs while ensuring the baseline tasks are always available. Which combination of purchasing options should be used for the ECS tasks?

A company runs a REST API on AWS Lambda behind Amazon API Gateway. The API is used by internal clients during a two-hour batch window each night and is completely idle the rest of the day. The team is concerned about the cost of API Gateway and wants to minimize it without changing the API contract for clients. Which change should a solutions architect recommend?

A company stores nightly database backup files in an Amazon S3 bucket. Each backup is about 50 GB, and the files are written once and never modified. Regulatory policy requires that every backup be retained for exactly seven years, after which it may be deleted. Retrieval of a backup for an audit is extremely rare and the company can tolerate a retrieval time of up to 12 hours. Which S3 storage class is the MOST cost-effective choice for these backups?

A video processing pipeline runs batch jobs that are safe to interrupt and restart. The jobs checkpoint progress to durable storage every few minutes, and the team can automatically resubmit from the last checkpoint. They want to minimize compute cost while accepting that capacity can be interrupted. Which launch configuration for the processing workers is the best cost-optimized choice?

A batch analytics job currently uses two NAT gateways in each of three Availability Zones, but only one private subnet per AZ needs outbound internet access. What should the architect review first?

A SaaS company runs a production API on an EC2 Auto Scaling group with steady demand 24/7. The team uses multiple instance types over time (they switch types during tuning) but the overall compute hours are stable. They want a cost reduction without committing to a specific instance type or size. Which AWS pricing option best meets the requirement?

A batch analytics job runs for several hours each night and can be interrupted and restarted. Which EC2 purchasing option should minimize cost?

A batch analytics job runs for several hours each night and can be interrupted and restarted. Which EC2 purchasing option should minimize cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A media processing pipeline runs batch jobs on EC2. The jobs can tolerate interruptions because they checkpoint progress to durable storage and can restart. The total workload is variable week-to-week, and there is no need to guarantee capacity at specific times. To reduce compute cost while maintaining correctness, what EC2 purchase option and approach is the best fit?

A media processing workflow in private subnets downloads large amounts of data from S3 through a NAT gateway. NAT data processing charges are high. What should the architect use to reduce cost?

A fleet of test servers is rebuilt every week from AMIs. EBS volumes are often left behind after termination, and the team creates daily snapshots of every volume even when nothing changes. Which three actions most reduce storage cost while preserving recovery options? Select three.

A batch analytics job currently uses two NAT gateways in each of three Availability Zones, but only one private subnet per AZ needs outbound internet access. What should the architect review first? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A static marketing site is served through CloudFront from an S3 origin. After a product update, customers report a drop in CloudFront cache hit ratio and the CloudFront bill increases because the origin is receiving many more requests for the same JS/CSS assets. Asset URLs are versioned, but requests now include an Authorization header even though these assets are public. Which CloudFront change most directly improves the cache hit ratio for these assets?

A financial services company stores regulatory documents in an Amazon S3 bucket. The documents are accessed frequently for the first 90 days, then almost never, but must remain immediately retrievable for seven years. Retrieval latency of a few minutes is unacceptable, and the company wants the lowest storage cost that still meets the access requirement. Which S3 storage class should a solutions architect recommend?

A workload runs in private subnets. It must access AWS services such as Amazon S3, but the company wants to avoid using a NAT Gateway to reduce outbound networking costs. What is the best solution?

A small e-commerce company hosts its product catalog on a single Amazon EC2 instance in a public subnet. Traffic is steady and predictable, and the instance runs 24/7. The company wants to reduce its monthly compute bill without changing the architecture or risking availability. Which action should a solutions architect recommend?

A company runs an internal analytics application in a single AWS Region. A solutions architect is reviewing the Amazon RDS for MySQL deployment and finds a Multi-AZ DB instance with a standby in another Availability Zone, used only for failover. The application performs many read-heavy queries against the primary instance, driving up instance size and cost. The team wants to offload read traffic and reduce the primary instance size. Which change should the architect recommend?

A company stores millions of objects in Amazon S3. Access patterns are completely unpredictable — some objects are frequently accessed, others rarely. Objects range from 4 KB to 50 MB. The company wants to minimize storage costs automatically without managing lifecycle rules. Which storage class should a solutions architect recommend?

A risk simulation workload in private subnets downloads large amounts of data from S3 through a NAT gateway. NAT data processing charges are high. What should the architect use to reduce cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A media company stores 50 TB of finalized video masters in Amazon S3 that must be retained for seven years for regulatory compliance. The files are accessed only during occasional legal audits, roughly once every two years, and retrieval latency of several hours is acceptable. The company wants the LOWEST possible storage cost while preserving durability. Which storage class should they choose?