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SOA-C02 · domain

Cost and Performance Optimization

This domain covers cost control and performance tuning on AWS: right-sizing EC2, S3 storage class selection, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, EBS volume types, CloudFront caching, and reducing data transfer charges. Questions present a scenario with a cost or latency problem and ask you to choose the most effective, operationally sound configuration or action.

141 questions52 easy53 medium36 hard

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What this domain covers

What to know about Cost and Performance Optimization

You must be able to map a workload's access pattern, durability, and interruption tolerance to the right EC2 purchasing model, S3 storage class, and network path. The single most important thing: match the pricing or storage option to the actual usage pattern rather than defaulting to the most familiar service.

Selecting S3 Lifecycle policies and storage classes such as Standard-IA, Glacier, and Intelligent-Tiering

Choosing EC2 purchasing options: On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot for fault-tolerant work

Using CloudWatch metrics, Compute Optimizer, and Trusted Advisor to identify over-provisioned resources

Reducing data transfer costs with VPC endpoints, CloudFront caching, and same-Region/ AZ-aware architecture

Watch out for

Common Cost and Performance Optimization exam traps

  • ▸Picking Spot Instances for time-sensitive or interruption-intolerant workloads; Spot can be reclaimed and is wrong when the job must finish.
  • ▸Assuming S3 Intelligent-Tiering is free or always cheapest; it adds a monitoring and automation charge per object, which hurts small-object workloads.
  • ▸Forgetting that NAT Gateway and cross-AZ traffic incur data processing charges; placing chatty instances in different AZs silently raises cost.

Question index

All Cost and Performance Optimization questions (141)

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1

An administrator runs the above CloudWatch command to analyze CPU utilization for an EC2 instance. The instance is currently running with a t3.large instance type. The company wants to optimize costs. Based on the data, which action should the administrator take?

Medium
2

A company uses a centralized logging solution with Amazon OpenSearch Service. The log volume has grown significantly, increasing costs. The logs are retained for 90 days for compliance, but only the last 30 days are frequently accessed. Which combination of actions would reduce costs without compromising compliance?

Hard
3

An application runs on c5.xlarge EC2 instances 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in us-east-1. The workload is stable and will not change instance type for at least 12 months. The team wants to reduce compute costs by 30 to 40 percent compared to On-Demand pricing. Which purchasing option achieves this with the lowest financial risk?

Easy
4

A company runs a fleet of EC2 instances in a production environment. The instances are part of an Auto Scaling group that uses a launch template with a m5.large instance type. The company's SysOps administrator notices that the instances are often over-provisioned, with average CPU utilization below 20% for the past month. The administrator wants to reduce costs without affecting application performance. The application is stateless and can handle temporary performance degradation. Which action should the administrator take?

Medium
5

A SysOps administrator notices that the monthly bill for Amazon S3 has increased significantly. The company uses S3 for storing application logs and user uploads. The logs are accessed rarely but must be retained for 3 years. User uploads are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely after. Which S3 lifecycle policy will optimize storage costs?

Medium
6

A company is using AWS Lambda functions to process events from Amazon S3. The functions are invoked several thousand times per minute. The SysOps administrator notices that the functions are taking longer to execute during peak times. Which action should the administrator take to improve performance?

Easy
7

A company has a web application running on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences latency spikes during peak hours. Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that CPU and memory are not fully utilized. The SysOps administrator suspects the bottleneck is the database. The database is an RDS for MySQL instance. Which action should the administrator take to improve performance without over-provisioning?

Medium
8

A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EC2 instances that runs for 3 hours each night. The job can be interrupted and can resume from the last checkpoint without data loss. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this workload. Which Amazon EC2 purchasing option should be used?

Easy
9

A company wants to receive alerts when their monthly AWS spending exceeds $1,000. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
10

A company runs a critical application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application requires very low latency and high availability. The SysOps administrator notices that the application experiences increased latency during traffic spikes even though the Auto Scaling group is scaling out. Which solution would MOST effectively reduce latency?

Hard
11

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancing. They notice that costs are higher than expected. What is the MOST cost-effective way to optimize costs while maintaining high availability?

Medium
12

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances that run 24/7. The application has a predictable and steady load. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs while ensuring the required capacity is always available. Which purchasing option should be used?

Easy
13

A company stores application logs in Amazon S3. The logs are rarely accessed after the first 30 days, but must be retained for 7 years for compliance. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize storage costs while ensuring logs are available for retrieval within 12 hours if needed. Which S3 lifecycle configuration is the most cost-effective?

Medium
14

A SysOps administrator reviews the CloudWatch metric data for an EC2 instance. The instance runs a web application that experiences high traffic between 12:00 and 14:00 UTC daily. The administrator wants to optimize costs while maintaining performance. What should the administrator do?

Hard
15

A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EMR every night. The job runs for 6 hours and requires a cluster of 20 m5.xlarge instances. The company wants to reduce costs while ensuring the job completes on time. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

Medium
16

A company runs a web application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances that operate 24/7 with a steady and predictable load. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs while ensuring the required capacity is always available. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?

Easy
17

A company wants to receive an alert when its AWS spending exceeds $5,000 in a month. The SysOps administrator needs to set up a proactive alert that monitors actual costs. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
18

A SysOps administrator wants to receive alerts when the estimated charges for an AWS account exceed a certain threshold. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
19

A company uses Amazon CloudWatch Logs to store application logs from EC2 instances. The log volume is 100 GB per day, and logs are retained for 1 year. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs while maintaining compliance. Which solution is MOST effective?

Hard
20

A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EC2 that runs for 2 hours every night. The job can tolerate interruptions and can resume from the last checkpoint. The SysOps administrator needs to minimize compute costs. Which EC2 purchasing option should be used?

Medium
21

A company wants to reduce costs for their Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. Which TWO actions would help achieve this?

Easy
22

A company runs a web application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application has predictable traffic patterns with high traffic during business hours and low traffic at night. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce compute costs while ensuring the application remains responsive during peak hours. The administrator has already implemented Auto Scaling based on CPU utilization. Which additional action should the administrator take to optimize costs?

Medium
23

A company is running a high-performance computing (HPC) workload on EC2. The workload is time-sensitive and runs for 2 hours every night. The company wants to minimize costs. Which THREE options should they consider? (Choose THREE.)

Medium
24

A company is using Amazon S3 to host a static website. The website receives millions of requests per month from users around the world. The company wants to reduce latency and S3 data transfer costs. Which solution should the company implement?

Easy
25

A company stores video files in Amazon S3. The files are accessed frequently for the first week, then weekly for the next month, and then rarely after that. The files must be retained for 5 years and any access must be served within minutes. The SysOps administrator needs to minimize storage costs while meeting these requirements. Which lifecycle policy configuration is the most cost-effective?

Hard
26

A company uses an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode for a variable workload. The SysOps administrator notices high costs and wants to reduce them without affecting application performance. Which action should the administrator take?

Hard
27

Drag and drop the steps to configure a VPC peering connection between two VPCs into the correct order.

Medium
28

A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. They want to optimize costs while maintaining high availability. Which TWO actions should the SysOps administrator take?

Medium
29

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances that have variable traffic patterns. The application experiences steady baseline traffic with occasional spikes. The SysOps administrator wants to optimize costs while ensuring performance during spikes. Which pricing model should be used for the baseline capacity and for the burst capacity?

Easy
30

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application experiences variable traffic with occasional spikes. The SysOps administrator wants to optimize costs while ensuring that the application can handle spikes without performance degradation. The current setup uses a fixed number of instances. Which action should the administrator take?

Medium
31

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application experiences steady traffic during business hours and very low traffic overnight. The SysOps administrator wants to optimize costs by using a mix of On-Demand and Spot Instances. The administrator also requires that the total capacity never falls below the baseline level needed during business hours, even if Spot Instances are reclaimed. Which combination of Auto Scaling features should be used?

Medium
32

A company runs a large number of EC2 instances across multiple accounts and regions. The finance team needs to track costs per project and department. Each EC2 instance must be tagged with a ProjectID and Department tag. A SysOps administrator needs to ensure that all newly launched EC2 instances are tagged automatically before they can be used, and that existing untagged instances are retroactively tagged. The tags must be propagated to cost reports in AWS Cost Explorer. Which combination of steps will achieve this with the least operational overhead?

Hard
33

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. Which AWS service should be used to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances based on demand, optimizing cost and performance?

Easy
34

A company hosts a static website on Amazon S3 with public read access. The website content is updated weekly. The SysOps administrator notices that the monthly S3 costs are higher than expected. The website receives about 10,000 requests per day, and each object is small (average 50 KB). The administrator wants to reduce costs without affecting the user experience. The website does not require HTTPS or custom domain at this time. Which action should the administrator take?

Easy
35

A SysOps administrator notices that an EC2 instance's CPU utilization is consistently above 90% during peak hours. Which action will improve performance without over-provisioning resources?

Easy
36

Which THREE AWS services can be used to monitor and optimize costs? (Choose THREE.)

Medium
37

A company stores 1 PB of data in Amazon S3 Standard. The data is accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely accessed afterwards. The company needs to optimize storage costs. What should they do?

Medium
38

A company is using AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. They want to reduce costs by identifying unused resources. Which AWS service should they use to monitor and report on resource utilization and cost?

Easy
39

A company runs a read-heavy database workload on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with a primary instance and two read replicas. The SysOps administrator observes that the read replicas frequently experience high replica lag during peak hours, causing stale reads for the application. The administrator needs to reduce replica lag while optimizing costs. The workload is predictable, with spikes during business hours and low traffic at night. Which combination of actions should the administrator take?

Hard
40

A company stores infrequently accessed data in S3 Standard. They want to reduce storage costs without compromising immediate accessibility. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

Medium
41

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application experiences variable traffic. The company wants to improve performance and reduce costs. Which THREE actions should the company take?

Hard
42

A company uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor its AWS resources. The company wants to receive alerts when CPU utilization of an EC2 instance exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. What is the MOST efficient way to achieve this?

Easy
43

A company has a production AWS account that uses Consolidated Billing with several member accounts. The finance team wants to identify the top cost drivers and allocate costs to different departments. Which AWS tool should be used to visualize and allocate costs?

Hard
44

A company is running a production web application on EC2 instances behind an ALB. The application experiences predictable traffic spikes during business hours. Which cost optimization strategy would be MOST effective?

Medium
45

A company uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver content to a global audience. The origin is an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs by minimizing the number of requests that reach the origin server. Which action should the administrator take?

Hard
46

A SysOps administrator notices that an Amazon RDS DB instance is running at 10% CPU utilization consistently. The instance has 8 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM. The application's performance is adequate. Which action will reduce costs without affecting performance?

Easy
47

A company is running a stateful web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application requires low latency and high throughput. Currently, the application is experiencing performance degradation during peak hours. Which scaling strategy should the SysOps administrator implement to improve performance and optimize cost?

Hard
48

A company is using Amazon CloudFront to deliver content globally. Which feature can help reduce costs by minimizing data transfer from the origin?

Easy
49

A company has an S3 bucket that stores millions of small objects (1-10 KB) and uses S3 Standard storage. The bucket receives frequent PUT requests and occasional GET requests. The monthly bill shows high costs for S3 PUT requests. Which action would reduce costs?

Hard
50

A company runs a batch processing job on a single EC2 instance that runs for 2 hours every night. The job is fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

Easy
51

A SysOps administrator wants to identify underutilized Amazon EC2 instances that could be downsized to reduce costs. The administrator needs a tool that provides recommendations based on historical utilization data. Which AWS service should the administrator use?

Easy
52

A company wants to receive alerts when its AWS costs exceed a certain threshold. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
53

A company wants to monitor the performance of its Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The database is experiencing high CPU utilization during peak hours. The SysOps administrator needs to identify the queries causing the load. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
54

A SysOps administrator is troubleshooting high CPU utilization on an RDS for MySQL instance. The application is read-heavy. Which optimization technique would improve performance and potentially reduce costs?

Hard
55

A company uses Amazon S3 to store log files. The logs are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely accessed after that. The company must retain logs for 7 years for compliance. What is the MOST cost-effective storage solution?

Easy
56

A company runs a batch processing job every night that takes 2 hours on a single m5.xlarge EC2 instance. The job is fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

Medium
57

A SysOps administrator is reviewing the monthly AWS bill and notices a significant cost for data transfer from EC2 to the internet. The EC2 instances are in a VPC and serve content to users. Which action would MOST effectively reduce data transfer costs?

Easy
58

A company uses an Amazon DynamoDB table with provisioned capacity. The average write usage is 500 write capacity units (WCU) but regularly spikes to 2,000 WCU during business hours. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs without affecting performance during the spikes. Which solution should the administrator implement?

Medium
59

A SysOps administrator is optimizing costs for an AWS account. The account has multiple EC2 instances running 24/7 with varying utilization. Which TWO actions will help reduce costs without impacting performance? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
60

A SysOps administrator needs to reduce costs for a fleet of EC2 instances that run a stateless web application. The instances are currently On-Demand. The workload runs 24/7 for the next 12 months. Which pricing model provides the greatest cost savings?

Medium
61

A company stores large volumes of log data in Amazon S3. The logs are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then occasionally for the next 60 days, and after 90 days they are rarely accessed but must be retained for 7 years for compliance. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize storage costs while ensuring data is available when needed. Which S3 lifecycle policy configuration should be applied?

Easy
62

A company runs a production Amazon DynamoDB table with provisioned capacity of 1000 write capacity units (WCU). The table experiences unpredictable spikes up to 2000 WCU, causing throttling. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize cost while handling the spikes. Which solution should be used?

Hard
63

A company wants to monitor the performance of its application running on EC2. Which TWO metrics should be monitored to detect performance bottlenecks? (Choose TWO.)

Easy
64

A company has an EC2-based application that runs at inconsistent times. The workloads are fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. Which purchasing option provides the most cost savings?

Medium
65

A company uses AWS Lambda functions to process messages from an SQS queue. The Lambda function is configured with a reserved concurrency of 100. The SQS queue receives unpredictable spikes of up to 10,000 messages per second. The function takes about 1 second to process a message. The SysOps team notices that during spikes, messages are being throttled and appear in the DLQ. How can the team resolve this while optimizing cost?

Hard
66

A company is running a critical application on Amazon RDS for MySQL. The database is experiencing high read traffic, causing performance issues. The SysOps administrator needs to improve read performance while keeping costs low. Which solution should the administrator choose?

Hard
67

A SysOps team is using CloudWatch to monitor CPU utilization of EC2 instances. They want to receive a notification when average CPU exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which combination of services should they use?

Medium
68

A SysOps administrator manages a web application running on Amazon EC2 instances that run 24/7 for the next 12 months. The workload is steady and predictable. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the highest cost savings for this use case?

Easy
69

A SysOps administrator wants to monitor the cost of EC2 instances. Which AWS service should be used to visualize and track costs over time?

Easy
70

A SysOps administrator manages a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances. The administrator needs to identify underutilized instances and receive recommendations for instance type changes to reduce costs. Which AWS service should be used to provide these rightsizing recommendations?

Medium
71

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an ALB. They want to optimize costs for variable traffic patterns while maintaining high availability. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

Medium
72

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences variable traffic patterns. What is the MOST cost-effective way to ensure the application scales based on demand?

Easy
73

A company is running a production web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The company wants to optimize costs without sacrificing performance. Which TWO actions should the SysOps administrator take?

Medium
74

Which TWO configurations can improve the performance of an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database that is experiencing high read latency? (Choose TWO.)

Hard
75

An application writes logs to an S3 bucket. The logs are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely after that, but must be retained for 7 years. Which THREE steps should be taken to optimize cost? (Choose three.)

Hard
76

A company has an S3 bucket policy as shown. A developer tries to upload an object using the AWS CLI without the --no-verify-ssl flag. What will happen?

Medium
77

A company runs an e-commerce application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Auto Scaling group. The application has a predictable baseline load from 8 AM to 8 PM daily and low load overnight. The SysOps administrator wants to optimize costs while ensuring sufficient capacity for the baseline load. Which purchasing option and scaling strategy should the administrator use?

Medium
78

A SysOps administrator notices that a Lambda function is timing out after 30 seconds. The function processes large files from S3. How can the administrator improve performance while minimizing cost?

Hard
79

An application runs on EC2 instances behind an ALB. Users report slow response times. CPU utilization averages 90% during peak hours. What is the MOST effective way to improve performance?

Hard
80

A company runs a batch processing job every night on Amazon EC2 instances. The job takes exactly 2 hours to complete and can be interrupted and resumed later. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs. Which purchasing option should be used?

Medium
81

A company is using Amazon S3 to store data for analytics. The data is accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely after that. The company wants to optimize storage costs. Which THREE actions should the SysOps administrator recommend?

Medium
82

A SysOps administrator is troubleshooting slow application performance. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that the average CPU utilization across the instances is below 20%, but the application is still slow. What is the MOST likely cause of the performance issue?

Medium
83

A company is using AWS Cost Explorer to analyze spending. They want to receive an email alert when costs exceed a certain threshold. Which service should they use?

Easy
84

A media company stores millions of video files in S3. Some files are accessed heavily after upload (when new) and rarely afterward; others are accessed unpredictably across months. The team cannot predict which files will be accessed and when. They want to minimize storage costs without risking retrieval latency penalties or per-object retrieval fees. Which storage class is appropriate?

Medium
85

A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 instances that runs every night for 2 hours. The job can be interrupted and resumed without any issue. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should be used?

Medium
86

A company uses Amazon S3 to serve large files to users. The files are accessed frequently for the first 30 days after upload, then access drops significantly. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize storage costs while ensuring low-latency access for frequently accessed files and automatic optimization for changing access patterns. Which S3 storage class configuration should be used?

Hard
87

The finance team was surprised by a $12,000 spike in EC2 costs last month caused by a runaway Auto Scaling group. They want to receive an email alert within hours whenever any AWS service cost behaves unexpectedly, without manually setting fixed dollar thresholds for each service. Which AWS cost management feature provides this?

Medium
88

A SysOps administrator is responsible for an AWS account that hosts a development environment. The environment includes several EC2 instances that are used only during business hours (9 AM to 5 PM) on weekdays. The administrator wants to reduce costs by stopping the instances during off-hours. Which action should the administrator take to automate this process?

Easy
89

A company hosts a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application experiences variable traffic patterns with occasional spikes. The current setup uses On-Demand instances in an Auto Scaling group with a simple scaling policy based on average CPU utilization. The team wants to optimize cost while ensuring that the application can handle spikes in traffic. What should the team do to reduce cost?

Medium
90

A SysOps administrator is troubleshooting a cost overrun in an AWS account. The cost explorer shows that data transfer costs have significantly increased. The architecture includes an Application Load Balancer (ALB) internet-facing, EC2 instances in private subnets, and an S3 bucket for static assets. Which action will MOST effectively reduce data transfer costs?

Hard
91

A company uses Amazon S3 for static website hosting. The website serves thousands of users globally, and the company wants to reduce latency and lower data transfer costs. Which solution should the SysOps administrator implement?

Hard
92

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences variable traffic patterns. The operations team notices that during low traffic periods, there are still a large number of running instances, leading to higher costs. What should the team do to reduce costs while maintaining performance?

Medium
93

A company runs a stateless web application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences predictable traffic patterns: high during business hours and low at night. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce compute costs without affecting performance during peak hours. Which action should the administrator take?

Easy
94

A company has multiple AWS accounts and wants to centrally track costs and usage across all accounts. Which AWS service should the SysOps administrator use?

Medium
95

A SysOps administrator manages a fleet of 50 EC2 instances running a batch processing application. The instances are launched via an Auto Scaling group with a dynamic scaling policy based on CPU utilization. The company recently switched to a new workload that is memory-intensive, causing frequent scale-out events. The administrator notices that the CPU utilization remains below 40%, but memory usage is consistently above 80%. The scaling policy does not trigger appropriately, leading to performance degradation. The administrator must optimize the solution to respond to memory pressure without incurring unnecessary costs. Which action should the administrator take?

Hard
96

A company uses Amazon CloudFront to distribute content globally. The SysOps administrator notices that the origin load is high and the cache hit ratio is low. What should the administrator do to improve the cache hit ratio and reduce origin load?

Hard
97

A company runs a development Amazon EC2 instance that is only used during business hours (9 AM to 5 PM). The SysOps administrator wants to reduce compute costs. Which action should be taken?

Easy
98

A SysOps administrator notices that the monthly bill for Amazon RDS is higher than expected. The environment includes multiple DB instances with low CPU and memory utilization. Which action will most effectively reduce costs while maintaining performance?

Hard
99

A SysOps administrator is reviewing AWS Cost Explorer and notices that data transfer costs from EC2 to the internet are high. The EC2 instances are in a VPC with a NAT Gateway in a public subnet. The route table for private subnets sends 0.0.0.0/0 traffic to the NAT Gateway. The application serves content to users over the internet. Which change will LEAST impact application performance while reducing costs?

Hard
100

A company wants to optimize costs for its Amazon EC2 instances. Which TWO strategies are effective for reducing costs?

Medium
101

A company runs a mix of Amazon EC2 instances and AWS Fargate tasks that are used for both production and development workloads. The usage is steady and predictable. The SysOps administrator wants to maximize cost savings across both compute services without having to manage specific instances or sizes. Which purchasing option should the administrator recommend?

Easy
102

A SysOps administrator needs to reduce data transfer costs for a web application hosted on EC2 instances in a VPC. The application serves content to users over the internet. Which TWO actions will help reduce data transfer costs? (Choose TWO.)

Easy
103

A company wants to reduce costs for its Amazon S3 storage. Which TWO strategies are effective?

Easy
104

A company is running a stateful web application on a single EC2 instance with a 500 GB gp2 EBS volume. The instance is currently at 80% CPU and memory utilization during peak hours. The company wants to improve performance and scalability without incurring high costs. What should the SysOps administrator do?

Easy
105

A SysOps administrator wants to monitor the cost and usage of AWS resources for different departments. Which AWS service should they use to tag resources and generate cost allocation reports?

Easy
106

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application uses Amazon EBS volumes (gp2) for data storage. The SysOps administrator notices that the storage costs are high, and the application's IOPS requirements are consistently below 3000. The administrator wants to reduce storage costs without affecting performance. Which action should the administrator take?

Hard
107

A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 instances. The application runs for 3 hours every night and can tolerate interruptions. The SysOps administrator needs to minimize compute costs. Which purchasing option should the administrator use?

Easy
108

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application reads data from an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. During peak hours, the database CPU utilization is consistently high, and the application experiences increased latency. The SysOps administrator observes that 90% of database queries are read-only. Which combination of actions will both improve performance and optimize costs?

Hard
109

An EC2 Auto Scaling group runs a stateless web application with predictable daily peaks. Which two actions can reduce cost while preserving capacity during peak periods? (Choose 2.)

Medium
110

A company uses S3 standard storage for all data. They have data that is accessed rarely but must be retained for 7 years. Which storage class would be MOST cost-effective?

Easy
111

A company runs a critical application on a fleet of EC2 instances that process real-time financial transactions. The application requires consistent low latency. The SysOps administrator notices that the application's latency increases periodically due to noisy neighbors. The administrator wants to optimize performance predictability. Which instance type should the administrator choose?

Hard
112

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table that stores historical data. The table is accessed infrequently but when queried requires consistent single-digit millisecond latency. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize storage costs while maintaining the required performance. Which DynamoDB table class should the administrator use?

Medium
113

A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 that runs for 2 hours every night. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the lowest cost for this use case?

Easy
114

A company uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to EC2 instances. The SysOps team wants to reduce costs by ensuring that idle capacity is minimized. Which configuration should they implement?

Medium
115

A company wants to reduce data transfer costs for traffic between EC2 instances in the same AWS Region. Which action should the SysOps administrator take?

Easy
116

A company hosts a multi-tier web application on AWS. The application consists of an Application Load Balancer (ALB), a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances running in an Auto Scaling group, and an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The application is accessed by users worldwide. Recently, the company has expanded to new geographic regions, and users in those regions are experiencing high latency. The SysOps administrator is tasked with optimizing performance for global users while keeping costs low. The administrator has already implemented Amazon CloudFront as a CDN for static content. However, dynamic content that requires database queries is still slow. The application's Auto Scaling group is configured with a dynamic scaling policy based on average CPU utilization, but the scaling is not responsive enough during traffic spikes, causing performance degradation. Additionally, the database is a single db.r5.large instance in the us-east-1 region, and all traffic must hit that database, causing high latency for remote users. The administrator needs to propose a comprehensive solution that addresses both compute and database performance issues globally, while considering cost. Which solution is MOST effective?

Hard
117

A company stores log files in Amazon S3. The logs are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely after that. The company wants to automatically transition objects to a lower-cost storage class after 30 days. Which S3 feature should be configured?

Easy
118

Which THREE AWS features can be used to improve the performance of an Amazon DynamoDB table that is experiencing high read latency? (Choose THREE.)

Medium
119

A SysOps administrator manages an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance that experiences high CPU utilization during business hours. The application is read-heavy. Which action will most effectively improve performance and reduce cost?

Medium
120

A company runs a production database on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The SysOps administrator wants to improve query performance for a read-heavy application without increasing costs significantly. Which THREE actions should the administrator take? (Choose three.)

Hard
121

A company uses Amazon CloudFront to distribute content globally. The operations team notices that the data transfer costs are higher than expected. The origin server is an S3 bucket in us-east-1. Which change would reduce data transfer costs?

Easy
122

A SysOps administrator needs to reduce costs for a non-production environment that runs 24/7 but is only used during business hours. What is the MOST effective action?

Easy
123

A company uses CloudFront to distribute content globally. They want to reduce data transfer costs and improve performance for users. What feature should they enable?

Easy
124

A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 instances every night. The job takes exactly 1 hour to complete and is time-sensitive. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs while ensuring the job can be interrupted and resumed if needed. Which EC2 purchasing option is most cost-effective?

Medium
125

A company is using Amazon S3 to store media files. The files are accessed frequently for the first 90 days, then rarely after that. The company wants to optimize storage costs. Which TWO actions should the SysOps administrator take? (Choose two.)

Easy
126

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances. The application's traffic pattern is unpredictable, often spiking to 3x normal load for short periods. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that the application can handle spikes without performance degradation while minimizing costs. Which combination of purchasing options and scaling strategies should the administrator use?

Hard
127

A SysOps administrator wants to identify Amazon EC2 instances that are underutilized to reduce costs. The administrator needs recommendations for rightsizing instances based on historical CPU and memory usage. Which AWS service provides these recommendations?

Easy
128

A company wants to monitor the performance of its EC2 instances and receive alerts when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 10 minutes. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
129

A company uses multiple AWS accounts and needs to generate a detailed cost and usage report that can be queried using Amazon Athena for custom analysis. Which AWS service should the administrator enable?

Medium
130

Which TWO AWS services can be used to monitor the performance of an EC2 instance?

Easy
131

A company runs a critical web application on EC2 instances behind an ALB. The application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. The SysOps administrator wants to ensure that the application can handle spikes without performance degradation while minimizing costs. Which TWO actions should the administrator take?

Hard
132

A company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application usage is consistent throughout the day and is expected to grow steadily over the next year. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs while ensuring capacity is available. Which purchasing option should the administrator use for the EC2 instances?

Easy
133

An application uses an RDS MySQL DB instance. The administrator notices that read performance is poor during peak hours. What is a cost-effective way to improve read performance?

Medium
134

A company is running a web application on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences variable traffic patterns with predictable spikes every day at 2 PM. The company wants to optimize costs while maintaining performance. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

Medium
135

A company runs a batch processing job every Saturday for 3 hours. The job can be interrupted and resumed at any point. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?

Easy
136

A company stores application log files in an Amazon S3 bucket. The logs are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely accessed but must be retrievable within 12 hours. After 1 year, the logs must be archived for compliance with a retention period of 5 years, during which retrievals are expected to be extremely rare (one or two per year) and retrieval time of 12 hours is acceptable. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize storage costs. Which S3 lifecycle policy configuration should be used?

Hard
137

A company uses an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. The table handles a workload with a steady baseline of 500 writes per second but spikes to 2,000 writes per second for a few hours each day. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs without affecting application performance during spikes. Which action should the administrator take?

Medium
138

A SysOps administrator notices that an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance has high read activity. The application performs many read queries but few writes. The database is currently a single db.r5.large instance. What change would improve read performance and reduce cost?

Medium
139

A SysOps administrator needs to reduce costs for an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance that is used for development. The instance is only needed during business hours (9 AM to 5 PM) on weekdays. Which solution is the MOST cost-effective while maintaining the ability to start and stop the instance on a schedule?

Medium
140

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances that are part of an Auto Scaling group. The application's traffic is predictable with regular peaks during business hours and low traffic at night. The SysOps administrator wants to optimize costs while ensuring that performance meets demand. The administrator also needs to minimize manual intervention. Which scaling policy should be used?

Medium
141

A company runs a production web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application experiences a predictable and steady workload 24/7. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this instance while ensuring it remains available during the expected workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?

Medium

Frequently asked questions

What does the Cost and Performance Optimization domain cover on the SOA-C02 exam?
You must be able to map a workload's access pattern, durability, and interruption tolerance to the right EC2 purchasing model, S3 storage class, and network path. The single most important thing: match the pricing or storage option to the actual usage pattern rather than defaulting to the most familiar service.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 141 Cost and Performance Optimization questions in the SOA-C02 question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?
Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Cost and Performance Optimization questions?
Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.
aws-sysops-associate AWS-SYSOPS-ASSOCIATE soa cost performance Practice Questions